Of Boycott, KP, and the ECB's alienation

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

 

Funny that Boycott should be annoyed by someone hellbent on batting the way they want to  © Getty Images

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On 13 August 1983, Geoffrey Boycott made a century for Yorkshire against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham. He stayed in all day, scoring 140 from 347 deliveries and angered his captain Raymond Illingworth by running out the free-scoring Kevin Sharp, who'd made a much faster hundred, while trying to keep the strike, and refusing to raise his own scoring rate.

Illingworth reported the incident to the Yorkshire committee and set in motion one of the most extraordinary uprisings in the history of English cricket. The committee issued a statement rebuking Boycott for batting that was "not in the best interests of the side", and was met with a furious response - from Boycott himself, who went on radio to deny that he had been officially reprimanded; from his friend Brian Clough, who used his Daily Mirror column to defend Boycott's batting; and from Sid Fielden, who led a group of reformers that would become central to the story. 

On 3 October, the committee voted unanimously not to offer Boycott a contract for the 1984 season. The Reform Group swung into action. More than 400 people attended a meeting in a hotel in Ossett, and the committee was forced to vote again on the issue. The sacking was upheld via a statement that stressed the need to encourage younger players without the "dissension and discord that creates a lack of confidence".

Another group, the Members 84, was formed specifically to deal with the Boycott situation, and nothing less than a civil war broke out. Under tremendous public pressure, the committee offered a bizarre compromise that would have allowed Boycott to take part in six Championship games, but at a meeting on 21 January 1984, amid scenes described as "evangelical", a vote of no confidence in the committee was carried by the Yorkshire members, along with a motion to reinstate Boycott. The committee, which included Fred Trueman and Ronnie Burnett, resigned, and Boycott ultimately played on until his retirement at the end of the 1986 season. "Boycottshire" had spoken.

That winter of discontent came to mind as another story played out this week. It had many of the same elements: a dominant player of polarising force, an organisation out of touch with the feelings of its public, and a maverick media operator speaking out.

For Boycott read Kevin Pietersen, for the Yorkshire committee the ECB, and for Brian Clough read Piers Morgan.

Pietersen is one of the few English players to have commanded public attention in the way that Boycott had done. They could not be further apart as batsmen and yet they share certain traits, foremost a tendency to speak utterly plainly. They both have complex, sensitive personalities and have often found themselves the injured party in their confrontations with authority. It's fair to say that both have been scapegoats at times, and that both contributed to their own woes, too.

Around Boycott was the blunt, often brutal language of Yorkshire cricket in the 1980s. We live now in the age of euphemism, and thus the battle for the advantage has been more subtly fought. Pietersen has not been publicly denounced as Boycott was. All of that has been hidden in legality and management speak. Yet this language, opaque and non-specific, is key to the Pietersen issue.

The desire to control information is a phenomenon of modern sport and cricket is not unique in striving to do so, but the ECB has a particularly bad case of it. The rigid paradigm that they have constructed around their communications, from the way they school young players to talk about the game to the press statements laden with meaningless office jargon, has detached them from the very people they most need to understand them: the fans.

It resulted in the slapstick interview given by the new chief selector James Whitaker (to rights holders Sky and the BBC only) this week. Even pre-recording could not save the unfortunate Whitaker, who was chained to desperate sentences like "There's a group of players there looking forward to re-energising this team, going forward with different values, re-evaluating the culture of the team."

These constructs of language echo emptily. They are designed to sound good without conveying anything specific, and they have a dehumanising effect. The people who step forward to utter them become trapped and typecast by the image that they create. They lack the linguistic power to challenge a forceful attack in plain English. They are evasive and diversionary and ultimately counter-productive.

It's probably fair to say that the ECB has never been as alienated from public opinion as it is now, and as the Yorkshire committee found out, that can be a dangerous space to occupy.

Only one person has attempted to argue a case for Pietersen's exclusion on cricketing grounds. Geoffrey Boycott took the airwaves to say that KP's batting this winter had been irresponsible and selfish, and he deserved to be dropped for it. You may or may not agree with him (and there is humour in Boycott becoming annoyed by someone hellbent on batting he way they want to) but his argument was clear. There is some sanity in that.

The dark soul of English cricket lies exposed

by Maxie Allen in The Full Toss • February 6, 2014

We are not going to take this lying down. Now is not the moment to supinely accept the latest act of cruelty our ECB overlords determine to perpetrate against us.

On Tuesday night, at the height of my anger, I wrote on Facebook that Pietersen’s dismissal constituted the greatest act of betrayal in the history of British sport.

If anyone bothered to read my outburst, they may have deemed me insane. But even in the cold light of day, I stand by every word.

We, the followers of the England cricket team, have been treated with an arrogance and contempt to a degree which is grotesque even by the standards of the English game’s hierarchy.

The ECB has taken a long, slow look at us, and then – quite deliberately – thrown a bucket of cold piss in our face.

They have sacked our best player – a cricketer whom some of us disliked, but many of us adored, and the vast majority valued. In so doing, they have ruined any chance of our short- or medium-term revival in Test cricket.

Pietersen’s sacking was not only a vindictive and cowardly way to treat one of English cricket’s finest servants. It was also a self-inflicted and catastrophic act of vandalism against the very fabric of our team.

Our team. Not their team. Our team.

We – the supporters, the spectators, the TV viewers – are the people who make English cricket what it is. Without us, it has no meaning or purpose – and becomes merely the private enterprise of two hundred professional sportsmen and administrators.

Our passion and our participation are the essence of the entire game. And our money pays for it. The salaries of the ECB executives and the England players are funded directly by the – very expensive – match tickets and Sky Sports subscriptions we buy.

The ECB have always taken us for granted – never doubting that we poor saps will obediently fork out whatever it costs to follow the team, even when they sold the game to Rupert Murdoch to line their pockets and then sent us the bill.

Depending on how you look at it, we are either the taxpayer or the customer. But when Downton, Whitaker and Giles conspired to make their fateful decision, do you think that for one nanosecond they thought about us?

Did they ask themselves – is the removal of Pietersen in the best interests of England supporters? Is it what they’d want? Is it a fair way to treat them?

I think not. But once that call had been made – with all its huge significance for the future health and performance of the test side – Paul Downton couldn’t even be bothered to explain to us the reasons why.

The ECB’s failure to tell us why – and exactly why – they sacked KP is breathtaking in its arrogance. We need to know the precise reasoning behind a decision which has caused such pain and which has such immense significance for our future.

We are stakeholders – and as such we have an unquestionable right to know the truth. And yet they are hiding still behind that wretchedly bland and evasive press release. Did Downton really think we’d accept those weasel words?

There is no justification for the ECB’s secrecy. If Pietersen’s behaviour genuinely made it impossible for him to continue in the side, then we must be told the specific facts, in detail: what happened, when, where, and involving whom. The excuse of employer confidentiality is nonsense; in no other walk of life would this happen – if a public sector employee was dismissed for gross misconduct, the facts would be placed in the public domain.

The other excuse offered is the sanctity of the dressing room: the notion whatever happens there, stays there. Usually, that’s fair enough. But in this affair, the England players have forfeited any such rights to confidentiality. The anti-KP faction have got what they wanted – their enemy has been liquidated – and in return they are obliged to reveal the facts which cost a man his career and the team its best player. If indeed Pietersen was fired as a result of conflicts and other incidents which occurred in private, they can no longer be kept private.

Piers Morgan was absolutely right to make the claims about Matt Prior on Twitter yesterday. The CNN and Life Stories host may not be to everyone’s taste, but at the moment he is the only journalist with the balls to challenge the establishment head-on, and shine a light into the incestuous and insular culture of the England squad. There may be no reason to single out Prior (although he did not deny Morgan’s allegation), but that’s not the point – in this climate of secrecy and obfuscation, the only answer is guerilla warfare and nuclear tactics.

Many people say – why is Morgan sticking his nose in, when he’s not a cricket journalist? It’s precisely because he’s outside the cricket world that his intervention is so valuable. Morgan is a total pain in the arse for the cricket establishment, and right now that’s exactly what we need – someone who’s not afraid to upset the ECB. That’s in contrast to the leading media cricket correspondents, who have been so disappointingly supine and reverent, especially Jonathan Agnew and – uncharacteristically – Mike Atherton.

The truth is that cricket hacks live in the same cosy bubble as the players and administrators, and they all have far more in common with each other than any of them do with the public. The Fleet Street press pack need good relationships with the ECB and plentiful access to the talent – which makes them too cowardly to speak very far out of turn. Thank the heavens that Michael Vaughan, at least, has had the guts and intelligence to see through the bullshit and tell us the truth.

But to return to the subject of openness – it might be, of course, that the ECB have not revealed the reasons for KP’s execution for the very simple reason that they don’t have any. They can’t tell us the detail of Pietersen’s offences because he never actually committed any. Even Derek Pringle, the arch-KP hater, and a journalist close to both Alastair Cook and Graham Gooch, can’t come up with much beyond a possible row with Andy Flower in Sydney. The BBC today report that no row took place between Cook and KP, and Graeme Swann told The Sun that ”I saw or heard no issues with [KP] in Australia this winter. His approach was exceptional”.

If this is true – that nothing much really happened – it means that Pietersen was dismissed purely because a few people didn’t like him.

Neither Downton or Whitaker have deigned to give a press conference to explain themselves. No ECB representative has yet given an interview. The most plausible explanation for the silence is this: it’s never occurred to anyone at Lord’s that we, the public, deserve a proper account of the facts. It would be beneath Paul Downton to actually have to address the great unwashed.

As far as the ECB are concerned, our purpose in cricketing life is merely to buy tickets and subscribe to Sky. Beyond that we are at best an irrelevance, but mainly an inconvenience.

The Guardian report that James Whitaker is due to give two broadcast interviews today, on the T20 squad selection. These were already scheduled before KP-gate arose. It remains to be seen what he will, or won’t say.

Downton, meanwhile, has given no interviews at all since he took charge, not even to discuss the abrupt and surprise departure of Andy Flower – who himself did not speak publicly either. The entire landscape of Team England has been bulldozered, without a word of explanation.

The ECB have turned the clock back to the Middle Ages, to the days when the MCC, a private club, ran the game as a personal fiefdom – aloof, patrician, and self-appointed.

And the wrecking balls have been wielded by a dismal triumvirate who remain steadfastly in the shadows, and whose credibility – to put it mildly – is open to question.

Paul Downton, the new England managing director, has been out of the game for more than twenty years. How did he get the job? Did Giles Clarke get chatting to him at a cocktail party?

James Whitaker, the new chair of selectors, is best described with this summary from Darren Gough on Talksport: “Lovely man – he always looks smart, nice hair, nice suits. Chairman of selectors – one Test match for England”. 

Presumably, the ECB didn’t have the phone number for any Englishman who’d had a proper test career.

Ashley Giles also had one hand on the dagger’s handle, and goodness knows why he was given the right to decide who the next coach will be able to pick. Unless he has already been told that the job is his. And if so, god help us.

You might think that I’m exaggerating, that I’m hysterical, that I’m paranoid and mad. What a fuss I’m making, you may say, about dropping a player who was a git anyway.

OK then, fair enough. Let’s just put up with it and carry on. I mean, everything’s fine like this, isn’t it?