The changing face of cricket writing

Michael Henderson

Without a Carey in the world

There wasn’t much fuss when Michael Carey died last weekend. He was a well-known sportswriter in his day, but that day passed three decades ago. He was 87 and had been a stranger to press boxes since Tony Blair became Prime Minister. His name means little to the younger men and women who occupy those much-changed boxes today.

The death notices said he was ‘a much-loved radio presenter’, and it is true he spent two decades on Radio Derby, introducing Memorable Melodies. Before anything else, though, he was a writer on cricket and football. In 1982, after 20 years as a freelance for various newspapers, radio and television, he succeeded Michael Melford as cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. A fine reporter he was, equipped with a well-stocked mind and stinging wit.

Carey was not easily budged, and that independence cost him his job at the Telegraph. Covering a one-day match at Worcester in August 1986, when Imran Khan was abused by a spectator, he told the sports desk the story had nothing to do with the cricket he was there to watch, and he left the ground without filing a word about it. He joined the Independent when it was launched two months later, and then opted for a reclusive dimming of the day in Darley Abbey, with his labradors for company. When Gerald Mortimer, a colleague from the Derby press box, died in 2013, Carey chose not to attend. It was rather sad.

How thoroughly the recent past baffles us! The Worcester incident was only 37 years ago yet to modern journalists, raised in the all-seeing digital age, it may seem as remote as the Stuarts. In those days press boxes were smoky, noisy places, where scribes clattered out words on typewriters borrowed from His Girl Friday, before bellowing them to copy-takers in London who did not always hear clearly. The non-striker’s end once became ‘the non-smoker’s end’, in a Benson and Hedges Cup tie to boot! They were old-fashioned grottos, exclusively white and male, and frequently grumpy. They were also cosy dens where journalists had great fun.

Carey could be relied upon to add a verse to the chorus, for the Derby box ranked high on any list of comic palaces. The cricketers may have groaned at the prospect of going to the old Racecourse Ground. Jonathan Agnew caught that mood in Eight Days A Week, his vivid account of a pro’s summer. For those who wrote about the game, however, Derby was often a playground for adults, and Carey bowled his share of overs.