the times | Wednesday April 8 2020 2GM 55
Sport
Eddie Jones has said that England’s
preparations for the World Cup looked
as though they were going to “blow up
completely” due to tensions in the
squad a month before the tournament.
It was on a warm-weather trip to Tre-
viso that Ben Te’o and Mike Brown
were involved in an altercation that led
to both players being excluded from the
final squad for the tournament in
Japan. Speaking to The Magic Academy
podcast, Jones credits Corinne Reid,
the sports psychologist, with easing the
tensions that had been building.
“We had a period of massive incohe-
sion, at one stage in Italy it looked as
though our World Cup preparation was
going to blow up completely,” Jones, the
England head coach, said. “Players
were fighting because all these wounds
were open and they didn’t know how to
handle it. But from that the wounds got
cleaned, the infections got sorted out
and we were able to work on being a
cohesive and better team.”Jones: Psychologist stopped implosion
Reid, who helped the Australia
women’s hockey team to Olympic gold
in 1996 and 2000, joined the squad in
Italy last year and Jones saw her make
a swift impact in addressing fault lines
in his squad, which he felt had been
exposed when they had thrown away a
31-0 lead to draw 38-38 against Scot-
land in the Six Nations.
“In two sessions with our squad, shewas able to delve deep into wounds that
were still there from the 2015 World
Cup that had never been cleaned, they
were still infecting the team,” Jones
said. “I’ve never seen a person who can
come into a room and assess the rela-
tionships [so quickly].”
Having announced last week a con-
tract extension to take England to theWorld Cup in France in 2023, Jones said
that he felt the majority of players took
a full year to acclimatise to inter-
national rugby after making the step up
from the Premiership. In the recent Six
Nations, Jones selected George Fur-
bank, the Northampton Saints full
back, for his first cap in the opener
against France in Paris, but the 23-year-
old was dropped after two matches.
“What I’ve found is that most of the
players in England need 12 months to
adapt to the international scene,” Jones
said. “You’ve got to have the patience to
have that 12 months to allow them to
have some failure, support them in
their failure, and bring them through.”
Jones also said that England’s train-
ing should have been more intense in
the week leading up to their World Cup
final defeat by South Africa. “We
probably didn’t train with enough
edge,” he said. “We felt the players had
had three pretty hard weeks of prepara-
tion, Argentina, Australia and New
Zealand, and we felt we needed to pull
back a bit. We pulled back about 10 per
cent and maybe that hurt us a bit.”Rugby union
John Westerbybehind closed doors, dependent on
government and public health policy
and the approval of the British Horse-
racing Authority [BHA] for us to
re-start racing. Planning for this is now
our complete focus.”
The five-day meeting, which offers a
heady cocktail of top-class Flat racing
and fashion, attracts 300,000 racegoers
a year.
Nick Smith, director of racing at
Ascot, said that the decision as to
whether the Queen would attend
“would have to go to Buckingham
Palace”, but it seems highly unlikely she
would choose to do so when the wider
public will not be allowed on the course.
Smith said that Ascot would seek to
learn from other countries where some
racing has taken place.
“We have been looking at the models
in places like Hong Kong, Japan and
Sydney. We are having detailedAscot hopes to run royal
meet behind closed doors
discussions with those places and are
taking heart from the fact that they’ve
been running meetings [behind closed
doors] successfully.
“We will be guided by whatever the
government instructions are in mid-
June. This is not an announcement that
racing will definitely go ahead.”
English cricket chiefs have explored
the possiblity of behind-closed-doors
international matches and concluded
that 350 is the minimum number of
people required to play and stage a tele-
vised event. Ascot could require more,
depending on the number of runners,
and, given the nature of the sport, may
also place more stress on emergency
medical care that would otherwise be
part of the fight against the virus.
The rhythm of the Flat racing season
will have a markedly different feel
when racing starts again. As well as the
Oaks and the Derby, the Guineas
Festival, scheduled for May 2 to 3, was
postponed until an unspecified date.Jones felt wounds
from 2015 had not
fully healedTavaré did not crave the limelight but
frequently made a vital contribution
to his team’s successWhy world would
be a better place
with more Tavarés
Matthew Syed
I
am not entirely sure why I fell in love with
Chris Tavaré, but I can pin the start of my
infatuation to a particular date: August 15,- That was the day when he stood at the
opposite end to Ian Botham in the fifth
Ashes Test as the great all-rounder heaved
Dennis Lillee, Terry Alderman, Mike Whitney
and Ray Bright around Old Trafford, a
performance that still brings back a flood of
emotions.
As eyes turned to Botham as he smashed 118
off 102 balls in what many consider his finest
innings, I found myself drawn to Tavaré, the bit-
part player in this historic drama, standing at
the non-striker’s end, running diligently
between the wickets, protecting his stumps like a
mother hen her chicks. His demeanour, his
sense of duty, even his post-match interview,
having occupied the crease for more than seven
hours for a painstaking 78 in the second innings,
when he paid tribute to his more illustrious
team-mate: all spoke deeply to this ten year old.
He was, to me, the ultimate cult hero.
Tavaré was not quite the dull and unassuming
batsmen that history often judges him to be. He
could score swiftly for Kent when the mood
took him, the bottom hand low on the handle,
hitting clean and true down the leg side. But it
was as a Test player that he sought to play the
role of anchor, holding on at one end for dear
life in an era where cricket matches were more
spread out, often ending in a draw, and where
steadfastness was sometimes considered a
virtue.
What is often overlooked about that Old
Trafford win that retained the urn is that Tavaré
batted all morning (England had been 70 for
one overnight) as Geoffrey Boycott, David
Gower, Mike Gatting and Mike Brearley fell,
one by one.
He scored nine runs in the morning session,
and two more in the first 20 minutes after
lunch, but still he was there, straining the
patience of the bowlers, holding together an
innings teetering on the precipice.
I don’t think it is stretching the point to
suggest that Tavaré laid the foundations —
tactical and psychological — for Botham’s
heroics. The latter started slowly, scoring only
five off his first 32 balls, but seemed to take
courage from the obduracy of his partner,
sensing the seed of doubt in the bowler’s minds.
As John Woodcock, the former cricket
correspondent of The Times put it: “Tavaré was
taking good care of himself, not scoring much
but relieving Botham of the anxiety of seeing a
partner in distress”.
Since my school days, I have harboured a
dissatisfaction with what you might call the
“Great Man” approach to history. We read about
kings and emperors, military generals and
statesmen, as if these figures shape human
affairs like puppet masters pulling so many
strings. I have always felt that this overlooks
what you might call the smaller actions of
ordinary people and how these, by
accumulation, shape history in a subtler
but nonetheless powerful way.
My mum was stacking shelves at
Asda in 1981, a job on which some of
her friends looked down. But I
could see the way her work ethic
and good humour had a huge
impact on her colleagues, on
the functioning of her section
(biscuits and cakes), not to
mention the experience of
shoppers. When you
have dutiful people
like mum — on thefrontline of hospitals, making deliveries,
cleaning streets — the spirit of a nation is
enhanced in ways that are difficult to
measure, but significant all the same.
Perhaps that is why I was so
drawn to Tavaré, a cricketer who
rarely made headlines but who
influenced matches in a different way.
I liked his eccentricities, too: the way
he walked to square leg between balls,
head bowed in concentration, the way
he held the bat, even the way he walked
out from the pavilion, once compared to
“a stork approaching a watering hole
full of crocs”. His concentration was
prodigious. Who could forget the innings
he put together in Perth on the 1982-83
Ashes tour, when in more than seven-and-a-
half hours at the crease he scored 89 runs?
I wasn’t surprised to read that after cricket,
Tavaré went back to Sevenoaks, his old school,
as a biology teacher (he had graduated from
Oxford with a degree in zoology), appreciated
by his students for his diligence and quiet good
humour. In an interview with The Cricketer
magazine a couple of years ago, he said: “I have
been teaching longer now than I played. It’s a
life that I sometimes wonder if I was ever part
of. I find it funny when I watch Sky, and they
have a programme about how great David
Gower was, and I am in the odd clip, the
batsman at the non-striker’s end.”
My sense is that if there were more like
Tavaré, who is now 65, individuals
not out to hog the limelight,
people prepared to put the team
first, the world would be a better
place. It is revealing that when
asked about his greatest day in
cricket, he resisted the
temptation to talk about his
own heroics (and they were
heroics), but instead those of his
more celebrated team-mate:
“My most memorable experience
was being at the other end when
Ian Botham got his hundred at Old
Trafford in 1981. I had the best seat
in the house.”I would love to hear about your cult hero:
the eccentric, idiosyncratic or unsung
sportsperson you idolised or just admired.
Please send to [email protected] or post
to Matthew Syed, News Building, Times
Sport, 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF. I
will publish the best tributes in my
column next week.continued from back