The argument that divided Somerset
It’s only when you turn back that you realise how distant the past has become, that all those days since add up to a very long time indeed. It’s been more than 30 years since the scandal at Somerset, the spat that split the club, the team and its supporters, led to the dismissal of Viv Richards and Joel Garner, and the departure of Ian Botham. The unlamented anniversary would surely have passed unremarked. But then the diaries of Somerset’s old captain, Peter Roebuck, were found among his papers, published in PDF by his family, and publicised by David Hopps, who wrote a very good article about them over on Cricinfo. Roebuck was the man, rightly or wrongly, who shouldered much of the blame for what went on.
Thirty years is not so very long, less than half a lifetime ago. Roebuck is gone, and so is Martin Crowe, but many of the other men and women he mentions 30 years ago are still on the cricket circuit. Not just Botham and Richards, but Vic Marks, who Roebuck enviously notes in his diaries has just been signed by Western Australia for the winter, and Brian Rose, who seems always to be away playing golf in La Manga and Mike Selvey, who has just taken up a job in the press box. During a match against Leicestershire, Roebuck is particularly impressed by James Whitaker, the only batsman in the match who could play Botham at his best. Current journalists Matthew Engel, Andrew Longmore, Ivo Tennant, all have cameo roles.
Everything Roebuck describes is well within memory’s reach, and every English cricket fan who can will recall the bare details of what happened, how the club decided to let Richards and Garner go so they could sign Crowe. But the diaries read like despatches from an era so distant that it has become another country altogether. It’s not what they lack that age them – Roebuck is always receiving calls on his house phone and has to walk to the corner shop to find out the news – so much as what they have and which has been lost since. They run to 100 pages, and every one of them is alive with an intensity of feeling about county cricket that seems entirely unimaginable today.
Not just from Roebuck, feverish as his writing is, but from everyone: Richards, Botham, and the rest of his Somerset team-mates, the committee, the fans, and, most tellingly, the media. For those few weeks late in 1986, the petty business of a provincial cricket club became a public obsession. The opinions of the “genial, sensible old men” on the Somerset committee suddenly became a fodder for the front pages. The diaries begin when Roebuck walks into the empty dressing room and finds that someone – he’s sure only Botham could have been “angry and brazen enough to do such a thing” – has stuck a sign saying ‘Judas’ above the spot where he sits. Roebuck decides to leave it where it is. “To take it down would be to admit that it hurt”.
Roebuck hopes, too, that the sight of it will persuade other people of his own argument that the team has grown rotten and needs to be torn up from the roots. That night he decides to start a diary, so that he could put his side of the story across. Before he had even begun writing, he is interrupted by “three men from the Sunday People” who try to persuade him to talk on the record. Soon he feels under siege in his own home, every bath, every trip to the toilet, is interrupted by the trilling of his telephone and another newsman wanting to know what he had to say about the latest developments. Reporters start sniffing around Taunton, asking prurient questions about Roebuck’s sexual preferences.
The Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Sun, the Star, the Mail, the Mirror, the People, and every other newspaper is in touch, all wanting his take on the story. A little bit of Roebuck seems almost to enjoy being the centre of attention. Interviews are arranged with HTV and the BBC, who put Roebuck on the nightly news. “Mark Nicholas was watching and said he almost spilt his cocoa when my face appeared on his screen.” In the TV studio “half a dozen technicians chatted away about the issue, very concerned”, arguing whether Roebuck is right or wrong.
All this interest seems particularly absurd because Roebuck spends so much of his time going about the quotidian business of county captaincy, making trips to Taunton to draw a raffle at Debenhams, to Bridgwater to open a new leisure centre, to Elmhurst School to present the head with the keys to a new minivan. Everywhere he goes, he is confronted with other people’s opinions. In the town of Street he is accosted by an old woman in a car park, who tells him that her son used to drive her up to Taunton just to watch Richards bat. “Increasingly”, he writes, “friends walk past in the street, embarrassed by my cheerful ‘hellos’.”
A lot of this publicity was down to Botham, as big a celebrity as any in English sport at the time. In terms of star power, his closest contemporary would be Kevin Pietersen, and even KP, from memory, never managed to get the machinations of county cricket committees on to the evening news. Roebuck’s diaries are a reminder of the way in which cricket has grown smaller in the years since. The summer game, these days, is the football transfer market. County cricket is an increasingly niche activity.
Roebuck’s family argue that there is a “causal connection” between what happened in 1986 and Roebuck’s death, in unexplained circumstances, 25 years later almost to the very day. And at the very least, it is true that the experience scarred him. Years later, he still seemed to be preoccupied with what people in England thought of him, perhaps not realising that, of course, they now seldom thought of him at all, except as a fine cricket writer and commentator. Roebuck struggled to move on, but the game he loved and played certainly did.
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