“If you asked Ian Botham about sports psychology he’d probably hit you: ‘What do I need a psychologist for?’ Bang!” – David Gower
Telford Vice / Cape Town
DAVID Gower was bored. So bored. The empty room’s silence had invaded his head, where it clanged about senselessly. Blinds on the windows blotted out much of what little daylight had seeped through the gloom outside. Noxiousness rose unseen from the damp carpets and lodged where nose and throat met. So very bored.
Consequently, a knock at Gower’s shut door was not ignored. Instead, he boomed: “Yes! Come in!” He didn’t have to say please — you could hear the prayer in his voice.
Hello Mr Gower. I’ve come from the pressbox. I’m sorry to bother you, but with all the rain and no cricket to write about my editors have asked me to get your opinion on …
He didn’t tell his visitor, with whom he had never exchanged a word previously, to go away. He didn’t fob him off with, “Talk to my agent”, or, “My contract wouldn’t allow it”. The question escapes recollection, but he was viscerally attentive during its asking. Then he answered it, effusively, extensively and eruditely. And kept answering. Would he ever stop answering?
The episode unfolded somewhere between an hour after lunch on January 14, 2000, the first day of the fifth Test against England, and the scheduled close three days later. Not a ball was bowled in all that time — the equivalent of 10-and-a-half sessions — because rain lashed Centurion like it seldom does.
Highveld summer days blaze with a heady incandescence that gives way to the beautiful violence of some of the most epic thunderstorms on earth. They issue from looming edifices of vicious black clouds that, hours earlier, had been but pale strands of candyfloss floating above the distant horizon. The deluge descends with a force that could knock the moustache off Merv Hughes, but rarely lasts for more than an hour. It is quite some show, worth more than the price of any cricket ticket. Then the gods are becalmed, the clouds melt away, the curtain is raised on the sun once more, the sky repairs itself to a dazzling blue, and play resumes in an exquisite light that shimmers with wet magic. For three-and-a-half days in the 2000 January, that didn’t happen. The rain came and stayed. And stayed some more. And still more.
All the while, Gower and two colleagues couldn’t leave their television studio lest the pilots of the mothership in London decided to “quickly pop in at Centurion to see what the weather’s doing … David? You there?” Of course he was. The studio had been set up in the hospitality box on the extreme left, as you look at the ground, along the crescent of buildings that hugs the northern boundary. Gower was maybe 200 hundreds metres of gates, corridors and civilian-strewn walkways from where the rest of the media were housed — snugly above the sightscreen — and further still from the dressingrooms. Should he venture there to relieve the tedium he would be too far away to make it back in time should London demand an audience at short notice.
He was marooned like Robinson Crusoe. At least Man Friday’s knock at his door gave him something to think about for a few minutes. Little did we know that a plot more convoluted than anything even Test cricket could conjure was being hatched, perhaps as we spoke, to force a result in a match that would otherwise have been drawn. All it took to seal the fix was R53,000 (USD2,850 at modern exchange rates) in two brown paper bags and a leather jacket “for your wife” from a gambler, Marlon Aronstam, who stood to lose big if the match did not end conclusively, to Hansie Cronjé. That and the agreement of Nasser Hussain, who had no knowledge of the tainting transaction. Innings were forfeited and declared, and England “won” the “Leather Jacket Test” by two wickets.
“It smelled to high heaven!” That’s Gower in Cape Town a few weeks ago, and he wasn’t talking about the dodgy dealings — the stink of that studio has swirled in his memory all this time. He was on the top of Table Mountain at a marketing effort to help the Lord’s Taverners promote table cricket, which is designed to render irrelevant a range of physical and mental challenges that stop players from enjoying the game in more traditional ways. Table Mountain, table cricket …
It was a crystalline summer’s day. The scene couldn’t have been more different from the inside of that drab box at Centurion 20 years previously. Coasts curved this way and that for kilometres all around, the throat-catching views interrupted only by the mountain’s ancient crags. Above the sun seemed closer and warmer, like a loving parent. Far below the ocean murmured a rhapsody in blue. It was a good day to be alive for those who were there, and has become a precious memory of what the world was like before it was plunged into lockdown by the coronavirus pandemic. In the past weeks most us have come to know how Gower felt when he was confined to his studio, left with nothing but emptiness. Our reality has been replaced by something smaller and poorer in almost every way. We are bored, so very bored. And we’re the lucky ones: we’re alive and we have the space to be alone.
We will get back some version of the world in which to live, work and play. And to return to prominence in our minds current irrelevancies like cricket. We cannot know what cricket will look like in even the near future. But we do know what it looked like when the world as we knew it stopped turning.
It might, then, be useful — or just mercifully distracting — to consider how the game has changed since Gower sauntered to the middle at Edgbaston on June 2, 1978. And pulled the first delivery he faced in Test cricket, from Pakistani left-arm medium pacer Liaqat Ali, for four. That happened seven years after the first ODI, three years after the first edition of the tournament we now call the World Cup, bang in the middle of the three years that Kerry Packer’s World Series held up a cracked mirror to the game, 27 years before the first T20I and 30 years before the IPL. How different was cricket in 1978?
“That year I went on my first tour of Australia, where we had Bernard Thomas as our physio,” Gower said. “But he did everything. He was our physio, doctor, counsellor. Any problems that weren’t cricketing, you went to Bernard. For instance, no-one believed in sports psychology in those days. If you asked Ian Botham about sports psychology he’d probably hit you: ‘What do I need a psychologist for?’ Bang!
“We had a year at Leicestershire, a long time ago, where we could afford a sports psychologist for about a week. It was interesting how many of the players responded well to both the things he told them about working together as a team and some of the individual frailties he was able to help people with. We all have good times and bad times, and you tend to hide it, partly because it’s good for you to not show weakness. But it’s very important, to me, that it’s been recognised more as time has gone on.
“I remember a tour photograph a while ago — 16 players and 16 backroom staff. And I said something on TV which was slightly sarcastic, which didn’t go down well with the ECB at the time. There has to be a limit somewhere, and there’s only so much information you can take in as a player. I’m a believer in the instinct of what you might call natural players to address their own performances; to address the team, to address team situations, to play without, as it were, doing it by the book.
“All the assistance one gets now as a player might seem, to some of us, like overload. But, if you grow up with it, you kind of expect it. The net result is that there are a lot of very good players out there doing some extraordinary things, especially in the various newer concepts of the game. Watching some of things that go on, in T20s especially, it is a different game.”
That cricket changed vastly in the 18 years from July 1975, when Gower made his first-class debut, aged 18, to when he played his last match at that level, in September 1993, is indisputable. That it would be transformed exponentially more in the years that followed is also true. What has remained the same as it was at least 20 years ago is Gower’s habit of answering a question to within a whisker of its answerability.
“I felt I was was lucky to start my career immediately post-Packer, which was when cricket as an industry realised that it actually was an industry and not an amateur sport with a couple of quid thrown in for good measure. For instance, the first year I played for England was the first time they had a sponsor, and Test match fees went up from £200 pounds a game to £1,000 a game.
“The cricket industry has developed extraordinarily. TV has grown up with it. Who’s leading what I don’t know, but TV has given it the exposure and has been responsible for bringing in most of the money. All the major sponsorships around the world are all predicated on TV. There’s a billion dollars a year floating around Indian cricket. It’s a far cry from where it was 40 years ago. The game is still way behind the more global sports: soccer, formula one, tennis, golf. But the top players are doing well and aren’t complaining too much, or they shouldn’t be. If you’re Roger Federer I’m afraid you will make a bit more money than if you’re Joe Root or Steven Smith. But they aren’t going to starve.”
You had to watch him bat, if only to see the smudge that would end an otherwise immaculate innings. He was a Rolls Royce. Until he became a dodgem car.
Cricket has been good to Gower, and Gower has been good for cricket. Besides talent, ability, a level of toffishness that did not make him unlikeable, and a languid, liquid left-handedness, he was imbued with fallibility. You had to watch him bat, if only to see the smudge that would end an otherwise immaculate innings. He was a Rolls Royce. Until he became a dodgem car. That happened too often for the liking of the cold-hearted purists, who might have suspected they were being taken for fools: Gower was born on April 1, 1957. These days, his flagrant inconsistency would be ironed out of him at schoolboy level, and ruthlessly. Or, worse, he wouldn’t have a significant career. There is no longer room in the world of moneyed cricket for romance.
Of England’s top seven in the famous 1981 Headingley Ashes Test, only Mike Brearley — virtually a non-playing captain, but the best of all captains — had a lower conversion rate of 50s into centuries than Gower. Brearley never made a Test hundred. Gower made 18, albeit that he had 138 more innings. Gower’s gift for doing and then undoing was a curiosity and a frustration for those who sat and marvelled at him from afar, the dressingroom or 22 yards away. For the man himself it was something else, as he wrote in his 2013 autobiography, An Endangered Species: “I came to realise that this wasn’t a normal condition. To an extent, every batsman has to strive to achieve that ideal state where brain and body function in harmony with bat, but I discovered that not every player had to work quite as hard as I did to get into the right frame of mind.
“Why could I sometimes do it, and sometimes not? This wasn’t just a mystery to other people. It was often a mystery to me.”
“All I had, all I needed, was that schoolboyish, yes public schoolboyish, enthusiasm for playing the game and having some fun with it. When it worked it was great but I got the message very quickly and very clearly from Ray Illingworth, my first captain at Leicestershire, and all those who had vested interests in my development, that my attitude and approach would have to harden if this was to work as a career. Luckily, that message never entirely got through.”
There it is at the end of that passage: the smudge that endears Gower to some but, to others, sullies him. Not for him Geoffrey Boycott’s tedious religiosity about batting nor Graham Gooch’s dour run-collecting. All three were in that Headingley side, as was the player with the closest conversion rate to Gower’s — just 0.11% better — but who never lacked the public’s confidence. That he and Gower, and another giant of self-belief, became the firmest of friends is worth a thesis: you would have to go a long way to find personalities as removed from Gower as Botham and Viv Richards. Strange how the relative ruffians in that equation have been made knights of their realms while the more genteel Gower remains a mister. But he is his own mister.
As it was with Richie Benaud, a generation may be surprised to hear that Gower was a fine player. They grew up with him, vicariously, as a commentator — a second career that was put on ice in September when Sky Sports announced that, after 25 years of his avuncular presence on their screens, they would not renew his contract. Botham, too, was gone. Commentary has developed from the days when only the necessary was said to the modern penchant for shouting far too much in capital letters followed by multiple unseen but not unheard exclamation marks that fly like, well, tracer bullets. What was the future of the craft?
“I hope standards are maintained,” Gower said. “With the spread of the game around the world and the uptake in television and radio around the world, there are good, bad and indifferent [commentators]. I like to listen to people who have a skill with words, who understand the game, and who can transmit the passion of the game without just getting louder. That’s a copout. As an observer of the observers — for a moment or two; I hope there may be some work somewhere — as players set themselves high standards to be as good as they can be, and if you’re not you run the risk of losing your place, as broadcasters they should maintain the same attitude. Of course there are lazy times and good and bad days. Some days every sentence appears to be polished and well thought through. Other days you can’t even speak your native tongue, which is a bit of a problem. But it’s a privilege to have done it for so long. It’s a privilege for anyone to be in that position, but it comes with responsibilities.”
Should positions on commentary teams be reserved for former players? “No. The proportion in commentary boxes of former players versus non-players is virtually non-existent, but it’s important that former players learn to broadcast. However great their capacity as a player, there are things they should learn. There are some very good ones. Michael Atherton is outstanding because he has an ability to put things with the right words. He is a bright man, a very clear-thinking man, and he has the talent to be able to write brilliantly and speak very efficiently, which cross-fertilise. He’s admitted that when he starts to write it helps him think about what he’s going to say on television, and when he talks on television that feeds back into the writing. There’s an aphorism that Richie Benaud used to use as words of advice: always engage brain before speaking. It’s useful to have that sort of thing in your mind.”
Difficult, isn’t it, to imagine Kevin Pietersen or Shane Warne knowing what an aphorism is. Or indeed to place them in the continuum with a player who was axed from his school’s first rugby XV for “lack of effort”, who earned a S level in history — in an examination attempted only by the best A level students — who wrote in his autobiography that an “errant ancestor gambled away [family-owned land] in a moment of boredom”, and who announced the end of a 10-year relationship by placing, along with the woman concerned, Vicki Stewart, a notice in The Times.
He played against a famous pair of Lloyds — Clive and David — in his first-class debut and was captained by Mark Nicholas in his last hurrah. His first match as a commentator was studded with Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. His most recent featured Ben Stokes, David Warner and Steve Smith.
Now, as cricket stands on the edge of an implosion to follow the explosion that helped make Gower the cricketer he was and the commentator he became, seems a good opportunity to consider how much has changed and how much will yet change. Because of the scale and pace at which the world seems to be disappearing before our eyes, that is a terrifying thought. But we know that, whatever happens or doesn’t, this will remain true: David Ivon Gower; sometimes bored, never boring.
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