Gifted Gower looks forward to new cricket challenges

Press, 31 May 1989, Page 30

Gifted Gower looks forward to new cricket challenges

By

HUGH McILVANNEY

of THE OBSERVER

A friend of David Gower’s recalls telephoning him at a Birmingham hotel shortly before halfpast eight on the morning of the final of the fifth Test in the six-match Ashes series of 1985.

England, with Gower working effectively in the captain’s job to which he has just been restored after three years reduced to the ranks, had Australia in big trouble at Edgbaston (a score of 215 from his own bat having helped to discomfit the tourists) and there was an excellent chance of going ahead in the series unless the English weather treacherously curtailed playing time on that last day. Not surprisingly, the forecast suggested that rain might indeed rescue the Australians, and the caller from another part of the country had scarcely completed his greetings when he asked anxiously: “How’s the weather?” “I don’t know,” said Gower languidly. "Hold on a minute and I’ll pull the curtains and take a look.”

Many another captain in the same circumstances would have maintained a meteorological watch all night — maybe from the lavatory window. But few who know Gower would ever suspect that his attitude contained a trace of affectation. His commitment to the stylishly relaxed approach to life and sport is thoroughly genuine. It is the basis of his unneurotic nature that seems frequently to be oversimplified.

His respopse on that August day in ’B5, and perhaps much of what has emerged as his public persona over the years, should probably be explained less in terms of a slow psychological pulse rate, an innate languor, than of an insistently applied sense of perspective about himself and what he does. There could hardly be a more blatantly romantic figure on the field — with his blond curls and lithe grace and a degree of hand-and-eye co-ordination that makes the best of his left-handed batting a sustained exercise in panache — but a

long conversation with him at his converted coach-house in one of the leafier suburbs of Leicester left no doubt that there is much that is practical about his mind. What could be more practical, after all, than his refusal to treat anything other than life and death as a matter of life and death? His gratitude to cricket for the way it has enriched his experience is real and deep, as is the awareness that his most significant gifts came to him as a pure and arbitrary blessing with his genes. But he gives the strong impression of never having been dazzled by his own extreme talents as a gamesplayer, never having lost sight of the simple fact that, regardless of how wonderful sport can be, much of what is most rewarding in life must always lie beyond its boundaries.

Of course, he conveyed all that very nonchalantly as we talked, with his stockinged feet tucked under him on a sofa and his Red Stripe tee-shirt r"

reminding us that the beer in the Caribbean can be a lot ' more pleasant than the bowling. But he did convey it and there was no difficulty about relating the values voiced to that Birmingham phone call back in the past. Noone has to be .told that watching the weather won’t change it but, whereas most of us would still be tempted to try to stare it into decent behaviour, Gower’s natural tendency was to let it get on with its own business, while he concentrated on his.

The arrangement came out satisfactorily enough in that Ashes season of four years ago: much of the early part of that vital day’s cricket at Edgbaston was in fact washed out, but England’s bowlers were left with enough time to dismiss Australia and take a lead that was consolidated with another victory in the concluding Test (a win set up by a Gower-Gooch stand of 351). Once Ted Dexter had been given the task of lifting the national team out of the slough of fail-

ure and lack of respect in which they have been sunk lately, it was always long odds-on that Gower would be made captain for this year’s defence of the Ashes. That he relishes the work in the atmosphere created by the kindred spirit is unmistakable. At 32 he communicates recognisable, though never heavy, hints of being legitimately concerned with achieving the place in the history of the game to which his talents are entitled.

As a batsman, the statistics alone would guarantee a share of immortality, even if they were not identified with such glittering memories of beautiful innings. Of English Test batsmen, only Boycott, Cowdrey and Hammond have been more prolific and Hammond’s Test aggregate of 7249 runs is under immediate threat. Even to those who see a lot of him he has always been enigmatic, a fugitive personality gracefully but elusively adrift between the influences of his middle-class, public school background and the cosmopolitan world of the top professional sportsman. However, there are persuasive signs that in the midst of all this social mobility, all the practised inclination to fit in with his surroundings, there survives a private part of Gower in which a powerful and consistent individualism is nurtured. The occasionally expressed suspicion that, fundamentally, this intelligent, open-minded man knows himself no better than other people know him seems not only presumptuous but wrong.

Whichever of his wide range of interests is being discussed (from music, to wine, to photographing lions and leopards on African safaris, to hurtling down the Cresta Run) his conversation is engaging and perceptive and, more exceptionally in someone exposed to a burdensome schedule of interviews, never cluttered with stock responses. But, of course, it is when the master

batsman turns to the subject of batting that he is most compelling. The eye for the ball that is the key to everything he has accomplished in cricket was, he says, directly inherited.

Though he mentioned it with characteristic casualness, one of the few alarming episodes of his life occurred when he felt something peculiar happening to his eyes in India just before the Ashes series of 1985. “People may draw the wrong inference from the fact that I became aware of the trouble while standing in a bar, but it wasn’t anything I’d swallowed that caused my eyes to go slightly out of sync somehow. I went to see a retired Indian eye man but he told me a lot of crap about one eye looking the wrong way and it wasn’t until I came home that the problem was diagnosed as tired optic muscles.

“The 'worry didn’t last long and that Australian series was the single most productive of my entire career, but I can’t believe those eye muscles are as sharp as they were. As a player I may be more prone to bad days than I was. But I can look back only three weeks to my highest score in first-class cricket and think, ‘That’s not bad.’ And there were two knocks at the end of last season that were about as good as I can get. I’m pretty sure the ability hasn’t suddenly disappeared.” If the marginal deterioration in his eye escapes opponents, they are even less likely to reconcile what they see of him at the wicket with his admission that often these days there is a fair amount of nervous pressure behind the serene exterior.

“There are batting days when the nerves you feel at the start ease off very quickly but there are others when the tension is there and simply won’t go away. The truth is that there are more days now when the tension seems to stay longer, though always you remain as outwardly calm as possible because you don’t want to give the bowler any encouragement.”