On Annual Leave with Mark Butcher

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0:35BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to Tailenders. Hello and thank you for having us on Tailenders. And ironically, I don't have a guitar on me, Greg, because I know we're joined by another cricketer slash musician. I wonder if he's brought his guitar with him. Well, it's me, GeForce Greg James. We have Felix White, who's currently rehearsing for Maccabee's show. Yes, Maccabee's show starts Sunday and move through for the week. Thank you for the tailenders getting in touch, saying they're wearing tailenders T-shirts at the gigs next week. Love you. We don't have a Jimmy Anderson as yet, but we do have a professional cricketer turned commentator, turned pundit, turned host, turned detective on the show today.

1:25it's someone that we love with all our hearts it is Mark Butcher Mark Butcher welcome back to Tailenders hey you guys how are you very very good to see you both especially Felix looking at post-rehearsal sweaty which is kind of alluring state well we should actually I should really I should sort of back away for a little bit because you should you know rock star to rock star you should be talking about methods you know rehearsal things preparations for shows how is it going butch in your world have you got a guitar near you not near me no no they're all they're all locked away in a vault at the moment as i'm currently between assignments um but felix is felix is rocking hard right now as you can tell so all good yeah ma 'am yeah i'm i'm feeling good it's good to be good to be doing it again man i feel really uh i've been saying to everyone butch i forgot what the um i know you know this feeling so first time i ever actually first time we met The first cricket thing I ever did was a conversation with you about life after cricket, which we did in a pub, which was one of the best chats I've ever had.

2:27We were talking about your life reinvention after playing and stuff. It was an amazing conversation. But I've been thinking about that chat a lot recently because I thought I was never going to do all the Maccabees things again. So having that flood of endorphins and adrenaline of like being able to experience it again has been such an amazing feeling. But do you remember that chat, Butch? I do. That was such a brilliant conversation. In the pub, it kind of went to places I don't think I've ever gone to before about my sort of life and career with anybody. So obviously whatever they were serving in there was pretty good stuff.

3:01But, yeah, I remember it being sort of blisteringly honest and we were kind of back and forth with the sort of the trials and tribulations of both of our professions and the constantly being on the road thing and what that does to you inside and out. Yeah. So yeah, it was cool. It was very good. The thing that really stood out to me at that time, sorry not to like, I know we were going to get into something other than this, Greg, but the thing that really stood out to me at that time, and loads of people mentioned it afterwards, is you saying that you were relieved when you had to finish playing cricket because you felt like you'd created a version of yourself that wasn't actually you that needed to, you needed, required to compete at a highest level.

3:41And so it felt like a relief when you stopped. Yeah, I don't remember that. Yeah, and that was about, because obviously I continued playing for another five years or five or six years after retiring, well, not retiring, but sort of not playing for England ever again. And, yeah, I vividly remember that conversation and remember that feeling as well, which is not to say, I mean, again, you look back on it again, you look back looking back and think that perhaps, you know, given a couple of years out of it to sort yourself out and maybe have another go wouldn't have been a bad thing. but by then I was far too old and fat and so that was the end of it.

4:18But, you know, it was, yeah, absolutely right. I'd kind of, we were talking, just funny enough, before we pressed record we were talking about the Oasis gigs and little by little sort of being there, having come out of it as a surprise anthem out of their sort of back catalogue about it being perhaps about his divorce and all this kind of stuff and there was a hell of a lot of that going on. I went through a divorce while I was in the middle of my England career and the sort of aftermath of all of that kind of stuff. So it was all very much tied up in then what came afterwards and my sort of second coming in the test side, where I was basically just not giving a stuff about anything or anybody and just trying to have fun, which I kind of did, perhaps to the detriment of my eventual England career.

5:03But there you go. That's that 170, isn't it? That's the big 170 that you scored in the second part of your career for England. Yeah. Yeah, man. So there was a lot in that innings. There was a lot of emotion, a lot of things to get out. Catharsis. Well, there was a lot in that conversation with Felix. I don't know about the... I can't remember that far back to the innings. If you can dig that up somewhere, you know, it'd be quite an interesting read. So if it's not opening the batting for England again, you have gone back into cricket in this way, that you've relived or reappraised a lot of the stuff that you went through as a player with this incredible Hansi Cronje documentary.

5:42So this is part of the BBC Sounds series, Sports Strangest Crimes. And it actually appeared on the Tailenders feed last week. So loads of Tailenders have been messaging us about it saying, oh, my God, what a story. They knew bits about it. A lot of people just were completely new to the whole thing. You're so good on it, Butch. It's really brilliant. Listen, I binged the whole thing yesterday. I binged it all because I was like, oh, I need to get and listen to this anyway because I love this story. But I thought I knew a lot about it. But it's clear that when you're doing it, you learn a lot that you didn't know as well.

6:17And you were there at the time. You were chatting to him. You were in the dressing rooms with him. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing came about how I ended up sort of fronting the whole thing. I was simply contacted by Crowd Network, one of the sort of major podcast producers. And they said, you know, you played in the game back in 2000 at Centurion, the match where sort of Hansi's world and the facade around him fell apart. You know, we like your stuff on various other things. Would you come and host this for me? I didn't really give it too much thought. So, yeah, yeah. Saw what they were playing.

6:54I went, yeah, OK, do it. Really? Yeah. Wow. So in the course of it, it was extraordinary. The whole process was extraordinary because like you, there was so much about the story. You kind of, everybody knows the nuts and bolts, right? So there's a match, England versus South Africa. The series is over. South Africa have won 2-0, but there's one game to go, the fifth test at Centurion. And basically, we start the match, South Africa batting, and then it rains, and it rains, and it rains. it's biblical for three days, three and a half days. And so we turn up on day five of the Test match. And as has happened many, many times, thousands of times before, probably mainly in county cricket, back in the days of three-day games, an offer came down while we were out there in the field.

7:41South Africa is still only six down, I think, in their first inning. So the game's going absolutely nowhere. There's plenty of England fans, as there always are when we go on tour. and the ground is kind of, you know, partially full of people who sort of turned up, God knows why. And a message comes down from the dressing room. Would you guys be interested in sort of, you know, forfeiting a couple of innings and setting up a match here? And that's how the whole thing starts. What would follow in terms of the match? We get an incredible offer. I mean, it's the most ridiculous offer of all time.

8:15250 or something, 254 runs in 75 overs or something. on a pitch that's barely been touched. You know, it's been undercover for however it was flat to start with and it was still flat on day five. And so, you know, I mean, the course of the negotiations were extraordinary in themselves. You know, Nasser Hussein, who was the Indian captain at the time, at first said no. He offered something like 270 or 280 in 75, 80 overs to chase it down and Nasser just said no and walked away. Hansi Cronje then comes back again and basically says, well, what do you want? You know, we'll give you whatever you like.

8:50just to make a game of this. And so on the face of it, everybody thinks, well, everybody in the ground, us, a few of the South Africans weren't wild about it because, you know, they didn't want to lose a test. 3-0 was better than or 2-0 was better than 2-1. And, of course, they would have to go out and bowl, which nobody wanted to do last day of a 25-day series. And everybody's happy because, you know, the crowd get to see a contest at the end of it. And in the end, we win the game. And that's the nuts and bolts of it. One or two people, Michael Holding in particular, who you'll hear on the podcast at the time, said that this is, you know, it's ridiculous.

9:24This isn't Test cricket and there's something shady going on. But that wasn't the overriding feeling at the time. So let's just wind back to contextualise Hansi Cronje a bit with tail enders that don't know much about him. This guy was a mega star. The first episode of the podcast is called Bigger Than Becks, right? So he was, in terms of South African sport, not just South African cricket, South African sport, he was pretty much top of the tree. He was Ernie L's level. He was friends with Nelson Mandela. This guy was a national hero. He helped unite South Africa through sport. He was used as sort of the poster boy.

10:03He was enormous. And then a few years later, he was banned for life for match fixing from this game. So this fall from grace, it's unprecedented, really. I mean, that's one of the great ups really of a career isn't it and that's something that you found really interesting as you as you went through there's a bit in the podcast where you said why was he so stupid why did he do why he didn't need to do this it wasn't like he wasn't a struggling player for a bit of cash but what what was it that you think that was that was in him that made him want to do this well i mean all of the the people that we spoke to you know we spoke like i had an incredible couple of hours with Alan Donald, who was a childhood friend of Hansi.

10:45So they grew up together in Bloemfontein. So from talking to him, from talking to journalists who covered South African cricket for many, many years, Neil Manthorpe is sort of writ large all over the whole thing. Rory Stain is sort of like his head of security in South African cricket, who kind of spent a lot of time with him, was very close to him. They all said that the sort of fatal flaw with Hansi was that he was tight as all hell and would do anything for a buck, would go to the opening of an envelope to make a few quid. Like Sharky. Yeah. You know, he just... Sharky Cronier. If there was a few quid in it or if he could save a few quid, for example, in terms of personality, as pro players, we get given shed loads of stuff, whether it be cricket bats, pads, all of the cricket kit, of course, but then anything else that goes with it, sort of leisure wear and all the rest of it.

11:41And there are bundles and bundles of these things that turn up at the beginning of every season or the beginning of every tour. And you've always got more than you can use. And the story has it that Hansi, at the end of a cricket season in South Africa, would be selling the stuff that he'd got for free to the young players in the dressing room for free state or the youngsters who literally couldn't afford it and he could very easily just give it to them, but he would sell it to them. He would save his per diems on tour. And this is a guy who used to run sort of 5K time trials with weight strapped to his ankles.

12:19He was absolutely kind of obsessed with fitness and drove the South African team in that fashion in order to become, which was his aim and his ambition was to make them the number one team in the world across all formats. Well, I suppose it's 50 overs and test matches back in those days. But he'd go and he'd get a KFC or a McDonald's or something in order to save his per diem's cash that he'd get on tours and things. It was just like this really weird relationship that he had with cash. Wow. I mean, the other side of it, I guess, is that there's a slight... What comes over from talking to people about him as a person was that there was a kind of slight or quite a heavy amount of manipulation that he would use.

13:09And as his status grew, you know, going through his leadership, he was captain of Free State at sort of, I don't know, 20 or something, captain of South Africa at 24. And as his status grew, his use of that status and of the fact that he was so widely respected and the fact that people would follow him and do anything for him, he would then kind of turn that around a little bit and use it to get people to do things for him. Not just the match-fixing type of thing or whatever, but just other stuff where he would coerce people and use his strength of personality in order to kind of bend people and things to his will.

13:48It's so Shakespearean, isn't it? Because there's obviously the context of it is that he'd been given, because Nelson Mandela was very vocally supportive, hansi wasn't he put him on that pedestal whatever you want to call it platform so globally you had that feeling about hansi connie being someone who was thinking about holistic and think about all kinds of people i mean it was like this the global opinion in him it was so different than the private going yeah i mean he was just he was a statesman and very very religious also the first time well the only time really that i i spent any sort of time with him and that was also in a crowd of other people so it wasn't one-on-one um was on the the tour that south africa had of england in 1998 which was england's first five test match series win in something like 13 years or something like that yeah um and and during that period of time i'll always remember this was a lot of the south african players himself john t rhodes darryl cunnel and i don't know if andrew hudson was on the trip he might not have been um but anyway they they have they would wear these these wrist bands and it used to say WWJD on the wristbands and it meant what would Jesus do and so there was a really strong kind of faith element to him and to South African cricket or certain parts of it anyway and so you add all of these things together this phenomenal rise this handsome you know good looking absolutely everything going for him guy who's very very strong in terms of his faith and all the rest of it and then you know the most the most kind of it's almost petty you know yeah for the for the amount of for the in the initial part the amount of money that he received from a bookmaker called Aaron Marlon's Aaron Stamm the guy who kind of who planted the seed with Hansi about the idea of of setting this match up at Centurion and and again just I'm not giving away any spoilers here but the point of the point of the the money and and the the bet the gamble the behind the scenes setup of all of this was that whatever happened the match couldn't be a draw as you think about it it's five five day game rain for three and a half days the most likely result is that the game is going to be a draw and so it didn't matter to hansi whether or not south africa won or lost that the match just could not end in a draw and you know his wife got a leather jacket and he got 50 000 us or some some sort of paltry sum and for that he threw his entire life and legacy and everything away there's something i guess there's something deeper going on with those top level sports people where maybe you have to be a maniac and you're always trying to find a new thing you're trying you're tempted by a new high or like to find a new level or something or something to game i don't know what it might be but what i really loved about the way you presented it is that you're fair throughout it, but you give your opinion on it.

16:43But also you do, I can hear the drums in the background. Tell Sam to shut the f*** up, will you? I'll hear the drums, Fernando. I'm just going to shut the door quickly. That's Sam, the tail ender's drummer, as well as the Maccabees' drummer. But anyway, what I really liked about it is that you did, you gave us the both sides sort of opinions, profiles of him. You've got this access to Alan Donald, who is one of our favourite cricketers of all time. So you've got Alan Donald, who I didn't know he was childhood friends with Hansi, But you've also got the other side of it, which is, I don't know, the guy at the end of the final episode who calls him a psychopath.

17:13So you've got everything. You've got the extremes and everything in between, really. But can we talk about Alan Donald and how that came about? Because he's so close. He was so close to Hansi Cronje. They used to sort of have family barbecues and play rugby in the back garden together when they were kids. That's a great get for the podcast to hear from him. How did that come about? Basically, I guess that was part of the reason why they reached out to me to do it in the first place. I was in South Africa on the SA20. Alan and I go back a long way from basically from him getting me out a lot back in the late 90s.

17:45We need to talk about, I want to talk to you about that after we've done the series. What is it like to face Alan Donald? But that's next. Okay, firstly this. It was good fun and I'll leave it at that. And so I was in South Africa at the time and I just texted him. I had his number and I said to the producers, well, I'll drop him a line and see what he says. and he came back almost immediately and said yeah sure so yeah we sat down but i'm the same room i'm in now he was he was at home just come off the golf course in in parlor i think we had two hours two and a half hours where we got very down and dirty with the whole thing wow i mean his there were times where where both of us are kind of we're both sort of choking up and during the course of the interview because to me and and again i did i there was a lot about this story that i didn't know and i was kind of gathering in the information as we went along and particularly when it came to speaking to alan so i was reacting entirely off his tone of voice and what he was telling me there were certain points during the course of the the story's arc that i that i that i knew about for example he didn't play in the centurion game he'd been brilliant all the way through that five test match series but was left out exhausted injured whatever it was at the end and and there was just this sound in his voice and i'm thinking to myself there is there's an enormous amount of regret in him over this whole thing and so i just put it i said by the sound of it mate if you and correct me if i'm wrong i'm saying i reckon you still think that had you been there had you been playing in that game or if you'd been around on any of the occasions because there was more than one.

19:22I mean, the pod goes into stuff that happened four years, three, four years before then, sort of a forerunner to the thing that eventually brought him down, that he would still be here. And anyway, listen to it. It's something else. Wow. I actually haven't listened to it and I cannot wait to hear it. And it's so interesting for someone like that, because there were a lot of tailenders that maybe were too young when this happened but i remember it happening in in real time and the really really interesting thing mark in lots of ways is how it was really celebrated wasn't it at the time i remember the innings i don't know if you guys were celebrating it but i remember back home it being like goes back to that shakespearean thing he was really praised universally maybe michael holding wasn't but i remember all the commentary commentary pundits the newspapers were saying that he'd done a really great thing for cricket.

20:15Well, I mean, the thing is he had. I mean, on the face of it, he had. I said it used to happen all the time in matches where there simply wasn't enough time for a two-innings match to conclude. So the captains would get together, come up with a deal and you'd play the game. In all of those circumstances, the draw was still available. You know, if a team felt that they were too stretched in trying to chase down whatever the target was that they could shut things down and try and play out for the draw um so it never happened before in test matches that that that scenario had never happened before and has never happened again but south africa had won i'll reiterate this south africa won the series 2-0 so they were not putting the series in jeopardy by doing this they were simply on the face of it hansi crony was sort of saying here you go here's a bit of entertainment for for the people that have come to watch the beautiful setting of centurion with the with the the chalets and the barbecues going all the rest of it and yet no and yet yeah but the the detail of that match is really interesting though and you do go into that and this this isn't giving too much away because the whole bit of storytelling in the podcast is is amazing but it does become farcical when it looks like england aren't going to make the total and he brings himself onto bowl he then bowls like the second string spinner is that right yeah as well and he like he sort of it does sound it sounds like a comedy sketch where he's like oh no oh don't hit me for six and that but what do you remember because there's a great archive before the game of what the commentators were saying oh this is a really brave thing for him to do this is really exciting this is what quick is all about but afterwards was how how much immediate suspicion was there well i i I remember being sat on the balcony, you know, watching the run chase.

22:06Michael Vaughan and Alex Stewart put on a really good partnership of 80 or something to get us sort of like right back in the hunt or sort of ahead in the game. But then they both got out and it just, you know, it looked as though, I can't remember whether it was instructions or whatever, but we just kind of, the run chase stalled. And then Hansi brought in, he hadn't bowled all series. He came on the bowl. Peter Strider came on to bowl. and suddenly we got 25 in three overs or something and everything was back rolling on again. And that seemed odd because to me, South Africa didn't have to, there was nothing in them trying to make us go for it.

22:45It wasn't as though there were points on the line as you would see in the county championship. And it was important that the team who were bowling at the time had to get the win, absolutely had to win. It wasn't that. It was just that the game couldn't be a draw. But we, of course, we didn't know that at the time. So there were certain points during the run chase, actually live, where I'm sat there on the balcony with Athens or something. We're kind of looking at each other going, well, that was, I wonder why has he done that? You know, anyway, nevermind. Hey-ho, we'll keep chasing and go on and win the game.

23:16And it wasn't a case of why have they done that? There's something dodgy about this. It was just kind of like, this is a very odd captaincy, you know, right. What was your first meeting with Hansi Cronje and what did you immediately, what were your spidey senses telling you about him? Okay, so playing against South African teams and him. So again, first time for me was, it would have been 1998, home series in 1998. I thought the guy was like, it was some sort of humorless automaton, you know, who captained a little bit by numbers and you could kind of, you could almost guess what was coming next.

23:54You know, it would be Donald and Pollock to start with and they'd bowl for an hour and somebody else would bowl for an hour. You know what I mean? There didn't ever seem to be any great sort of thinking going on. However, the guys that I spoke to sort of said that that was absolutely not the case, but he kind of portrayed himself in this very sort of robotic way out on the field. And then I actually met him in a social surrounding during the course of that series. So again, some of the younger listeners might not remember the game, but the passage of play in it has kind of gone down in cricketing legend, the Alan Donald versus Michael Atherton duel at Trent Bridge.

24:32Don't, don't. Yeah, something astonishing. I think we think about it all the time. I mean, honestly, there were sofas in that old home dressing room at Trent Bridge. I was first out, I think, because NASA would have been batting at three. Yeah, so that's right. And there was a period there where I was literally behind the sofa watching it sort of peeking up out to see it out the window it was the most astonishing 45 minutes to an hour of cricket that I've seen to this day I think still it was just incredible so anyway we win that we end up winning the test match athurs is 90 odd not out stewie hits the winning runs and we level the series 1-1 and series between England and South Africa were tended to be quite spicy it was my first taste of it but they kind of you know there was There was no love lost and there was quite a lot of, you know, flying around and some of it not particularly pleasant.

25:25But at the end of that test match, bearing in mind we got one test match to go, Headingley was the last, Hansi and Alan Donald appeared in the home dressing room carrying a few sponsors' brews. Completely out of the blue. This hadn't been a thing throughout the course of the series and generally speaking would only happen last test. And they popped in, you know, Alan having pretty much done his nuts in the game, was spent and could barely get up the stairs. And he and Hansy came in and they shared a few beers around. I think Athers was still there, Nassau was still there, Alec was definitely there because the rest of the guys would have packed up their kit and gone to go and play county cricket the next day.

26:06So there was nobody around. So there was about five or six of us in the dressing room. And Hansy, he was warm. He was funny. He was everything that I hadn't imagined that he would be during that course of time. And, of course, we all knew Alan because we played against him when he was at Warwickshire and all that kind of stuff. So he was much more familiar to all the English players than perhaps some of the others. And I always, always stood out, always remembered that because I couldn't – because given what happened in the next test, the test match at Henningley, which was the most rancorous and spiteful and nasty test match I think I ever played in.

26:43Brilliant. And we end up winning, we win the game, win the series 2-1, you know, awesome, fabulous stuff. Yeah, great. But so given what happened afterwards, that always stuck out to me because I could never to this day work out why that happened. But I'm incredibly grateful that it did. It's like it's five different people, actually. You would meet a completely different person, which I guess is true of all of us in different ways. But the degrees of it are wild, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But that goes back to the manipulator. as was mentioned in the podcast. Yeah, potentially. He knows how to play people.

27:18A disarming kind of guy. He could kind of push people's buttons and make you see or feel what he wanted you to, perhaps. I mean, I'm speculating a little bit there and I try and stay away from doing that in the pod and in life in general. But yeah, I mean, it feels as though that's not a million miles away from the truth. Am I right saying that when the plane crash happens and he dies tragically young, that he's a sort of a hero in South Africa or a martyr of some description. I don't know if that ruins the pogg. I remember hearing that that's how it ended, that he was thought of as a hero of some sort in South Africa.

27:54Yeah, I mean, there's still quite an uneasy relationship with his memory in South Africa. There are some that, you know, to this day, that still would see him as nothing but a complete and utter traitor to South African sport and to the country and to what the country was trying to achieve coming out of apartheid and the strides that the country was hoping and trying to make. And there are others who are very forgiving of what he'd done. We sort of touch on it a little bit in terms of the Christianity, the strong faith that runs through South African society and the idea that everybody deserves a second chance.

28:29And there are even some who've shrugged at the whole thing and said, well, you know, what's fixing the odd cricket match or coercing young players to underperform in matches so that you can earn a few quid? You know, and the swings in terms of how his memory is looked upon are pretty wild as well as his personality. They sort of veer heavily from one side to the other. I found that a really interesting bit, which I didn't know about. and I'm going to sort of do some more reading about, but the idea of it being a very forgiving, very sort of Christian upbringing that he had in Blomfontein, which is a very conservative, religious part of the world.

29:11And those things, if you look at it one way, are in such conflict with what he ended up doing. But also if people go, oh, well, you know, we're all susceptible to sinning and making mistakes and stuff. It's a really interesting, it's just a really interesting story. and there's so much going on. Butch, it is brilliant and I urge all tailenders to listen to it. You know what? I'm going to sack off rehearsals, actually. You're not going to listen to this now. You should. It's something way better. Yeah, can I have a bit more Butch in my ears, please? Yeah, I can't put you up. Maccabee's down, mop and drop.

29:50Butch, thanks so much and I hope you have a good rest of the summer. What have you made of the summer so far? You talked about it being quite a ferocious battle that test at Headingley against the South Africans. What did you make of the drama between England and India this summer? What did you make of it? Did you enjoy it? It was fantastic. I certainly wouldn't say that it was spiteful and nasty. It was just great drama. Quite fun, wasn't it? Yeah, healthy competition. The players were all very capable and very able at the end of it to kind of look one another in the eye and hug and say, well played.

30:24I don't think there was any sort of hard feeling left over at the end of it. But what you saw was two teams going hell for leather at one another. And the end result was probably about right, I think. I mean, India could have won the series 3-1. England could have won it 3-1. But either team could have won it 5-0. You know what I mean? It was that type of contest. It was funny. It was almost, Butch, can I just say, it was almost, I might have been listening to too many podcasts, but it was a little suspicious, do you not think? Oh, interesting. Interesting. They threw the match. If that transpires, and I'm willing and able to roll out the roll once again.