England cricket coach Andy Flower follows an old narrative by restricting players' wives and girlfriends on the Ashes tour
When I moved back to the north-east in the early 90s I travelled up with our furniture in a removal van with two blokes from the west end of Newcastle. One of them had been a keen Sunday footballer, but he'd recently retired from the game. The other asked him why he'd given up playing.
"Well it wasn't fair on our lass and the bairns, was it?" the first man said. "I mean, I was going out Sunday morning, playing a game, getting a shower and by that time it was midday, so I went down the social club, I'd get home about half?three, sit and watch a bit of football on the telly, fall asleep and when I woke up it would be time to go down the club again. I'd get back about midnight. They never seen us all day. Eventually our lass started playing war. So I give up the football. What else could I do?"
"You could've give up the club," his mate said.
I relate this story of sporting sacrifice for the sake of domestic harmony because at Lord's last Monday Andy Flower announced that the England players' wives and girlfriends will be allowed to join their partners only after the first two Tests of the Ashes tour. "I did feel the need to restrict the presence of families on tour," the England coach said. "I feel its important for us to get together and focus as a group."
That men can't focus when women are around, or at least not on what they are supposed to be focusing on anyway, seems to be taken as self-evident among sports coaches. Several decades back a friend of mine interviewed some of the boot room staff at Anfield. One of them told him that Kenny Dalglish didn't like his players staying with their wives the night before a game.
"When you have sex you lose your legs," the man concluded wisely. It was a pleasant expression, one that conjured up the image of the Liverpool boss fielding an agitated call on Saturday morning from one of his players ? Peter Beardsley or John Aldridge, perhaps ? and calmly saying: "Don't panic. Have you looked under the bed? Well, maybe they're in a different pair of trousers. What about those ones you were wearing at the PFA dinner?"
Not that everyone feels the same way as Dalglish apparently did. When the great US sportswriter George Plimpton told Muhammad Ali's trainer Angelo Dundee that the Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera used to wrap a stout rubber band round his member at night to prevent arousal, Dundee laughed scornfully. "Carnera could have cut it right off. He still wouldn't have been a fighter."
For an older generation the current belief that men should spend time with their families is deeply puzzling. Indeed, it might be supposed that sport was more or less invented to stop such a frankly unnatural situation from arising, because if it were not, then surely games would be much shorter? Golf courses would be two holes, cricket would last 12 balls per innings, in tennis, games replace sets, and fishing equipment would be a simple yet effective combination of hand grenade and landing net, and everyone would be home in time for tea and The Fimbles.
Back when I was growing up the moment a small child pointed at its father and asked: "Mother, when is that strange man going to go home?" was regarded as cause of hilarity rather than as a sign of future psychological scarring. A father was expected to absent himself as often as possible from the domestic scene, only really appearing once the child was old enough to have useful information imparted to him, such as that he must "sniff the ball" when playing a forward defensive shot and never point a gun at anyone. "No, not even the postmistress ? Especially when she is on her bicycle" ? that kind of thing.
In those days cricketers especially were kept away from their families for deliberately prolonged periods. When the Australians toured England in 1926, for example, they played their opening match on 28 April and the final one (in Carlisle) on 16 September. As well as playing five Test matches and all of the first-class counties they also took on: Minor Counties, the MCC, the South, the North, Cambridge University, Oxford University, Public Schools, an England XI (at Folkestone), the Civil Service, CI Thornton's XI, an England XI (Blackpool) and G Palmer's XI.
The fact that teams were invented just to keep the Aussies from returning home too soon make it hard to avoid the conclusion society believed that cricketers' families benefited from their absence.
Perhaps the feeling was that they should not be left with their young offspring for fear that, like male guinea pigs, they would eat them if they were. This seems unlikely, admittedly, though if you study old photos of WG Grace it's hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the white in his beard is the remains of a shredded terry?cotton nappy.
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