his apology, they would call off the remainder of the tour.
Once back in England the Board should quietly have reminded Gatting of his responsibilities and told him that any further breaches of discipline from him and his players would result in the ultimate sanction of suspension.
The fact that they chose the former rather than the latter option displayed fatal weakness from the men at the top. Their subsequent award of £1,000 to each player as a ‘hardship bonus’ was just a joke. In Australia and New Zealand the players’ behaviour failed to improve. Broad and Graham Dilley were both fined for on-field incidents; on-field dissent often led by Gatting and then later supported by team manager Micky Stewart gave the squad a reputation for surliness they surely deserved.
From that moment Gatting was dead in the water as captain. Had the selectors made a clean break then England would have been able to approach the 1988 summer series against the West Indies as a fresh start. Gatting himself would have been able to re-focus his thoughts on maintaining his position as the best batsman in the side and the players would have understood the price of poor discipline. Instead, although the Board issued a directive to the selectors to take into account a player’s behaviour as well as his form, Peter May, the chairman of selectors, re-appointed Gatting without a second thought. Such muddled thinking invited disaster.
And then came Rothley Court. Gatting’s critics had waited eagerly for the slightest opportunity to pile in and, while England were achieving a creditable draw against Viv Richards’ side in the first Test at Nottingham his behaviour at the team’s hotel gave it to them with knobs on.
The day after the Trent Bridge Test had ended two national tabloids ran stories of a ‘sex orgy’ at Rothley Court involving unnamed players. The next day Gatting was named as one of them and by the afternoon of 9 June he was sacked. Gatting admitted to the selectors that he had invited a woman to his room for a birthday drink but denied any impropriety. The selectors said they accepted Gatting’s version of events, then sacked him anyway. The saga then rumbled on when the Board fined Gatt £5,000 for publishing a chapter on the events of the Pakistan tour in his autobiography Leading From the Front because of the contractual obligation not to comment on recent tours.
In between times the captaincy issue took on the nature of a game of pass the parcel. John Emburey was appointed for the second and third Tests, although increasingly unsure of his place. Chris Cowdrey, on the strength of Kent’s performances in the Championship, was then given the job when in spite of the fact that while a lovely bloke he resembled a Test match cricketer in name only. Finally, after Cowdrey had been ruled out of the final Test through injury, the selectors turned to Graham Gooch. Twenty-three players were used during the summer series. England lost 4–0. It was all a total fiasco. From Ashes winners eighteen months earlier England ended the summer of 1988 as the laughing stock of world cricket.
There was more, much more, to come, starting with the cancellation of England’s 1988 winter tour to India.
TED LORD AND HIS BRAVE NEW WORLD
‘His [Dexter’s] habit of opening his mouth and walking straight into it had ensured that a man once considered merely an eccentric was developing a reputation for being dangerously out of touch.’
Under the captaincy of Graham Gooch England had made a better fist of things in the final Test of the 1988 summer series with West Indies. They still lost, by eight wickets, but at least England played as though they were a team rather than the disorganised rabble that had been on show previously, and they finally brought to an end a run of eighteen Test matches without success when they beat Sri Lanka in a one-off Test at Lord’s.
On purely cricketing grounds Peter May, the retiring chairman of selectors, must have been relieved to be able to appoint Gooch to lead the winter tour party to India. But that feeling turned to dismay once again almost immediately. From the moment Gooch was appointed speculation was rife that the Indian government, hard-liners on the issue of sporting links with South Africa’s apartheid regime, would object to Gooch’s presence. And when, two days after the squad was announced on 7 September, the Indian government announced that no player ‘having or likely to have sporting links with South Africa’ would be granted a visa, the cancellation of the tour was only a matter of time.
In their defence the Board pleaded that there had been no objection to Gooch as a member of England’s World Cup party the previous year, but the powers that be must have known that the Indian government had stretched a point so as not to cause problems.
In fact, earlier in the summer Gooch had already decided not to tour India with England in 1988 but to take up the offer from Robin Jackman, the former England bowler and now the Western Province coach, to spend the winter over there in South Africa. But when he was sounded out by Doug Insole of the TCCB and asked if he was prepared to travel to India as captain of the side, Gooch said yes.
Once again the Board had allowed their lack of foresight to make them look just plain daft. Why had they not foreseen the question of the blacklist? And if they had, was it not plain arrogance that led them to believe they could sweet-talk the Indian government if things got difficult?
Finally, after two seasons of complete shambles, the Test and County Cricket Board decided to take swift and decisive action over the future course of the running of the England cricket team and its public image.
Towards the end of the year it was decided that, in future, the England team should be the responsibility of an England committee, and the next step was to decide who should lead it. To that end the county chairmen entrusted this task to a two-man working party comprising A C Smith, the chief executive, and Raman Subba Row, the chairman. Subba Row, the man who had sanctioned the £1,000 hardship bonus to Gatting’s 1987 Pakistan tour party, now had another brainwave. He reasoned that England needed a strong figurehead in charge, someone whose reputation as a cricketer would leave no room for criticism, and a man with the kind of charisma and public persona that would send off the right signals in the world of cricket. So far so good. The problem was his choice: ‘Lord’ Ted Dexter.
The next the county chairmen heard of developments was at the winter Board meeting at Lord’s in January 1989. They had gone there to discuss the Board’s position with regard to overtures being made to England cricketers by Ali Bacher, the leading figure in South African cricket and later to become the head of the Unified Cricket Board.
Rumours had been circulating regarding a ‘rebel tour’ set up by Bacher and the chairmen discussed how the situation should be handled when push came to shove. At the end of the meeting Subba Row threw in, almost casually: ‘By the way, gentlemen, I think we may have settled on the man we are looking for to chair the England committee. Ted Dexter.’
Chris Middleton, the controversial chairman of Derbyshire who, four years later, orchestrated the moves to oust Dexter, takes up the story. ‘I knew very little about Dexter apart from the fact that he had been a marvellous Test batsman for England, but at the time we as county chairmen were happy to hear that one suggestion had at last been put forward. We were told by Subba Row that this had to be kept secret and that we should tell no one, and we all agreed. I didn’t even tell my wife.
‘Nothing more was said or heard on the subject for a couple of months. Then, one evening in late March, I was at home watching television and saw Raman Subba Row, his wife Anne and Ted and Susan Dexter dressed up for an evening out and heard Dexter announce that he had been appointed the new chairman of the England committee, the new chairman of selectors.’
Dexter had been installed, all right, but with absolutely no reference to the county chairmen. And the decision of Subba Row and Smith to present them with a fait accompli caused severe consternation. Many chairmen felt that Subba Row had overstepped the bounds of his authority and they never forgave him for it. They had thought that any firm proposal by the working party would be ratified by them before being allowed to take place. No such procedure took place. And that