Jonathan Agnew is settling into an anecdote about Sir Geoffrey Boycott as the catering staff at the Multan stadium bring trays of rotis into the media lounge for lunch.
“I’ve done some terrible tricks on him you know, but the only time he got shirty, and he’ll read this, was when he said at the MCG in 2006 that [Agnew now breaks into his Boycott voice] ‘If that Andrew Symonds gets a hundred I’ll eat my hat.’
“I was on ABC at the time when Symonds smashed a huge six into the members stand to bring up his hundred and I said, ‘There it goes. I can see Geoffrey Boycott getting his salt and pepper out and getting stuck into his hat.’
“And I tell you, he got very cross about it. He made me rewind the tape from the day before just to prove he actually said it.”
We sit down to chat the day before the second Test in Multan that England would go on to lose to set up a series decider this week. Agnew, the former England cricketer, would have wanted them to win of course, but the journalist in him will relish the prospect of the series going to the wire, especially as the third Test in Rawalpindi will be his last as the BBC’s cricket correspondent.
Agnew is stepping back from his role after more than 30 years. At the age of 64 he is freeing himself of the on-call aspect of being a full-time correspondent – “No more abandoned shopping trolleys in Tescos,” he says – to concentrate solely on his role as lead commentator on Test Match Special.
“They need someone younger because the game’s changed a lot with franchise cricket and so on. If I’m honest, I’m not really interested in that and I don’t think my generation of cricket people generally are either so the BBC want someone who’s going to generate news and be interested in that side of things.”
The BBC is still to decide whether to replace Agnew and have a full-time cricket correspondent, a sign of it losing its place in the battle for rights, especially overseas tours. “I don’t think they’ll appoint another correspondent. I think they’ll wait and see, and they’ll dust me down for sort of an overview when, say, a captain goes, if somebody dies, those sorts of things, which is fine,” he says.
‘I’m a bridge between old days and now’
Agnew started with a dramatic Test – England-West Indies at Headingley in 1991 – and ends with the Bazballers in Pakistan at a ground where they hammered 500 in a day not that long ago. They could give him the perfect send-off.
He estimates he has covered more than 400 Tests and seen England win series in India and Australia, and win a World Cup final at Lord’s. All the while his beloved TMS has evolved with Agnew the soothing familiar voice binding it together. It is so familiar, you will probably read his quotes in this interview with his voice in your head.
“My role is to be a bridge between the old days of TMS and now. Brian Johnston, Fred Trueman and Trevor Bailey really set the tone and sort of invented cricket commentary. They set the whole business of it being like a combination of people but when you look back at photographs of those days, it was just a small group of middle to senior aged, white blokes. And now the programme has changed enormously, which is great.”
The box is very different now, the upper-class English voices of Johnston and Henry Blofeld replaced by a younger crowd, a more diverse reflection of society. Alex Hartley, the 31-year-old former England women’s bowler from Blackburn, and Aatif Nawaz, the British-Pakistani stand-up comedian, are with Agnew in Pakistan.
But however much personnel evolves, the TMS charms remain, mainly humour and playing gags on each other. Agnew joined the Barmy Army one day in Multan, replacing their trumpeter with his euphonium for a rendition of Jerusalem. A giant poster of scorer Andy Zaltzman looking like a cross between Lord Kitchener and Chairman Mao was pinned to the top tier of the main stand.
On air during the second Multan Test, Agnew was wondering who the Pakistan spinner Sajid Khan reminded him of. He settled on Errol Brown, lead singer of Hot Chocolate. Hartley missed the cultural reference. “Oh come on,” cajoled Agnew. “You know who he is… ‘You sexy thing’. No, no, not you,” he said to Hartley, who fell about laughing. Agnew grumbled about feeling old, summing up listeners thinking the same thing about themselves. “Well, we are Aggers,” chirped Zaltzman.
Agnew still listens back to his broadcasts. He is highly critical when he thinks standards are slipping. On a demanding live show he is constantly aware of balancing the jokes with the seriousness of the cricket and potential pitfalls of saying the wrong thing in an era where offence can easily be taken. Does he worry about being cancelled?
“Oh, yeah, it goes through my mind all the time. I had that conversation with my previous boss a couple of years ago. You are working without a script. You’re trying to be entertaining. And yeah, there are loads of groups of people out there who seem to want to be offended. Yeah, bring it on. ‘Ooh, I’m offended. I’m offended. Right – you’re cancelled.’ And the next day they move on to someone else.
“Especially when you get to your mid-60s, you’ve got to be much more careful about what you say and be more measured and I hope that doesn’t make people more cautious. With experience, I hope I can get myself out of a blind alley that when you’re inexperienced, perhaps you find yourself going down further. I also think I’m of an experience now where I could actually apologise quite easily if I said something I thought I shouldn’t have said, but I’d only say sorry if I felt that I shouldn’t have said it.
“But I’d like to think innuendo still has a place. In cricket how can you commentate without innuendo? The conversations with Tuffers [Phil Tufnell] about playing my euphonium and tonguing and fingering, you know? I mean, as long as you are obviously talking about euphonium playing then you’re all right. I think there’s always room for that.”
‘Most colourful commentator I worked with’
Many of his old comrades are gone now, the passage of time forcing changes on the line-up. There is a TMS group photograph taken at Trent Bridge in 1995 and only Agnew remains, along with Vic Marks, who now only makes occasional appearances as a summariser. Bailey, Trueman, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Bill Frindall and Tony Cozier have all died while Blofeld retired in 2017.
“Will there ever be another Henry Blofeld at the BBC? I don’t know. I probably doubt it,” says Agnew. “I just don’t think that person would probably get through any more, although you could argue that actually, his voice is different, is diverse, and he’s the most colourful, flamboyant, excitable commentator that I’ve ever worked with. I mean, he would bring any game of cricket to life. Henry actually gave my best bit of advice. He said, ‘Don’t copy anybody.’ And that was on my first day.”
Agnew is especially proud of the View from the Boundary interview slot and says the biggest difference now from when he started is a harder news edge to the programme. TMS is expected to lead comment on stories, it is not just a jolly chat about the cricket. Five Live, the BBC website, as well as social media, have all developed during his time at the corporation.
“There weren’t mobile phones so that’s been the biggest change since when I started doing this job. There was a main sports desk on Radio 2 in the early evening. There was the Today programme in the mornings, and that was it. There were no early bulletins or every quarter-of-an-hour score updates and stuff. And so it has become a much more news-driven job.”
We talk not about Agnew’s commentary highlights – the famous ‘legover’, the 2019 World Cup final, Stokes at Headingley – because he will continue in that role and he thinks TMS listeners will not notice the difference when he steps back from being correspondent. Instead it is the breaking stories he wants to talk about: Mike Atherton and dirt in the pocket, interviewing Nelson Mandela, the Hansie Cronje fixing scandal, the Allen Stanford fiasco and Jonny Bairstow’s stumpgate incident that brought together sporting action, news and the morality of cricket in the theatre of a Lord’s Ashes Test. Does he believe in the spirit of cricket?
“Always, yes. Mankadding? I just think it’s disgusting, and I’ve warned the ICC about this. The last World Cup, the T20 World Cup, I phoned them up. I said, ‘I do not want to be the commentator that commentates on a Mankad to win a World Cup final, because that’s what’s coming.’ I think it’ll happen one day.”
‘Benball rather than Bazball’
Agnew’s wife, Emma, is joining him in Rawalpindi, not because it is his last Test but so she can experience Pakistan. Life on the road covering cricket is privileged but takes a toll, opening it to family can help all cope with the time away. “You know, it’s a selfish job,” he says. “It’s a massive commitment to have done it for 30-odd years. It’s probably about 12 or 13 Christmases and most of my children’s birthdays I’ve missed.”
Agnew is hitting his stride. He talks about Bazball. “It should be Benball really,” he says, praising Stokes for his originality and drive. He warns about the power of India, particularly apt because we are in Pakistan where facilities are impoverished and there are worries they will lose hosting rights of the Champions Trophy next year for political reasons. “It’d be just so sad if India can’t bring themselves to play a few games [in Pakistan]. That’s all they’re asking. Is it really that much? There’s a very fine line between patriotism and jingoism.”
He has tired of white-ball cricket, which is one of the reasons for the job shift. “My own view is I think people will get bored of T20 cricket if it’s a non-stop diet of a games. It’s too easy for administrators to knock out another T20 tournament, sell it and flog it. And that’s the real concern. If the current administrators really do damage to Test cricket’s long-term prospects that’s an act of criminality.”
Agnew believes the current team is the most approachable he has worked with in 30 years and he is aware not to grumble too much about the old days. “I remember playing and Fred Trueman would say something, and I think, ‘Daft old so and so’. A lot of the game has changed. And then, on the other hand, a lot of the game hasn’t changed. When Jimmy [Anderson] was with us last summer, I had some really, really nice discussions with him about swing bowling in the bar in the evening.
“I was a very poor man’s Jimmy Anderson when I played. I tried to run in swinging the ball. But I never even considered the skills that he’s got. Wouldn’t even have thought that it was possible to land the ball not quite on the seam. If you did that when I was playing for Leicester you would get a bollocking for putting a mark on the ball. Wobble seam, all those innovations, I love it.”
Sir Geoffrey will be nodding along at the bit about Agnew being a poor man’s Anderson – their ribbing on air would often revolve around his “roobish” bowling – and they remain friends, still in contact as Boycott recovers from his latest bout of cancer.
“The last thing I did with him was for Scarborough Cricket Club’s 175th anniversary. It was the week before he went public about his latest cancer. We got up there, we did an hour, and he was absolutely brilliant. He knew that he was going to be diagnosed with cancer a couple of days later. But he was in his professional, in-the-spotlight, sort of mode.
“I mean, I love Geoffrey. And he’ll always end a phone call saying ‘love you lots’. It’s just a Geoffrey thing but going back to school, I would never, ever, have thought I would bowl at Geoffrey Boycott or have such a very close and genuinely respectful relationship with him. Yeah, I do miss working with Geoffrey, absolutely.”
Lunch is ready and Agnew has to conduct his pre-match interview with Stokes. “If you’re an avid cricket listener, you might notice a difference,” he says about his next career step. “But then if you’re a TMS listener, you won’t notice any difference at all. And that programme is the most important thing to me.”
Agnew on his career highlights
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Dirt in the pocket, 1994
It was the first big news story I had to cover, and probably the first time listeners realised that there was more to being BBC correspondent than trying to be amusing on Test Match Special. I think I said Mike Atherton’s position was ‘untenable’. With experience now I’d probably handle it differently.
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South Africa readmission, 1991
I went to India to cover their first match back in Calcutta. I remember interviewing Clive Rice, who I knew very well. It was a big huddle and Clive had a very soft voice and I lost my interview. So I saw him in the hotel a couple hours later and he agreed to do it again. That’s when he gave me the great line of, “Now I know how Neil Armstrong felt when he walked on the moon,” which he hadn’t said in the press conference.
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Meeting Mother Teresa, 1991
We got invited to Mother Teresa’s when the team were shown around her missionary [in Calcutta], which was a bizarre experience. She actually lost her cool a bit because her place was invaded. There’s a very nice picture of her handing me a little prayer slip but actually she’s trying to shoo me out of the room.
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Interviewing Nelson Mandela, 1994
I said to the press man in Soweto, ‘What chance possibly of interviewing Nelson Mandela?’ thinking he was going to say zero. Suddenly there he was. It was a packed situation, I knew if I left any pause, others would jump in. It is comfortably the worst interview I’ve ever done. He spoke so slowly and deliberately I thought he’d finished his sentences. Fortunately, no tape has survived.
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Hansie Cronje affair, 2000
I knew Hansie quite well, because his sister was married to Gordon Parsons, my old bowling mate and flatmate at Leicester. I went to Cape Town to cover his case, which was incredibly dramatic. I sat next to his father, who I’d worked with quite a lot. He used to commentate with us on the SABC radio. And one of my main memories of that trial was actually him just shaking his head. He had no idea what had been going on.
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Allen Stanford, 2008
I was horrified that day when he came to Lord’s and landed his helicopter. It was just horrible. I interviewed him and I thought, ‘If you’re this rich, why does your blazer not fit?’ He had this massive, ill-fitting blazer. He also called me ‘Johnny’, which I don’t like very much, ‘Johnny, Johnny’. Ghastly.
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Jonny Bairstow and ‘stumpgate’, 2023
If you look at it really carefully he grounded his foot, he scraped his foot in his mark, then he walks out. And there’s an angle that shows the umpire handing the bowler his sweater. I just thought Pat Cummins missed the biggest opportunity that an Australian captain has had for years to bury the ‘Same old Aussies, always cheating’ chant you still hear.
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