The end of room mates

Graham Gooch: an Englishman abroad © Getty Images

Darren Gough and Robert Croft are the latest and last famous `couple' in a great England cricketing tradition. When Lord MacLaurin put his head round the door of the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza in Harare last December and found the pair together, the new boss of English cricket decided such practices had to stop.

The days of the `roomie' are over. England's best cricketers will no longershare hotel rooms. In an effort to provide the best for the best, MacLaurin wants to give Mike Atherton and his team space and privacy. In other words, single rooms. The days of beds in corridors and creepy-crawlies and worse between the sheets are gone.

There are many who lament the passing of the practice. Sharing by and large, meant fun. Occasionally, it spelt trouble. The mixing of Allan Lamb and Ian Botham was always likely to have a combustible effect, as happened in New Zealand in 1984. The untidiest room I ever witnessed was the combination of Phil Tufnell and Wayne `Ned' Larkins in Australia in 1990-91, when Graham Gooch decided to put all his smokers in one ashtray.

The change will, at least, end the arguments and queues at checkout time. With direct-dial phones, those mornings have become a nightmare as players squabble about who made which calls and who wanted the porn channel at two in the morning.

The clever players stay one step ahead of the game. One lad actually got a key to the manager's room and made all his calls home from there. As the bus headed for the airport, the manager, realising why his hotel bill was about $1000 more than it should have been, asked the guilty man to come forward voluntarily: `I know who it is!'

There was still no admission of guilt. The manager read the phone number out and identified the area code. Quick as a flash, the player piped up: `Which of you buggers has been ringing my wife?'

Single rooms will help prevent the spread of illness. Devon Malcolm went down with chickenpox on the last Ashes trip and there were worries it might sweep though the squad, while the but that bowler Paul Taylor picked up in India put Mike Atherton out of the Calcutta Test and Graham Gooch was already struggling with it before the dodgy prawn finished him off in Madras.

Single rooms are nothing new. The captain, vice-captain and senior players have usually been afforded that luxury. As players get older and are less inclined to party, such privacy is valued. They have little desire to share the experiences of someone learning to play the guitar or the fumes from Jack Russell's oil paintings.

John Woodcock, cricket correspondent of The Times from 1954 to 1987, is one of the few still writing who remembers the days of travelling to Australia and South Africa by boat. Woodcock, says there have been three great `couples' during his years of touring.

The three inseparables in my time have been Peter Loader and Brian Statham in the 1950s, David Allen and John Murray in the 1960s and Graham Gooch and John Emburey in 1970s and 1980s. That doesn't necessarily mean that they always shared, but you rarely saw one without the other.

"I once shared with Brian Statham before a Test, when Loader had flu. I was quite surprised to see how different he was on the morning of the match. Here was one of the most accurate bowlers in the world on his third England tour worrying about getting it right, when most people believed that he could land the ball on the spot in his sleep.

`We had team rooms even in the old days. Often the press would be invited in for a drink before heading off to write their copy.

Emburey and Gooch struck up their friendship on the London Schools tour of East Africa in 1969. `Actually, we didn't share that often,' Emburey says. `Bernard Thomas organised the rooming lists and the idea was to switch players around. Not so much for negative reasons, more for the positive aspect of players getting to know each other. That's what we did last winter in Zimbabwe.

`It would be said if sharing disappeared completely. It's helped cricketers in the past and its value has not vanished because of the passage of time. It's true that being stuck on your own in India and Pakistan is not the isolation it once was. Now there are telephones, televisions, video channels and tea-making facilities, but it can still get lonely.

`There's a lot of camaraderie about sharing. I remember rooming with Graeme Hick in Gwalior at the end of the 1993 tour of India. I'd known Hickie for a long time, but I learnt more about him in those few days than in all the previous years. Some players are quiet at team meetings and sharing allows them an input, albeit indirectly, to the tour.

`On that India tour, I was happy to have my own room most of the time. I was 40 and pretty set in my ways. I'd read my book and go to bed early.The last thing I needed was some young trendy with a ghetto-blaster coming in and putting the light on after midnight. But I enjoyed sharing with Hickie. Suddenly, I saw him in a different light.

`Another plus of sharing is the wealth of funny stories, the things players say and do, the ones who have trouble on the phone with the wife. All that helps team spirit.

`Sharing with someone like Derek Randall could be an experience. He'd forget he'd started running the bath and go down for breakfast. You'd get up and find the carpet was under a couple of inches of water.

`In Australia in 1979-80, John Lever had got back late and was starving. The breakfast list looked attractive. He ticked the lot and ordered two of everything. I can't remember how many trays were brought in, but there was enough for about a dozen people. At the next meeting Alec Bedser the manager, held up a bill and said: Look, lads, I said order what you want within reason, but $87 for a breakfast is taking liberties.

`Another advantage of sharing is that it allows the veteran tourists to show then novices the ropes. The first stop on my first tour of India was Bombay. The first thing J K ( Lever) did when we got to our room was order a curry. So I did the same. I should have known better. I had the curry, lay on my bed in my jock-strap, coughed and just about pebble-dashed the room. He stopped laughing when I ran over his bed to get to the toilet.

`One of the troubles these days is that cricketers go away with far too much stuff and that really makes rooms cramped. On his last Ashes trip in 1982-83, Goose [Bob Willis] turned up with a small hold all, containing a couple of shirts, a pair of trousers and a few other bits. I think Jack Russell had five big cricket cases last winter. The New Zealanders couldn't believe that we turned up with more than two tons of gear. That's why most of it had to go on different flights.'

Sir Alec Bedser explains why his generation regarded sharing as a way of life. `We had spent the war years sharing. You were just grateful be around.'

`We shared as county cricketers, so doubling up on tour for England seemed the natural thing to do. On the county circuit, we had to pay our own hotel bill. Apart from a third-class rail ticket, everything else had to come out of our wages, laundry, meals, hotels, everything. On top of a small basic wage, we received £10 for a home match and £16 for an away game.

`That's how the professionals shared. The amateurs did things differently. We travelled by the same train, except the amateurs were provided with first-class tickets. We would meet up on the platform before they headed off by taxi for the best hotels and we walked or took the bus to the cheapest.

`That changed when Stuart Surridge became captain. Not that we got to go and stay in the better hotels. Stuart would come and rough it with us at places like the Stag and Pheasant in Leicester, which was 17/6 a night.

`I always shared with Eric. In all my years at The Oval, I never shared the same dressing-room as Peter May or Stuart Surridge. The only time I shared with Peter was on the smaller county grounds or on tour with England. The amateurs, like the professionals would share cabins and rooms on tour, but only with each other.

Even in those days, there were four or five single rooms for senior players, whether amateur or professional. On Freddie Brown's Ashes tour, I was on my own sailing out.'

Bedser's Test career finished in 1955, but he was made an England selector in 1962 and acted as chairman for a record 13 seasons, 1969-1981. He was assistant manager to the Duke of Norfolk on the 1962-63 Australian tour and was manager for the 1974-75 and 1979-80 visits.

`The major change was the regular appearance of the wives, girlfriends and children. Dorothy Hutton and Godfrey Evans's wife were the first to appear, during the New Zealand leg in 1954-55. Then it was decided that the families would come out for the two weeks over Christmas. That would coincide with two important Tests. I could tell the atmosphere changed. You no longer popped into rooms for a chat with players about the matches and what we should be doing.'

There was a voluntary ban on families last year on the Zimbabwe- New Zealand tour after the experiences of the previous winter in South Africa when the touring party expanded to more than 60. The group was already labelled a `travelling circus' before the three-day defeat in Cape Town.

The problem was that the families arrived just as the players faced their biggest challenge. Australia solved the problem two winters ago in the Caribbean. West Indies were defeated in a series for the first time in 15 years. Mark Taylor's squad celebrated with a fortnight in Bermuda with their families, playing a couple of one-day exhibition matches to finance the excursion.

Australian wives will be allowed to stay with their husbands for the first time this summer. Previously, wives were banned from spending the night in the same hotel and had to be housed elsewhere. That led to one newspaper taking long-lens photographs of Australian cricketers at the end of what appeared to be a good night out on the town, only to discover they were actually saying goodnight to their wives and girlfriends.

One of the delights of touring is the social intercourse. The modern whistle-stop schedules have all but ended the visits to locals' homes and families. Today's players are more than likely to make their way to the best hotel in town for an evening's entertainment. What has not changed is the attention touring cricketers receive from the local girls and travelling aircrews. What has changed is the media's attention to such dalliances.

The modern cricketer behaves no differently in that respect and overcomes the problems of sharing in much the same way. A swap with those in their own is one remedy if the accompanied tourist arrives back to find his roomie already in occupation. If the couple are first back, it is the roomie who looks for alternative accommodation, having spotted a prearranged signal.

If all else fails, the cricketer will convince the lady that he is sharing with the heaviest sleeper in the squad and nothing ever disturbs his slumbers. Such was the scenario on a recent England tour. After a rather unproductive hour the girl wondered: `Are you sure he's not awake?'

The words from the other bed soon entered tour legend. `How do you expect anyone to sleep with all that noise going on!'