The news of the circus broke a month ago and it has taken all this time for them to react
The news of the circus broke a month ago and it has taken all this time for them to react.”Lord says that attitudes to a professional circus have changed since his own failed attempt. “People accept professional rugby is here to stay now, it’s just a case of how much they are beng paid and who it is who is paying them There was so much bad feeling back then. The players had been fantastic, keeping mum about it, but Bobby Windsor, the Welsh player, spilled the beans and after that all hell broke out. No one has been more pilloried or ostracised than I was then Lepers, communists and terrorists have been treated better. I found it staggering that people you have known all your life suddenly thought you were the arch enemy.”Twelve years on, Lord is involved in the golf world. “I’ve got my hands full with what could turn out to be the biggest amateur golf tournament in the world,” he said. “Because of it, I’ve not been able to get involved with the rugby circus But it’s fascinating stuff.
The beautiful part of this whole saga is that back in 1983, Ross Turnbull was deputy chairman of the ARU and was doing his best to stop my circus Ross is a bloody good bloke. I haven’t seen him since he started working on the other side of the fence, but when I do, it will certainly be entertaining.”. IT WAS mildly surprising to find that the Surrey coach did not look the same age as the club In the circumstances 150 might have been on the young side. This was intended to be a glorious anniversary summer at the Oval.
Nobody could have been greater party-poopers than the team: much-vaunted, highly glamorous and out of contention in every competition. And was Grahame Clinton fretting his way to premature dotage about this undesirable turn of events? He was not. His mood in the blistering heat of the St Lawrence ground at Canterbury last week was as jaunty as the Panama hat on his head. In a season which has seen Norman Gifford, his counterpart at Sussex, depart because of poor results, Clinton pronounced himself content. He certainly did not look nor sound like a man under pressure.
“It has been disappointing, I have to admit that,” he said. “But you have to discuss why things have happened then balance that out against all the positive points.
Yes, it would have been good to win things this year for the first time in 14 seasons and that’s a record that must be altered. But I’m in the business not of getting a trophy in a season but of building a side that will last five seasons and still go on from there. We’ve got a young team and it can take two or three years to get established.”Much of what Clinton says in defence of Surrey is incontrovertible and in the confines of the dressing room he may well be prepared to be more critical than he was sitting around the St Lawrence nets. He pointed out that Surrey have won the toss in only four of 13 Championship games and lamented the significance of the coin landing the right way It was, he insisted, no way to play first-class cricket. In the old days (Clinton is 42) he said a captain might think of asking the opposition to bat but not now, not in 1995, when he had to put his own team in, hope to score 400-500, then catch the opposition on a rapidly deteriorating pitch.It was probably only momentary forgetfulness, but Clinton did not mention that Surrey did win the toss against Warwickshire this season: they chose to field and lost by 93 runs. “What I have to do as a coach is to make sure the players improve,” he said “It’s as simple as that.
We’ve got a young side and the young players couldn’t have done much more for us this summer. They need the established players to be doing well but at the start of the summer that simply did not happen. People like Darren Bicknell and Graham Thorpe simply weren’t doing their stuff.”As he spoke Bicknell and Thorpe were compiling majestic centuries, so they have managed to surmount that failing. Clinton is eager to emphasise the positive aspects of the season. He is painfully aware – and almost grimaced in recounting it – that his youngsters, who provided most of the high spots, have a reputation as batsmen for big-hitting cameos – for brief interludes and nothing more.”I think it simply reflects society Nobody has any attention span any more. It’s not in people’s nature to concentrate and that’s probably passed on in our cricket.
