Reverse sweep

So it’s going to be like that, is it? Go on then, have your excitement. Just don’t start making a habit of it.

Gawd, how the English love a gritty stand, they get all this race-memory flashback to the Blitz. I suppose you can’t expect them to be stirred to full-throated identification with, say, sulkiness, hopelessness or please-don’t-look-at-me-I’m-not-actually-here-ness. Because that's what it was all about on Day 4, traumatisation to the point of dissociative personality disorder, pain so deep they actually seemed to be floating outside of their own bodies and looking down on themselves. “What, this old thing?” “Oh, that Ashes!”

And every ad break there was Ricky Ponting: “Tired? Stressed?…”

Some highlights from the previous few days...

Cricket Love

Haddin & North were wonderfully cuddly, but the stand-out for me was Hussey stroking Johnson’s face when he got I think Flintoff out. Oh my. Whoever is doing the slo-mo visuals at SBS/BBC knows their stuff. Cannot of course find a photo or video of it, because by contrast cricket photographers and other highlights-package people have their priorities totally wrong.

Lengthening shadows

At about the exact same time a friend texted me with “Doesn’t anybody in the Aus team shave anymore?” I was admiring Katich’s 5+ o’clock shadow as he came on to bowl. “Bristling” is just the vibe you want in a cricketer.

Geoffrey Boycott

I have a cricket book called The Strangers’ Gallery: Some foreign views of English Cricket (London: Lemon Tree Press, 1974), and in a piece called “Star Gazing”, purple-hued and comma-loving US convert Marvin Cohen says of Geoffrey Boycott:

You’re in the classical tradition, our nation’s true stylist. I see the classical age of the thirties, in the golden wonder of your form. Peerless! Today is not decadent. In you, old stability fortifies us. You’re an anachronism. Clean up the rot, of our tawdry age. Purge us. Restore our noble heritage. Boycott the present. Live, our only lineage.

Don’t you worry Martin, Geoffrey’s on it. The problem with the English cricket team? Too many support staff—would you believe there are people who carry the players’ luggage—and too many drinks breaks. Also: jewellery, natty socks—serious question marks.

And if you want a vivid definition of “old-fashioned test cricket”, here’s GB’s thoughts around the the time Australia were picking off the middle order on Day 5 in a very satisfying manner:

It’s just old-fashioned test cricket: one team getting on top of another team and… (a pause as the “producer” part of Boycott’s brain starts signalling frantically, but fruitlessly) … grinding them down.

To taste the sweet I face the pain

SBS has been doing little vox pops with the Australian cricket team between sessions, including one where they were asked about what motivational music they listened to. Amidst a lot of AC/DC, Mötley Crüe and “Eye of the Tiger”, was Shane Watson saying that “despite what you might think” his tastes would be, he was fond of a Whitney Houston song, “One Moment in Time”. No really, he said, you have to listen to the lyrics. No really YOU Shane Watson: Whitney Houston is exactly what I would have expected from you and those lyrics are really terrible.

Someone who I have now worked out is James Hopes declared cheerily that Celine Dion does it for him. He seemed so ugly and good-natured that I found this charming. Later when asked to name a food item like Shane Warne’s toasted cheese sandwiches that keeps him going during a Test match, he answered: “My X-box.”


The SBS team

Greg Matthews had me hooting on Day 2 when he started earnestly advising Monty Panesar through the television screen. It was sort of a reversal of when Miss Patricia on Romper Room would get out the magic mirror and say “… and I can see Timmy, and Catherine…” and she knew she couldn’t but the kids around the nation didn't. He finished his first point with a “my friend” that sounded just like Steve Vizard’s shonky Persian carpet seller on Full Frontal.

I actually kind of love GM's gaucheness and the way you feel he only has one “gear”. Like he’d be exactly the same and say exactly the same thing wherever he was, whoever he was talking to, no adjustments for audience knowledge, register, context, like a little toy figure you wind up and put down on different surfaces and it just keeps walking and making noises in its own way. He’s what the fug girls would call “secretly awesome”.

Damien Martyn: the word I think of is “fey”, in the sense (now I actually look at a dictionary) of “otherwordly” rather than “about to die”. In my head the word “fey” also had faint overtones of coyness/flirtatiousness, probably because I think the only time I have known someone to actually use the word is JFK to describe Jacqueline. It’s the eye thing and the soft-spokenness that’s almost like one of those devices to make people lean closer to hear you.

I’m already quite liking rather than just “not being bothered by” Stuart Magill.


Great words, bad, naughty reality

On Day 2 when Stuart Broad was not getting out Aggers said he had “all his father’s cussedness”. In the end cussedness was perhaps the word of the 1st test.

Philosophers sometimes have to think of a word to describe the way reality has a certain resistance to one’s expectations, desires, ideas, etc., indeed this is almost its defining quality. There are terms like “facticity”, “refractoriness”, Peirce’s “secondness”... Cussedness is all these things with the addition of “being determinedly and deliberately so” (like Keating’s “recalcitrance”) and “causing you to use bad language”. When the dictionary gives the second meaning of “cussed” as “cursed”, I understand it in the very worldly sense of “is sworn at”.