England's colourful, shameless decade

Such is the professionalism implanted in English cricket as a matter of course these days that the 1980s increasingly seem to be a hallucination. For an entire decade, the England side paraded its inadequacies, its excesses and its downright fun on the back pages of the tabloids, lurching from one crisis to the next in the most frenzied of soap operas.

It was not all bad. There was a World Cup final appearance in India, three Ashes victories, and a win in India that would not be repeated for 28 years. Even the two 5-0 defeats against West Indies could easily be explained away by the sheer ferocity, with bat and ball, of one of the greatest Test sides of any era.

But it was also laughter, incredulity and anger that tracked England through the most colourful and shameless of decades, a period when rampant individualism was rife, incompetent administrators belonged to a bygone age and were entirely unqualified - or not minded - to cope, and a voracious tabloid media in thrall to Ian Botham was at its most powerful and intrusive.

It is easy to sympathise with the view expressed by John Emburey, the former England offspinner, that no professional sport had ever operated in such an amateurish fashion as England cricket did in the 1980s. Selection was hapless and haphazard, overseen for the most part by Peter May, who might well have been an exquisite middle-order batsman in the 1950s, but whose distance from those he sat in judgement on was an abdication of responsibility that only a man of considerable breeding could contentedly pass off. Surely England have never selected as chaotically as they did in the 1980s.

David Tossell, five times shortlisted in the British Sports Book awards, would seem to be a reliable guide to a decade where English cricketers' fondness for rebel South African tours brought them into conflict with politicians, racial tension dogged series against Pakistan in particular, sex and drugs scandals regularly filled the back pages, and where Botham became English cricket's first no-holds-barred tabloid celebrity.

Tossell tells the story of the decade efficiently enough through the recollections of many of those involved - a considerable number of whom hold prominent positions in the game today. But this is a strangely strait-laced rendition for a book entitled Sex & Drugs & Rebel Tours

Even the commitment that royalties will go to the PCA Benevolent Fund does little to break the code of "what goes on tour stays on tour" or encourage any real attempt at self-analysis by those involved. This is a decade that shrugs occasionally but believes it had more fun and sees no reason to apologise. Fun, along with the cricket, was part of the deal then.

Neither is there a concerted attempt to explain or examine the social conditions that meant English cricket found itself in the perfect storm.

In the 1980s, Thatcherism was the political creed of the day. Self-asserting individualism was encouraged and many of the old structures were unable to cope. There was no more creaking and antiquated structure than the Test and County Cricket Board - the forerunner of the ECB and little better than an Old Boys' Club - which sent impressionable young cricketers abroad with no more backup than a tour manager and a former professional to carry the bags and organise the nets sessions and wondered why things got out of hand.

As behaviour became more ribald, and alcohol was joined by enough dope-smoking for some players to begin to believe, in the words of The Who, that "the stars were connected to the brain", the paternalistic instinct of the traditional cricket correspondent to concentrate only on the field of play was broken down by a more aggressive tabloid culture and, in Botham, they were able to document the hard-living lifestyle of one of England's finest cricketers, much of it supervised, lightly, by his gracefully talented, insouciant captain, David Gower.

England's cricketers were living the heady final years before the public demanded more responsibility from the professionals they followed so avidly and now knew so much more about. "The personality and apparent peccadillos of Botham were now moving international cricketers into a new neighbourhood, one with a camera and notebook on every corner," Tossell writes. Some journalists still talk longingly of the 1984 tour of New Zealand as the "tour of shame" and go misty-eyed at the memories.

England was also out of step with much of the cricketing world. Few cricketers committed with any sense of social justice to the fight against apartheid, preferring to stay loyal to friends in South Africa and the prospect of a good payday, and they were repeatedly offended when their stance was questioned, parroting the belief that sport and politics should never mix.

And, in the days before TV replays and neutral umpires, when upcountry hotels in Pakistan were an unwelcome imposition, an England captain could be involved in a slanging match with an umpire, Shakoor Rana, stumps could be bashed to the floor, and Botham could joke that Pakistan was the sort of place to pack off the mother-in-law.

The first signs of change came in 1986, when Micky Stewart, father of Alec, who was to go on to captain his country, was appointed team manager in 1986 to sort out discipline. He sought to establish the prototype of a framework that Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower would develop so successfully, but there was another painful decade or more before it really began to have effect.

Sex & Drugs & Rebel Tours: The England Cricket Team in the 1980s
By David Tossell
Pitch Publishing
256 pages, £18.99