ENGLAND’S OTHER MAVERICK
He struggled to match Ian Botham’s exploits on the field in the 80s, but did his best to keep up off it. Derek Pringle was…
Picture the scene. An emerging all- rounder, barely out of university, is in his first summer of test cricket and doing his utmost to fit in with some of cricket’s biggest names by proving he belongs in the sacred surroundings of Lord’s.
Only Derek Pringle, big news back then in 1982 for being picked for england while still at cambridge and wearing an ear stud, does not do it by attempting to demonstrate he is capable of living up — on the field — to what became a well- worn tag of becoming the new ian Botham.
instead Pringle, excited by the presence in the Lord’s dressing room of a new-fangled video recorder, decides to impress by bringing in a film for the england team to enjoy if ever a moment for quiet reflection presented itself during battle against Pakistan.
So that is how the england team, far from offering encouragement on the balcony to chris tavare while he applied himself to keeping out the Pakistan attack, came to be watching a production with, shall we say, an adult theme, called Billy’s Big Banana.
‘ it had little artistic merit,’ says Pringle, taking up the story, ‘though the dubbed dialogue was so naff as to be hilarious. Being fairly new technology at the time, nobody had worked out how to mute the video, or even to switch it off except at the mains.
‘So when Peter May, the chairman of selectors, walked in just as things were getting interesting, in the film as opposed to the match, we improvised by pausing the video on freeze frame. Despite standing in front of the telly, which was on a shelf just above head height, May was oblivious.
‘the tension went on for at least 20 minutes, during which general tittering turned into nervous laughter until the mood was finally broken by tavare’s dismissal for 82, which brought to an end his sixand-a-half-hour vigil. to our relief May chose to leave the dressing room to give tav some space.’
the postscript came when the distinctly undemonstrative tavare returned to join his team-mates, perhaps expecting some hard-earned congratulations. Not a bit of it.
‘Never one for histrionics, tav took off his pads, gloves and box without ceremony and packed them neatly in his bag,’ continues Pringle. ‘ then having towelled himself down, tav suddenly noticed us all looking at him. it was only then he glanced up at the screen to be confronted by in flagrante delicto on pause. tav was a man of iron constitution and his face did not shift an iota.
‘Dry as old parchment, he said, “Nice to see you lads have been watching me bat. i know i’m boring but it hasn’t been that bad, has it?”,’
this remarkable true story is told in what must surely be the cricket book of the year, Pringle’s entertaining, informative and at times downright uproarious look at the game in the 1980s through the lens of his own eventful times spent with essex and england.
‘it was puerile and most definitely in bad taste,’ says Pringle, 60, of the Billy’s
Big Banana episode. ‘But i would have done anything at that time to be one of the lads.’
How he succeeded in doing that in a career which brought him 30 test and 44 one-day international appearances during an era that perfectly suited his curious mind, sense of adventure and determination to enjoy every benefit of being an england cricketer.
Now, after 25 years in his second successful career as a highly respected writer and commentator on the game, Pringle has decided to tell his own story during an extraordinary time for the game jam-packed with big characters and even bigger scandals.
‘i did have a lot of fun writing the book but who wouldn’t enjoy a self-indulgent trawl through one’s past?’ says Pringle, now in the shadow of trinity college in cambridge, where in his student days he appeared as an extra in the Oscarwinning film Chariots of Fire.
‘ it’s not really an autobiography because there’s nothing in it from before i was 19 or 20. i thought i’d stick to the 80s as it was the last decade of the maverick cricketer. that was the last era where players had real freedom.’
And what freedom they had judging by Pushing The Boundaries. Cricket In The Eighties. Playing Home and Away. this is so choc-full of rip-roaring tales of drinking, womanising and general excess that it is a wonder how Pringle and company ever had enough energy to play cricket.
But how the likes of Botham, Graham Gooch, David Gower et al could play the game, and this is as much a tribute to them and their ilk and a lament to how much Pringle believes has been lost in the coach- driven modern era of ultra professionalism.
‘it was fantastic to play then because there were not only some hugely talented homegrown players around but we had the cream of the international game in county cricket,’ says Pringle. ‘And i truly believe standards never suffered through what went on off the field. By the 80s every county had one or two world-class overseas players and therefore the standard of county cricket was pretty high.’
ABOVE ALL, Pringle loved being surrounded by such individuals and, far from the establishment’s early hopes for him as leadership potential being an ex-public schoolboy and cambridge graduate, he desperately wanted to be a maverick himself.
‘i think the era suited my personality,’ he said. ‘i came from a sort of amateur background at cambridge and even
though we were professional it was definitely with a small ‘p’. We had a captain at Essex in Keith Fletcher who was an outstanding reader of the game and he always said to us, “I don’t care what you get up to in the evening as long as it’s legal. Just make sure you’re ready to play for me at 11am the next day and give it 100 per cent”.’
Pringle was clearly in thrall to Botham then and talks with real affection and respect for him in the book. ‘ Beefy has always been a very generous guy,’ says a man who, like so many others, never was able to become that new Botham the game so craved. ‘You don’t want to make an enemy of him but if he liked you he was very kind and loyal to most of the people he played with.
‘It was fantastic to watch him up close and the most incredible thing was his self-belief. He’d still be talking up your chances of winning when you were following on. All things were possible to him.’
With Botham came a showbiz entourage barely believable in today’s game that brought the biggest names in music down to the homely surroundings of New Road just to be near him.
‘There’s a pic of Eric Clapton, Elton John, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne all watching a county match at Worcester, which wouldn’t happen today,’ smiled Pringle. ‘It was solely the Beefy effect. He turned heads. He got people noticing cricket. The best we got at Chelmsford at the time was Jimmy White and, once, a visit from Gary Lineker.
‘One evening in Worcester was one of the greatest of my career. Clapton came and played guitar for us in a local pub. People forget Beefy was the most famous and recognisable sportsman of the 80s. It wasn’t any footballer. Kevin Keegan and Glenn Hoddle were around but Beefy outshone them.’
Times have changed enormously but Pringle, for one, is clearly not convinced that they have necessarily changed for the better, even though the occasionally shambolic era he played in was summed up by his chapter on the extraordinary summer of 1988.
England had no fewer than four captains during yet another thrashing by the West Indies and, for two sessions when all else had failed and Gooch was injured, Pringle himself was at the helm as a fifth leader.
‘The talent was definitely there in the 80s but maybe not the desire to apply it every day,’ he says. ‘I was young when I started and the players always seemed big, bold characters. I’m older now but I just don’t see how things are better.
‘I think by its nature, coach culture can destroy freedom and self-expression. It’s just a shame the box has been opened. You speak to someone like Goochie, who has been on both sides of the fence, and he will tell you modern players can’t do without having a coach so they can cry on their shoulder or lean against them.’
HE Adds: ‘ In the 80s you had to fend for yourself more. You do wonder if there had been today’s dieticians, isotonic drinks and an early-to-bed regime whether the players would have expressed themselves in the same way. It’s one of life’s imponderables. some things might have been better but some things might have been worse.
‘Would we have had those great feats from people like Botham and Gower if there had been a prescriptive coach culture?
‘England might have got more results but I’m not sure whether we would have seen those incredible individual performances.’
The book ends at the start of the 90s with Pringle describing his role in the greatest of all England oneday sides — it is difficult to imagine Ben stokes warming up for next year’s World Cup by appearing in pantomime as Botham did in 1992 — and how his life might have turned out had he trapped Javed Miandad lbw at a critical stage of the final against Pakistan in Melbourne.
‘Inevitably, I’ve wondered how different things might have been had Javed been given out and we’d won the World Cup. But it wasn’t the first time an appeal has been turned down when the batsman was adjacent. In fact there were two appeals in the same over and both were pretty plumb. But I wasn’t too upset about it immediately afterwards.
‘some friends have had fantasies on my behalf that I might have been given the freedom of Chelmsford or married Liz Hurley, but it’s not something that keeps me awake at night.
‘I saw (umpire) steve Bucknor at a cocktail party a couple of years later when I had become a journalist and I said, “Is Javed still not out, steve?” And he blanked me.
‘I’m told we were the best England one- day side by people who were there, but you have to say Eoin Morgan’s team are playing incredible cricket. They perhaps need to go one better than us and win the Cup next year to take our mantle.
‘These guys like to plan years ahead now but the fact I took the new ball in that tournament in 1992 was a late decision and Beefy talked himself into opening the batting just before the Cup. You don’t necessarily have to make all your plans so far in advance. You have to be flexible in your thinking. You have to go with a good gut feeling.’
Life in the 80s was full of late planning, gut instincts and, yes, chaos at times. But the players had a lot of fun as well as often producing thrilling, memorable cricket. And Pringle, for one, wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Pushing the Boundaries: Cricket In The Eighties Playing Home And Away by Derek Pringle is published by Hodder and Stoughton.
‘I brought in an X-rated film... I so wanted to fit in’ ‘Today’s game would have stifled Beefy and Gower’