County committees are generally comprised of people who have the game at heart, but who are attracted to a club for any number of reasons, and to have them responsible for running the game is sheer folly. The captains, by contrast, are treated like schoolboys by the people at Lord’s. They pompously issue ‘we know best’ edicts from those offices next to the museum, when half of them should be in the museum themselves. It is very hard to monitor the game if you are not in the dressing room, and even though players can be selfish, short sighted and need monitoring by a higher authority, there is no excuse for their voice being as feeble as it is. You get people like Ossie Wheatley vetoing the appointment of an England captain. Why did he have that sort of power? Who on earth is he? There could have been very few county cricketers at that time who either knew who he was or what he had done in the game, and what is the purpose of appointing an England committee only for its decisions to be over-ruled by a face-less official deep behind the scenes?
Lord’s have only recently cottoned on to the idea of consulting umpires about players. They are closer to the action than anyone, and almost without exception, have played the game at a high level themselves. Our umpires are consistently better than they are anywhere else in the world, because of the experience that cannot be bought or acquired from an examination paper. They are familiar with players and their attitudes, and the fact that they have played the game automatically invests them with a cloak of authority. In places where this is not the case, such as Australia, the players find it almost obligatory to abuse their umpires from the moment they get onto the field to the moment they leave it – and that is probably one reason why so few ex-players don’t take it up. Someone like Tom Brooks, who was a pretty good umpire, more or less gave it up in 1979 when he gave Graeme Wood out caught behind off John Lever. It was a poor decision, but the flak he copped was unbelievable. How Tony Crafter, who is a lovely man and a fine umpire, has kept going all these years I don’t know.
I am more in favour of an international panel of umpires than so called ‘neutral’ officials. It doesn’t do Australia or England any good if they are saddled with a substandard Pakistani umpire, or indeed India or Pakistan any good if they get a poor one from us. The pressure on umpires these days is horrendous, with all the trials by TV and newspapers, and mistakes are highlighted and exaggerated more than ever. As for the idea of electronic aids, a kind of replay booth of the sort they have in American Football, I tend to think it would be a benefit. I love the theory and tradition of the umpire being the sole judge, and his word being law, but if there are technical aids that can help, then there has got to be a move towards using them. There are so many things for them to do nowadays, that to be infallible is more impossible than it ever was. The days when all they had to do was check the coat pocket for six marbles are long gone. As always with the game of cricket, traditional thinking such as ‘the umpire’s word is law’, remains at the heart of all discussions on the subject. At the moment, the technology that exists can only help with run-outs or stumpings. We will have to wait until there are foolproof methods for clarifying catches behind and lbw decisions, so that those dismissed erroneously in these ways no longer feel aggrieved by colleagues who have been reprieved by cameras ideally sited to deal with a contentious run-out.
On the piste and on safari
FROM early childhood through to adulthood (some might say semi-adulthood) cricket has been the dominant feature of my life, and most of the things I’ve done have stemmed directly from the game. However, I have always tried to ensure that cricket does not take over my life completely, and there have been times when I have had to get right away from it to preserve a degree of sanity. Getting right away from it by taking to the air in the middle of a match was perhaps an extreme example, and in terms of career advancement, not a very wise one. I bumped into my old cricket master from King’s School, Canterbury, during a county game last summer, a lovely chap by the name of Colin Fairservice who would be well into his eighties by now. He brought up the Tiger Moth business and said, ‘The trouble with you, David, is that you’ve never grown up.’ I don’t think this is entirely true, but I guess this is how most people perceive me, and I would have to own up for supplying a certain amount of evidence to this school of thought.
I have developed many outside interests, enjoying them both for what they are and as a partial antidote to cricket. You cannot get much further away from a cricketing environment than snow, and winter sports have figured prominently in my more energetic leisure pursuits. I first went skiing at the age of ten, when my parents took me to Switzerland, but it was another twenty years before I had my first serious go at it. I had become very close friends with a keen social skier and bobsledder by the name of Simon Strong, having met him through Allan Lamb, and one year the three of us and our respective ladies took ourselves off to the resort of Verbier. It was a somewhat painful introduction to the sport, largely because our hosts had booked lunch at a place situated at the bottom of one of the more demanding slopes at the resort. It was certainly not for novices, and having made most of the trip on arse and elbow, the wine was consumed less as an aid to digestion than as an anaesthetic.
I later took a ride in a bobsleigh at the Italian resort of Cervinia, behind the then British No 1, Nick Phipps. It was exciting – a little like being on a trapeze without the safety net – and just before the West Indies tour of 1985-86, Strong decided that it was about time Lamb and myself had a go at the Cresta Run. Essentially, you lie on a one-man toboggan – two runners with a frame and sliding seat – and we were simply plonked at the start and shoved off. I have been back many times since, acquiring membership of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club, and I have certainly caught the bug for it. There is a corner on the Run called Shuttlecock, which is designed (for both experts and beginners) as a safety valve: if you are going too fast, it ejects you like a cork out of a bottle, bringing you back to earth – hopefully unharmed – in thick snow and hay. It qualifies you for the Shuttlecock tie, not an exclusive club by any means, and if I had one for every time I’ve been catapulted off the toboggan, I would have an awful lot of ties in the rack. Like all of these things, it is a combination of fear and exhilaration that gives you the buzz. The first time we went down, Lamby and myself thought that if we could pull off something like the Cresta Run, then facing the West Indies’ attack would be a piece of cake by comparison. We were not exactly proved right, I must confess. Put it this way, the Cresta went a lot better than the West Indies tour, during which, in all five Tests, the team went the same way as a Shuttlecock tie-holder.
I went to the winter Olympics at Calgary in 1988, which was fabulous, and one of my most enjoyable experiences was watching the USA versus Czechoslovakia ice-hockey match. The Saddledome Stadium was packed to the rafters, and I have scarcely enjoyed watching a game of anything more than that. It is a sport that does not come over that well on TV, largely because it is so difficult to pick up the puck, but I would recommend a live match between two good teams to anyone.
I have developed a reputation as something of a bon viveur, although it is a general misconception that I always am, as it were, out on the piste. In this country, I am quite a homebird, but it is very easy to be out most nights on a tour. You live out of suitcases by and large, and as there is a certain depressive aspect about room service, I do like to go out and eat.