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Spectator Sport

Roger Alton

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Back chat

The last time I saw Darren Gough in action was on the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special last December. The ruddy-cheeked stalwart of the Yorkshire and England fast-bowling attack doesn’t look like a natural for the more skinny-limbed athleticism of ballroom dancing, but he won the show with alarming ease, twirling across the floor with a light-footed sureness as if gravity didn’t exist (rather like Usain Bolt at the Olympics, come to think of it, who runs as if the ground wasn’t there). The Dazzler still turns out for Yorkshire (he’s club captain, best recent figures 2-62 off eight overs) but more to the point, he also presides over one of the best sports programmes around, Darren Gough’s Cricket Show (Radio 5, Thursdays, 8-9.30 p.m.).

The show feels so fresh that it often sounds like Gough has just rushed from the pitch to the nearest studio, still in his whites. And this week he probably will be: he’s doing the show from the Scarborough cricket festival. The programme is a free-ranging mixture of cheery blokishness (to Graeme Hick: ‘Hi Hickie, it’s Goughie here.’ ‘Hi Goughie.’ ‘Hey, what about that pint you owe me?’), highly insightful chat about the big issues of the day — Vaughan’s resignation to Pietersen’s captaincy and whether it would affect his form, the impending ICC Champions’ Trophy debacle in Pakistan, the ups and downs of the England attack, and Lancashire’s unexpected release of Dominic Cork — all sprinkled with a high-octane set of guests and senior players who Gough can pull in with his huge reputation in the game. Recently there was the Independent’s Angus Fraser, who has played for England with Gough, Essex’s Alastair Cook (‘Hey Cookie, it’s Goughie’), Geraint Jones, and Australian fast-bowler Jason Gillespie (‘Hey Dizzy’, ‘Hey Goughie’), currently plying his trade in Glamorgan and the only tail-ender to score a double century in Test cricket which led to some excellent banter with Gough (highest Test score 65).

The format flirts with a dangerous mateyness that could begin to exclude the audience, but Gough’s warm and engaging personality tends to keep the chat always on the right side. Gough, unlike a lot of people from his home county, is happy to laugh at himself. On the other hand, what he does share with most Yorkshiremen is what you might call a forthright quality in his views. When the BBC first approached him last year with the idea for the show, their only anxiety was that as a current player he might not be willing to speak his mind. They needn’t have worried: and his fierce attacks on the Test selectors during the South Africa series this summer have been an absolute joy.

As Fraser points out, Gough is funny, likeable and has a huge love of the game. He is also a whole-hearted cricketer — strong, energetic, immensely hard-working. He has always been liked in the dressing-room, and that beams through the microphone. A huge media career clearly awaits, though maybe not till he’s picked up a few quid from the Indian Twenty20 bonanza next spring.

Finally, a last word on the splendours of the Olympics. If anyone is any doubt about the all-round magnificence of the mightily thighed über-cyclist Chris Hoy, try this exchange (and I’m indebted to Richard Moore, whose book about Hoy is published by HarperSport). Hoy is at a press conference in Beijing for Scottish journalists. Q: ‘In the last 24 hours everyone has been offering an opinion on Chris Hoy. But what does Chris Hoy think of Chris Hoy?’ Hoy: ‘Chris Hoy thinks that the day Chris Hoy refers to himself in the third person is the day Chris Hoy disappears up his own arse.’ A knighthood is surely not enough.

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