NOW GIVE US ALL A REAL PRESENT . . . WIN A TEST!
Forget Bairstow’s head-butt and the Duckett drenching, this was when England’s Ashes party went completely. . .
SPORTING Christmas hats and glasses, Jonny Bairstow (left), England debutant Tom Curran and Stuart Broad enjoy a trip to Santa’s grotto ahead of today’s Melbourne Test
Daffy as Diana was chatted up by a couple of blokes!
Bubbly flowing from breakfast onwards, an eminent player mocked up as a Nazi officer and another looking effortless in drag. Welcome to the England cricket team’s Christmas party.
unsurprisingly given recent events Down under, this is not Joe Root and Co. This is an Ashes tour social in the 1980s and 90s, an age when drinking games outnumbered warm-up matches — when pop idols were groupies and their superstar all-rounder was front-page news.
back in 1986, hard-drinking, hardhitting Ian botham remained the greatest influence on English cricket, initiating tour freshers with introductions to Eric Clapton at Heathrow Airport.
beer spilled in public is mopped up without fuss when you’re winning. Forgetting to take your bat out to the middle due to inebriation — as botham did before an innings against Western Australia, in which he managed to strike the middle ball of the three he saw with customary ferocity — becomes the stuff of legend rather than an inquest.
That England reached the festive period 1-0 up that year was in no small part down to botham’s hundred in brisbane, and the fact that they raised their game whenever facing Australia.
They had arrived on the back of eight defeats in 11 Tests, lost to Queensland before the series began and were bowled out for 82 in a loss against New South Wales.
They were dubbed a bunch of can’ts — as in ‘can’t bat, can’t bowl and can’t field’ — by one English writer on the eve of the series.
but in the pre- satellite TV era, these players were only seen for three- quarters of an hour each evening on the bbC highlights.
Away from the action, few English touring groups enjoyed themselves as much as the 1986-87 vintage. According to captain Mike Gatting: ‘The togetherness of the squad was as good as I’d ever known.’ Fun spills out of the pictures from their festivities 24 hours before the decisive boxing Day Test.
It started at 8.30am with a champagne breakfast and pantomime put on by the travelling press corps before attention switched to the fancy-dress lunch. Gatting was a pirate, the botham clan were bunbury rabbits and David Gower a Colditz camp commandant. but the piece de resistance of the event was Phil DeFreitas as Diana Ross.
Frances Edmonds, wife of spin bowler Phil Edmonds, reckoned DeFreitas owned the best legs of any man or woman she’d ever seen. According to Gatting, Daffy the diva was chatted up by a couple of blokes before he left the lobby of the team hotel. ‘He looked too good, to be honest. He must have done it before!’ says Gladstone Small (left).
‘A few days earlier we all had to pop our hands into a bag full of letters of the alphabet. The letter you pulled out related to the outfit for both you and your partner, so we had to get off to a fancy dress shop and come up with something. My letter was Z, so I went as Zorro with full mask, cape and sword.’
How times have changed. The ECb will pick up the tab for this year’s England team meal in Melbourne — 31 years ago, players had to pay for their wives and children. but Small adds: ‘It felt like a proper Christmas family get-together. The mood was good as we were 1-0 up with two Tests to play and the camaraderie between everyone was so natural.’
The ale flowed all day but thankfully not all night for Small, who had yet to feature in the series.
‘I had played club cricket for balwyn in Melbourne so I was getting calls from my club colleagues and the family that I’d stayed with, saying, “you might as well come over, and have a few because you won’t be playing”.
‘I could easily have taken the bait, gone off and topped the night off. but we had a big enough Christmas Day as it was.
‘Next morning, Graham Dilley failed a fitness test and half an hour before the toss Mike Gatting said to me, “Hey, Stoney, stop mixing the drinks. you’re playing today”.’
In a style befitting the tour, the fast bowler emerged from a hangover haze to claim five wickets as Australia were dismissed for just 141. Just 48 hours later, shortly before claiming the man- of-thematch award, he took the catch that sealed the Ashes.
The party continued long into the night at the MCG, with Elton John as dressing-room DJ and provider of a never-ending supply of champagne. At the end of it, contrary to the words of one of his most famous songs, few were left standing.