England have confirmed they will travel to Bangladesh for two Tests and three one-day internationals in October.
And the announcement of the schedule has brought back memories of my one and only trip out there, which it is my duty to share with you.
I should make it clear that my erstwhile employers had given me the choice of whether to go at all. England had two major commitments in the spring of 2010 and the Mail On Sunday decided, quite reasonably, that the sports desk budget would only stretch to sending their cricket correspondent to cover one of them.
So they asked me to pick between three weeks in Chittagong and Dhaka, and a month in the Caribbean reporting on the World T20… and I still don’t know what came over me.
For reasons I will never be able to fully explain, but which did include the romantic notion of completing the ‘set’ of world touring destinations, I chose the former. No disrespect intended to the people and the country, both of which I found to be utterly charming but, for reasons of ill fortune and my own ineptitude, it turned out to be an experience I will never forget, no matter how hard I try.
Until the moment I attempted to use the facilities at Dhaka airport during the two-hour wait for my connection to Chittagong, it had all been going swimmingly. Widely-travelled as I considered myself to be, the sight of what is known by some as a ‘squatter’ held no fears and all passed without undue alarm until, in the action of raising myself to my feet, I felt something snap at the back of my right leg and realised I had become the first man in history to pull a hamstring while having a dump.
Limping heavily through the arrivals hall at my final destination and in considerable pain, I was delighted to see a sign with my name on it in the hands of the hotel driver. His face was one giant smile and he could not have been more helpful, making sure I was safely installed in the back of the car before proclaiming: “Music!” and shoving what appeared to be his only cassette tape into the slot.
About a million guesses would probably be needed to come up with what he had selected for my listening pleasure; one song, recorded over and over again on a continuous wonky loop. To save time, it was, in fact, All That She Wants, by Swedish pop group Ace Of Base, which some of you hipsters will recall being No.1 in the charts in Australia, the UK, Germany and Denmark some 17 years earlier in 1993.
“Wooaall thassshe wanns,” belted out Linn Berggren and the boys, “isss another baybeh…” The noise – blaring out of the speakers right behind my head – was deafening and hideously distorted, the tape so worn through that it kept speeding up and slowing down without, sadly, ever quite, snapping.
“Err, excuse me,” I called out. “It’s a bit loud,” to which the driver responded by turning up the volume as high as it would go, his face taking on a slightly crazed expression. “SHESS GONE TOMORROH, BOY…
“WOOAALL THASSHE WANNS ISSS ANOTHER BAYBEH… YEA….”
The torture continued for what seemed like an eternity until the driver clocked me with my fingers rammed deep in my ears and the penny dropped, whereupon he switched off the machine, but proceeded instead to sing the song out loud for the remainder of the ride, at the top of his voice.
The hotel room was not untypical of many that I had come across during many years of covering England in far-flung outposts of the Sub-continent with a narrow single bed-frame rooted to the floor by means of a metal pole.
But this was a first in that, being the last room in the corridor on the top floor of the building, an anaconda-sized cable providing the TV service for the entire hotel ran through it and out the other side, via my window, which had to be kept open at all times.
This presented several problems.
It rendered the cranking old air-conditioning’s attempts to counter the steamy heat useless and that, coupled with the racket from the bustling city streets outside, would certainly have kept me awake all night, were it not for the fact that wave after wave of well-coordinated raids by squadrons of
bat-sized mosquitos, taking advantage of unrestricted access, had rendered the very idea of sleep quite impossible anyway. So, it was with some relief that I set off for the stadium for the first day of the first Test.
Plugging into local ways, I climbed aboard a tuk-tuk for the ride but, even allowing for usual gridlocked traffic, I underestimated the time it would take to complete the trip – about an hour to cover three and half miles.
Thus the match was well underway when we finally arrived and, while I was surprised to find so little obvious sign of security, I was also disappointed to discover that the prospect of Test cricket had failed to attract much of crowd.
I didn’t recognise any of the Bangladesh team at all.
In fact, I soon realised I didn’t recognise any of the England team, either, and this turned out to be because instead of taking me to the Zahur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium in the west of the city, the driver had actually brought me to the MA Aziz stadium, some six miles to the east.
Foolishly, when I arrived at the match I had been sent 5,000 miles to cover all expenses paid, at around tea time, I recounted my tale of woe, which earned me the rather unkind nickname of “Hapless” from the reporter soon to be appointed editor of Wisden [Lawrence Booth – Ed].
Not that I missed much in the West Indies the following month, as it turned out. Apart from England playing brilliant cricket to reach the final of the World T20 in Barbados, beating Australia to lift a global limited-overs trophy for the first and only time in their history and enjoying a night-long celebration at the Harbour Lights beach bar in Bridgetown with skipper Paul Collingwood leading the team in a blissfully inebriated rendition of We Are The Champions.
Hapless, indeed.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday July 1 2016
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