TALES FROM THE PRESS ROOM WITH OTTERS, JIM AND CMJ...

There’s still time for Joe Root to change his mind. As indeed he still might if he’s been tuning in to the India v Australia series, where the team captains have been obliged to walk onto a stage at the end of each match and answer questions that would make your brain throb if you were a pond skater. Or a dung beetle.

Steve Smith’s increasingly glazed eyed expression comes not so much from the relentless strain of trying to orchestrate a series victory in as tough an environment as India as the post match ordeal by microphone.

Ergo, after a gritty escape with a draw in the third Test in Ranchi, the Australian captain was firstly asked whether he was pleased, followed by whether he was looking forward to the fourth Test in Dharamsala.

The answers to which, surprise, surprise, were yes and yes.

I can’t quite remember now when this kind of thing became the norm, but given that the stage is permanently occupied by what appear to be waxwork exhibits from Madame Tussauds, but which are in fact a selection of bigwigs from Rio Tinto Zinc, or Delhi Dogbiscuits Ltd, I imagine it’s all to do with buttering up the sponsors.

It’s just one of the ways in which cricket reporting has changed beyond all recognition in just half a century or so. Back in the Sixties, for instance, after a Test match in England, the post-match analysis would consist solely of the Daily Telegraph’s EW Swanton delivering his magisterial verdict from the pavilion balcony, pontificating in a manner indistinguishable from the Pope addressing a massed gathering in St Peter’s Square.

Jim, as he was known, was a product of the generation who believed that his readers wanted to hear only from him, and not someone as unimportant as the England captain.

What’s more, not even the most outrageous happenings on a cricket field could persuade Jim that they needed to be recorded with anything other than a detached air of gravitas.

I have an old audio tape of great cricketing moments, edited by Swanton, in which the late Christopher Martin-Jenkins greets India’s victory over the West Indies in the 1983 World Cup Final with: “And that must be the most sensational result in the history of cricket!” Followed by a longish pause, before Swanton’s mildly admonishing: “Yes, well. Let’s just say it was a very good game.”

It’s easy to forget now, what with all these ultra sophisticated cameras, that England’s overseas Test matches weren’t even covered on live television until Sky broadcast the series in the West Indies in 1990, when the only way

In pre-internet days, getting reports back from India was only just more advanced than a box of carrier pigeons, or a knowledge of morse code

to get a properly in-depth account of a day’s play came from newspapers. And in the pre-Internet era, getting reports back from somewhere like India was only just more technologically advanced than having a box of carrier pigeons, or a working knowledge of morse code.

Then came a wonderful new invention called the Tandy. This was a primitive version of the modern day laptop, and the idea was that you tapped your story into it, then attached an enormous pair of ear mufflers to your hotel room telephone, dialled a number, and the article would miraculously appear in a terminal at your newspaper’s office in London.

In reality, what actually arrived was either nothing at all, or what appeared to be a hefty chunk of Serbo-Croat. The result of which was that many a Tandy didn’t make it through a whole cricket tour, either smashed to pieces on a hotel bedroom wall, or hurled out of the window and into the swimming pool.

It may well have been the primitive communications that helped shape some of the characters in cricket writing in years gone by, in that it was not uncommon for you to walk into a hotel lobby in India and find the manager pinned to the wall with a pair of hands around his throat. And even less uncommon to find that the pair of hands in question were attached to the correspondent of the Press Association, Graham Otway.

Otters, as he was known, was almost never happy, apart from when he finally moved on from the PA and landed the job as cricket correspondent of a new national daily, Today. His first assignment was a tour to the West Indies and, sitting in front of his Tandy in the Press box in Bridgetown, Barbados, he turned to a colleague in the row behind and said: “I can’t tell you, Peter, what a relief it is to get away from all those clichés you have to come out with as an agency man.”

With that, he turned back round, thumped at his keyboard for a few seconds, and wandered off to get himself a cold drink at the back of the box. Intrigued at the thought of the new, cliché-free Otway, Peter leant over to take a look at his Tandy screen, to read: “England collapsed like a pack of cards here today.”

Otters was just as entertaining in the old typewriter days. During one Ashes Test at Lord’s, he inserted a sheet of paper, hammered away for about ten seconds, and then pulled out the sheet, crumpled it up, and hurled it into a wastepaper basket. When he’d done this for about the tenth time he groaned: “Bloody hell, if I had a fiver for every intro I’ve thrown away I’d be a rich man.”

At which point, the laconic voice of veteran Australian agency reporter Dick Tucker piped up: “Otters, if you had a fiver for every intro you should have thrown away, you’d be a bloody millionaire.”

Agency men like Dick, both in Australia and in England, made a lot of their money hiring out phones to visiting Pressmen, as all reports then were dictated to a copytaker. A breed, normally of men, who were notoriously indifferent to the poetry most writers deluded themselves into thinking they’d just composed.

There were no word processors to give you a word count, so at some stage during the dictation, the writer would have to ask the copytaker. Which resulted in one of the great putdowns when the representative of the Daily Express was halfway through his order for 500 words on a day’s play between Middlesex v Lancashire.

Round about what he estimated to be halfway through his allocation, he said to the copytaker: “Could you tell me how many words I’ve sent so far?” To which the copytaker replied: “Enough.”