The Summer Field

85 Journalism still weighed more than the brief gain from reporting the embarrassing truth (or sensational ‘gush’, depending on your opinion). Blofeld was inaccurate when he said that ‘the press’ protected Botham; in truth it was only the cricket journalists. Like the news reporters who landed like locusts in the Taunton press-box in August 1925, it was usually non- cricket reporters that broke news stories of players misbehaving off the field, just as the regular reporters of the Westminster Parliament did not uncover the scandal of members’ expenses in 2009. Even as journalism, especially radio and TV – mirroring sport – gave its leading professionals a good living (including, ironically, Sir Ian Botham), the ever more hours of channels and pages of sports supplements were no better at reporting the essentials. * That was partly because journalists had become confused about what the essentials were. Gone were the lifelong certainties of the likes of Sam Berridge, who died in 1957 after 60 years’ reporting for the Leicester Mercury . This man, who scored Leicestershire second eleven matches in his 80s, in the end simply sat next to the scorers: ‘Most of the visiting teams and officials knew him. Many stopped for a friendly chat,’ the 1958 county yearbook recalled. Just as county cricketers found they had to dot around clubs to stay in work, so journalists found it harder to stay at one newspaper. Recruitment, especially to the newer broadcast journalism, had always been sloppily unprofessional; training patchy, and ‘on the job’. This allowed the ambitious to bluff their way in, and even to boast about it. Once he was safely BBC cricket correspondent, Jonathan Agnew admitted in the 2004 edition of his diary of the 1988 season, Eight Days a Week : ‘I told one small fib during my interview. When responding to the question, have you ever done any live radio reporting before? I should have said no. Instead I said yes,’ which he laughed off as a ‘minor oversight’. Likewise, the non- journalist Miles Jupp deceived his way into the press box to watch England in India in 2006, which he turned into a book, Fibber in the Heat . Note that each man hid their lying behind the craven word ‘fib’. At least it showed a way with words; and a contrast with pro’ cricket. Pretending you were a better player than you were to earn a trial or even a contract – as in the case of Adrian Shankar at Worcestershire in 2011 – would do you no good; you could not suddenly become good enough if you were not. * Journalists in cricket as in other fields were always in danger of blurring the difference between news and comment. In October 2013 Stuart Broad correctly spoke of ‘trash talk’, as in boxing (‘it’s like a big fight,’) as Australian and English past and present cricketers and their coaches traded predictions before the 2013/14 series. Commentators, even ones with newspaper columns in each country, were on one side or the other. ‘I see Warne as working for Australia,’ Broad said of the former leg spinner. This spoke not only of the enduring interest in international matches between England and Australia – though the ever-more excited journalism