Mr Paparazzi. Darryn Lyons
Despite not having a great deal of natural talent, Stewie and Cros loved the game and were the heartbeat of the team. Both took some unbelievable catches. They made a major contribution to the social side of the team – especially Stewie, who was a real party animal. Ian Walker was also part of the drinking hard core and we would always be up until God knows when. The landlords of the pubs would often just leave us to it and go to bed. We would calculate what we’d drunk and pay up the next day. Our bar bills were enormous.
Bill Greaves was a big part of the team, a real posh old-stager. He would turn up in his blazer and whites, smoking a Hamlet cigar. Being more laid-back, he didn’t really approve of my bombastic approach to the sport, but I guess he appreciated my contribution to the scorecard. Generally I would bat at three and either make nothing or a lot. I admired Bill for getting out there and doing it at his age. He never missed a match and we had some good nights together, though Dave Williams was forever acting as mediator between us. I played to win and sledged like hell. I enjoyed fielding at silly mid-off, a great sledging position. Talk to anyone who plays polo with me now – nothing has changed. I’m sure that on occasion I pissed off the whole team, and I know that Dave sometimes struggled to arrange the fixture for the following year due to my outspokenness and constant sledging. Once we got to the pub, though, everything was forgotten. In fact, I regularly became the life and drunken soul of the party.
There was always something to amuse us on those trips. In one game, all of the opposing team had the same surname! I remember one legendary match in particular that took place in Somerset. The Friday was fairly typical. We had lunch in the local – a ploughman’s lunch and a few pints – and then took to the field for the twenty-over match. I was on fire and bowled my heart out. The Saturday match, coming as it did after a heavy night of drinking, was truly exhausting. The pitch was on a plateau at the top of a massive hill. It looked like Robin Hood’s hat with the top cut off and you felt like you were playing in the clouds. If anyone really got hold of a delivery, an unlucky fielder – usually me – was looking at an 80-metre run! I went up and down the hill a few times that day. It was more like mountain trekking than playing cricket.
On the Sunday we were in illustrious company. The celebrated British author of Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee, owned the pitch at Sheepscomb on which we were playing, and he turned up to watch. Laurie had built a wonderful pavilion and pitch, all for the love of the game. I had no idea who he was at the time. It had been pissing with rain and was a really sticky wicket. When it was our turn to bat, I made a combative eighty while the others dropped like flies around me. As I left the field, Laurie kept hailing me as ‘The champion!’ and told me he was going to write a book about me. I loved that guy, he was fantastic, so eloquent – a real eccentric, loving life, with his cane and his young-looking girlfriend hanging off his arm. By the end of the evening people were claiming that his next novel would be called ‘XXXX with Darryn’.
Being at The Mail gave me the chance to witness the greatest tournament of another, very different sport. I had covered plenty of football matches since arriving in the UK, but getting sent to the Italia 90 World Cup was a real coup – and a bit of a fluke. Jim Hutchison and Brian Bould were initially covering the event, but Brian had to come back to the UK as his father was ill. As ever, I was the first guy to pick up the phone in the photographers’ room. I was told to get the next flight to Italy and couldn’t believe my luck. Giddy up!
This was it – the pinnacle of achievement for a photographer, as far as I was concerned. It was a privilege to be trusted to cover such a massive event. I’d covered a lot of big sports events in Australia – VFL (now AFL) grand finals and the like – but this was huge. The passion aroused at the World Cup is amazing. I don’t think even winning the Ashes compares to its power, and I’m a cricket nut. The first match I covered wasn’t exactly the greatest in the World Cup’s illustrious history – Argentina became the first team ever to fail to score in a final and were beaten by West Germany due to a late penalty converted by Andreas Brehme. But the buzz was unbelievable.
As well as covering the matches, we were there to cover the England camp. Everywhere they went, we went. There was a press conference or story every five minutes around this team, which boasted some truly great players and characters – Lineker, Gascoigne and Shilton among them. It was very much a news trip, not a ‘Let’s stitch up the players’ trip. Though England played well, the only thing they won was the Fair Play trophy, which was no big deal in my eyes. There was only one trophy that counted, after all. The team’s final match was the third and fourth place playoff, and they went down 2–1 to the host nation.
I was the packhorse on that trip, the ‘dev and wire’ man (developing film and transmitting the images). My role was to make shuttle runs from the press room to Jim at pitchside and send stuff out to the paper as fast as I could. There was a lot of pressure. Everything had to be perfect, and we tested everything twice. I had an enormous amount of gear to carry with me. There were some consolations – the women were unbelievable. The World Cup hostesses were everywhere and they were stunning, breathtaking and, above all, willing!
Our brief gave us the opportunity to travel around Italy and to see its cities. Over there, going to a football match is like going to a royal ball. The stadiums were stunning, some even featured marble stairs, and the crowd were elegantly turned out and classy – not something you associated with British football fans. Some of the women were wearing ball gowns! In Bari, a couple got married in the centre circle before the match. The atmosphere in the stadiums was always electric; I would get chills up and down my spine just from plugging into that excitement.
Of course, the ultimate experience was the final. Being in Rome for a World Cup final: what could be better? I felt like Caesar in the Colosseum watching that match. They used to feed Christians to the lions here, and now the Lyons was a photographer there! The roar of the crowd was unbelievable. After the final whistle heralded the West German victory, I just slumped back in my chair, worn out by the sheer emotion and intensity of it all.
‘Under the coat I had a metre-long 600 mm lens with a doubler’
At The Mail I had access to the top news events and celebrities, and my work began to be recognised. On one of the most memorable nights in my career I witnessed the lights going out for one of the world’s greatest-ever performers. The paper had received a tip that Rudolph Nureyev, the legendary ballet dancer, didn’t have long to go and I was sent to Paris in October 1992 with Rebecca Hardy, a real go-getter, great foot-in-the-door merchant and brilliant writer. Another Mail photographer was with us, Brian Bould, who opted to be the processing man. The show that was Nureyev’s true swan song, La Bayadère, was to take place at the Palais Garnier theatre.
Luckily it was a cold night when I strolled up to the theatre in my trench coat, because under the coat I had a metre-long 600 mm lens with a doubler. My excitement faded a little when I discovered that Europe’s most feared paparazzo, Daniel Angeli, was already there on the job, but I kept going and got past security somehow. I walked up to the private boxes at the back, from where I could see the auditorium. Over to one side, Nureyev was slumped in the box nearest the stage, surrounded by close friends.
Needing a vantage point, I seized the nettle and, after knocking politely, barged into the box opposite Nureyev’s. It turned out to be filled with a Japanese delegation from Toyota who spoke not a word of English between them. Courteously they all got out of my way, bowing madly and chattering excitedly as I set up my gear. It was like National Lampoon Goes to the Ballet. They must have thought I was very important. The way I pulled the lens out, though, it could have been a bazooka!
There was no light at all in the theatre, so I was using 1600 ASA film pushed to 18 000. Brian was going to need to be on top of his game to get anything from the shot I was attempting to pull off. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing through the lens, and kept shooting. Just as I decided to leave, Nureyev left too. Expecting security to get me on the way out, I rushed off and palmed the film to Rebecca. She managed to get it out to Brian, who processed it in our hotel room. As I left the theatre I walked out past Angeli (who had missed the shot) and into the street. I realised that Nureyev’s car was about to come past me and, with clinical precision, whipped my camera out and nailed him again with a perfect car shot. That was the