Where would cricket be without its journalists? Certainly not on these pages
Deepti Unni | October 5, 2024
“I just called to say… it’s a draw”
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Cricket – and cricketers – has long had a love-hate relationship with the press. The media are the first to broadcast successes but also merciless about failures. They’ll hunt players down before, after and during games to get that one byte or quote that’ll make the front page tomorrow. They’re relentless and dogged – they don’t call them newshounds for nothing – in their pursuit of headlines. But what is life like behind the trenches?
It isn’t easy bring a cricket correspondent. Players can go home after a match day is done, but despite having followed every ball of the game with unbroken concentration, a journalist’s job only really begins after – there are match reports to be filed, stats to be pored over, and reams of play to analyse. And it needs to be done all over again the next day. In the photo above, journalists Martin Johnson and Peter Johnson (nor related to each other) file match reports over pay phones at Barbados airport during England’s 1990 tour of the West Indies.
At least they didn’t have to lug around a whole typewriter like the Daily Mail‘s Peter Smith in this 1982 picture.
Key game: Peter Smith clacks away on the luggage rack in his hotel room in Delhi during England’s 1981-82 tour of India
Adrian Murrell / © Allsport/Getty Images
The lucky few form friendships and build a rapport with players that lasts a lifetime. Journalist Frank Keating of the Guardian, who authored a book on Ian Botham, was also his close friend. Below, he joins Botham on one of his charity walks to raise funds to battle leukaemia.
Walk of life: Beefy and Keating get their steps in
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Long hours spent on the road during tours also mean writers get a level of access to players – at least in the old days – that a cricket fan could only dream of. But that also means occasionally having to play the hand you’re dealt
Just a little Patience: Mike Gatting and journalist John Thicknesse play cards on a train to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1993
Graham Chadwick / © PA Photos/Getty Images
Back in the day, there was none of this fuss about formal press conferences before and after matches – you could simply have journalists over to your room for a chinwag while still in your pajamas and carpet slippers.
England tour manager Ray Illingworth entertains the press in his room during the 1996 World Cup
Chris Turvey / © EMPICS/Getty Images
When your office for the day is a cricket ground, you might occasionally have to brave the elements, but try explaining to your editor that your report is delayed due to a wet outfield.
A journalist makes heavy weather of writing during a rain delay in Antigua
Ross Setford / © EMPICS/Getty Images
Reporting from the front can also be fraught with peril. In 2006, police assaulted journalists and photographers with batons after a scuffle broke out over stringent security checks in Chattogram. That still doesn’t mean you can stop working, though
A photographer captures the chaos at the stadium even as the police beat back journalists
Mir Farid / © Associated Press
Sometimes, though, the cause of the injury is… yourself. Zahid Malik, a reporter for Pakistani newspaper Daily Khabrain, had a particularly torrid time of it during a tour of New Zealand in 2003. According to the New Zealand Herald, “Malik made an ignominious beginning to his tour when he flew to Christchurch rather than Wellington for the Boxing Day test. Having arrived at the Basin Reserve just before tea on the first day, Malik missed the first two sessions on the second after succumbing to jet-lag, and when he did turn up, marked his entrance by walking straight through a full-length glass window.” Malik survived to tell the tale and even became a mini celebrity on the tour, at the end of which the New Zealand side presented him with a signed jersey – though he might have been better served by a helmet.
Sticks and stones won’t break his bones, but keep him away from plate glass
Ross Setford / © Getty Images
A reporter’s life is not about comfort, it’s about finding the right angles, in stories and photographs. And you occasionally have to scale the fourth wall.
A media frenzy outside Sania Mirza’s house, where police were questioning her then fiancée Shoaib Malik about him already being married to someone else
Noah Seelam / © AFP/Getty Images
After years spent in press boxes and chasing players, if you’re lucky you’ll get a chance to join a poor man’s hall of fame. Or is a hall of blame?
Caricatures of journalists line the walls of the press box at Headingley
Laurence Griffiths / © Getty Images
You know how they say to really get to know someone you have to walk a mile in their shoes? ESPNcricinfo’s UK editor and coiner of “Bazball” Andrew Miller takes that very seriously and goes one better.
Miller time: players wish he would clock out
John Buckle / © EMPICS/Getty Images
Deepti Unni is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
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