Some time in late summer 1996 I was at The Oval, sat behind that red-brick secret garden wall that snakes around the Harleyford Road, watching some county cricket. In the middle a broad-shouldered, shaven‑headed figure in a billowing white shirt was running in to bowl to someone, with the score on something, and working up a fair old pace. This was of course Chris Lewis, who was turning out to be an excellent addition to a dressing room of amusingly cocksure talents.
During the tea interval I walked out past the shops at the old Oval tube station, passing the kiosk where a man with long grey dreadlocks used to play reggae music and sell drinks. Standing next to him on this occasion was a broad-shouldered, shaven-headed figure in a billowing white shirt, drinking a can of something cold, grinning an indecently handsome smile, flirting with a cluster of women, and generally showing no great urgency to get back to the game of cricket he was, according to the scorecard, playing in at that moment.
This was, of course, also Chris Lewis, still a year away from the end of his England career and five years on from his appearance in the 1992 World Cup final – England’s last World Cup match in Melbourne, and an occasion that, looking back now, provides a kind of time tunnel into a half-finished world of paunch-hugging viscose shirts, pre‑irony moustaches and outsize sporting greats.
It has been pointed out many times that the 1992 tournament was the jumping off point for New Fast Loud Cricket, the moment coloured clothing, floodlights, white balls and all the rest began to defibrillate an unmodernised Victorian spectator sport. But take a look now at the team sheets for that final and something else jumps out too.
It turns out this was a match contested by a uniquely ill-fated group of cricketers. Indeed, there is a fair case the 92 World Cup final stands alone as one of the most murkily back-storied occasions in cricket history, with the future activities of those involved taking in – among more legitimate pursuits – corruption, cocaine addiction, match fixing, cricket journalism and international drug smuggling.
Lewis’s own story is at least due to take a slightly happier turn some time soon. By my calculations he has a chance of being released from prison this year, after being found guilty in 2009 of smuggling cocaine into the country inside tins of fruit juice.
He isn’t alone in having suffered in the years since. Famously that final turned on a brilliant spell of bowling by Wasim Akram. First Allan Lamb was bowled by an in-swinger that nipped away, a delivery so hauntingly elusive that Lamb presumably still goes out looking for it now and then in his car, combing the countryside, putting up wanted posters. Next ball, Lewis, the new man at the crease, was bowled by another perfect nip-backer.
At which point, drawing back from the names and numbers, the 92 final starts to jump up off the page and walk around the place of its own accord. Four years later Lamb – along with Ian Botham (out for a duck in Melbourne) – would meet Imran Khan again in the high court in a grandiose libel case that ended in another spectacular defeat. Lewis’s problems with the law are well documented but his replacement at the crease, Dermot Reeve, would experience his own cocaine-related problems, admitting in 2005 that he had even commentated on a Lord’s Test match in a gabbling coke-induced haze. Which is, let’s face it, some way short of the Richie Benaud ideal.
On Pakistan’s side Saleem Malik – AKA The Rat – would go on to become one of cricket’s match-fixing bogymen of the 1990s; Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed and Akram were all fined, too, as a result of the Qayyum report into corruption. In 1993, Aaqib Javed, along with Wasim and Mushtaq, was arrested by Grenadian police on drugs charges (subsequently dropped). All-night casino trips, wild carousing, murky rumours: it is a fairly endless list, to be honest.
Lots of bad choices! All at the same time! It is, though, necessary to keep some perspective. Few teams in any sport remain untouched by some kind of scandal, while cricketers, throughout the sport’s history, have been a maverick, troubled bunch, adrift in a sport of fine margins, anxiety, fragile means. But this is extreme stuff, a fug of mishap and misadventure , all intersecting around a match that took place at a notable G-spot in cricket’s modern history.
Whether they knew it or not, the class of 92 had their noses pressed up against something. Cricket was on the verge of striking its own generational jackpot, triple-cherries zeroing in, gold coins all set to come chugging out. Except, not now: not for them. Little wonder, perhaps, that there were temptations, unusual gravitational pressures, just as there were during the golden age of English football match fixing, a time of surging revenues and star players still kept down by the salary cap.
Twenty-three years on cricket remains a uniquely hot-housed, giddily destabilised global sport. Those hidden currents of avarice and ambition are out front now, unashamedly driving the show, an entire global sporting governance predicated on the helicopter full of gold bullion model.
Meanwhile far less talented cricketers than Chris Lewis are making far more money than he would have been able to squeeze out of those wretched fruit juice tins. And Lewis himself simply looks like fortune’s fool, a comprehensive school kid from Barbados, driven on by nothing more than his own talent, who went on six England tours but never quite found a home for his goofy, flaky, party-boy style, and finally drifted into hapless criminality. Lewis may or may not emerge from prison some time this year (the rumours suggest he has survived as well as could be expected). In the meantime he probably hasn’t watched much cricket. It shouldn’t matter. There isn’t a great deal that will look that unfamiliar in this altered landscape to a man who was back there back then, before the game behind the game became the game.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
1992 World Cup finalists – the most ill-fated group of cricketers ever?
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment