I blame Shane Watson, obviously. When you are averaging around 50 and everyone around you is failing, are you a blessed stalwart of the top order or are you in fact its cursed hoodoo?

I also only just realised Justin Langer is Australia's batting coach. Just the other day - the first day of this Test - I was wondering what message they'd be getting in the change rooms and hoping it would be more along the Ian Chapell lines of "get it together or we're stuffed" than the Power of Passion lines of "you know you can do it, back yourself and think of the Baggy Green, etc etc". So: hmm.

P.S. Katich trained at my local oval yesterday. Must I be everywhere?

Please, a paddle

Well, surely this was waiting to happen, how many lucky escapes from first innings collapses have we had this series? And only the one recovery that amounted to winning a game.

I had the ultimate Boxing Day yesterday: a beach swim before a late breakfast of leg-ham and egg in front of the toss, then rising from the couch only to make myself a turkey and stuffing sandwich, a bowl of cold pudding and custard, or to go for a nice nap. The pudding however was seeking solace after Ponting's dismissal, the nap seeking oblivion after Hussey went, and the couch useful mainly for having a back I could push my head into.

But the "oh no oh no oh no" when the wickets fell was nothing to the "OH NO OH NO OH NO" upon seeing Johnson spraying one so far down the off side that the fact it wasn't called a wide can only be a Christmas miracle. There's being up shit creek and there's not having the paddle.

So can we move off the sports and onto the comic pages? Let's shall.

1. I noticed before the start that BOTH the English and Australian anthems have sprouted fiddly trills at the beginning in an attempt to distract from what dogs they are. The Australian one has certainly done that for a while, I hadn't noticed it on God Save the Queen, though I must say the whole of God Save the Queen makes the Australian anthem appear less of a dog.

2. Early in the piece, Kevin Pietersen diving after missing a catch off Watson, in the soccer sense of the term.

3. I've only just noticed Chris Tremlett's cheekbones. In the 80s, whenever I saw Ivan Lendl I could not put aside the idea that every night before going to bed he would strap two tennis balls to his head so that each one nestled in the hollow of a cheek. Same deal with Tremlett, substitute cricket balls.

4. Bresnan: a return to the potatoey English bowler of yesteryear (specifically, 2005) - the love child perhaps of Caddick and Harmison?


5. Oh ads, the irony you conceal. I had the sound down, but there appeared to be an ad where the Aussies "gave the Poms a chance" by batting blindfold. You can stop that right now. "Just keep walking" also had a barb that was surely not intended.

Anyway, to the barricades/couch for day 2.

But if I didn't have little faith I would never have discovered the phrase "petty fidianism"

“The Real Mitchell Johnson”, if that is his real name, accused me in the comments yesterday of petty fidianism and look, I admit it. When Michael Slater quoted Latin sage Bon Jovi (“Good cheer”) before the start of this match – “you gotta keep the faith” – I was tempted to paraphrase Monty Python – “what are they gonna do, bleed on them?”

But why wouldn't I have little faith? There’s only so many times you can hear “It’ll be different this time, I can change”, only to come back in from putting the washing on the line to find the Australian team again blotto on the kitchen floor.

Even now, you would have thought a truly joyful bowling effort and a juicy first innings lead would ease the collywobbles in the Australian top order, but... what is it? but... but oh? BUT NO. Lord help me I am even developing feelings of thankfulness – real and not just grudging ones – for Shane “The Wodge” Watson.

But let's speak of other things:

Terry Alderman: welcome back Terry Alderman, your relentless indignation is like an old friend. He managed to maintain a rant about short deliveries and their uselessness in getting wickets right up to, through and out the other side of Peter Siddle getting a wicket with one. That’s top-shelf crabbiness. He followed it up with a good spray at the old chestnut of Drinks Breaks.

The KP sleaze bomb:
Here’s a curious thing. They did a little ring-side interview with Mitchell Johnson on Channel 9 toward the end of the day yesterday, and they asked him whether any of the wickets were particularly special. He said they all were, of course, but that he supposed Pietersen’s wicket gave him special pleasure because KP had been repeatedly asking him for his phone number and saying he wanted to be friends. I suppose this is a new form of sledging? I would give anything though that it weren’t and that Johnson was simply declaring his revulsion at the overture.

Because there are in fact suggestions afoot that Kevin Pietersen is waging a terrifying campaign of sleaze in the antipodes. The speeding in the yellow Lambourghini of course, and then in the last session yesterday he actually draped his arm around an umpire and it looked like Strauss came up to detach KP’s hand from the umpire’s shoulder. Dude, stop touching the umpire. It must be quite a stress on the whole team to keep KP’s sleaze fallout to a minimum radius.

But no

I thought there was a glimmer of hope when Andrew Strauss decided to bowl. Wasn’t sending the other team in a famously series-turningly fatal move in Ashes lore? I was so mesmerised by this possibility that Anderson’s first couple of balls even looked... could they be a bit wide? But no.

Is “but no” the motto of the series?

I had thought for example that the Adelaide start was not just bad, but freakishly bad, "freakish" meaning "an aberration of nature", "statistically unlikely to happen again very soon". But no!

“You’d think they...” “What if...” “Surely...” But no. But... but... ? No!

I am grateful for Jonathan Agnew, who somehow manages to sound soothing even when he's saying "4 for 49".

Warnie

When Picasso first showed his portrait of Gertrude Stein and people said it didn’t look much like her, he replied: “It will.” Who would have thought the same principle would apply to the 2007-2008 VB Summer of Spin Shane Warne plastic figurine?

People have texted me to ask if I am driving the campaign to bring him back. My position is that I am all in favour of his return, on the condition that he arrive at the ground in a golden helicopter and is lowered to the pitch as fireworks are let off around the ground and “Thus Spake Zarathustra” blares from the speakers. I think that's about the level and flavour of the idea.

Yeah, I got nothing

Speaking terms again

I “stopped talking” to the cricket for an hour or so yesterday morning. For the rest of the day I managed to keep everything down to a manageable level – the volume, the tension, the expectation – except for a bad moment when Channel 9 decided during the rain to show the end of the Adelaide Test from 4 years ago. Ouch. I turned around to see them all – Hussey, Warnie, Brett Lee – tumbling over each other like labrador puppies. So golden and healthy and happy! Sigh.

A friend has offered to take me out for a “session in the nets” in the quest to get me out of the house. I am going to have to develop my technical knowledge of the game if I am going to be able to “enjoy” watching Kevin Pietersen, as Jonathan Agnew suggested even the most ardent Australian supporter must. But do I really want that to happen? Mayn’t I hold on to the warped lens of my bigotry? I don’t think I would know who I was if I started enjoying watching Kevin Pietersen.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow. One thing this series has put paid to is the idea that there is anything especially Australian about chirping and crowing when you’re on top.

The Australian Cricket Team, c'est moi

It came to me overnight as in a dream: I am under the weather, with a mountain of work in front of me that will see me labouring through pretty much every weekend until Christmas. I am the Australian Cricket Team. Or: the Australian Cricket Team, c’est moi.

I came down sick on the second day of the 1st Test and have been a lumbering allegory ever since: gloomed, clumsy, unfocused, poor appetite. Yesterday after the first half hour I had to go to the doctor. I toiled in the afternoon but then downed tools around five to “see Hussey get his century” – had I but known!

How to handle this awesome and unexpected metaphysical distinction? By continuing to follow the game am I engaged in a recursive loop of deterioriation – the worse it gets the worse I feel the worse they are the worse I am?

A nap this afternoon didn’t do anything, when I turned on again so little had happened for so long that Aggers leapt on a ball from Marcus North that seemed to show some turn: “something seemed to happen there...”

I really need to get out of the house. I am getting out of the house.

Test 2 Day 1

Gah. Who are these people? Am I with them?

I’d accepted on a theoretical level that things would need to get worse for Australia before they would get better, because of the in-built trauma of the downward slide that gives it momentum, but the acceptability of the idea in the abstract is a long way from its palatability in concreto. In other words, nice idea, but oh God the pain, the terrible pain...

Is it worse as spectator? I mean OK no, it’s not worse as a spectator, but at least as a player you have something to do, you get hit and that means you have work to do – be it only to work out what to say to Mark Nichols – and the work absorbs the pain that focuses your mind on the work.

I hear the wicket and all I can do is screw up my face or pull my hair and there’s a limit to that sort of thing and so most of the emotion just clangs around inside. I suppose this is why spectators start hitting each other. As for me, I took advantage of the groundwork laid by the game’s fast food sponsor to do some emotional eating. KFC is doing a very blokey burger range at the moment with things like hash-brown inserts - if I didn't know Warnie was already helping Maccas design a burger I would suspect his handiwork.



This allows me to segue to the Adelaide scoreboard, pictured here from this time last year, which is a fine looking object in itself, and the bar in the base of it has always struck me as one of those supremely blokey combos, like a beer cooler with a built-in transistor radio in reverse.

Test 1 Day 5

I don't know what to add. As I was saying to Deeply Depressed in Brunswick in the comments, at least a batting collapse by its very nature brings things to an end, a bowling slump on the other hand just goes on and on and on and on. It was like a spell had been cast over the Gabba, like being in a nightmare where you run and run and don't cover any ground, like the ball was a one cursed and doomed never to go to hand.

Over the last day or two Kerry O'Keefe has kept trying to split the honours between the teams and divide the "momentum" of this match, but when you reach a point when it seems kinder to everyone involved to look away and the Barmy Army are so loud even Jim Maxwell is goaded into an "oh shut up"...

I'd forgotten about Cardiff and in retrospect I look fondly on that match's in-built drama, running down the order and staving off a loss down to the last ball. At least it went somewhere and had something at stake.

Yeah, no, it's a loss.

Test 1 Day 4

When I said after day one that I had been dreading "total awfulness", I specifically meant, according to my notes, "toothless bowling, England spanking out boundaries". Should I have spelled that out and thus averted the dread's fulfillment?

I have been in bed with a cold the last couple of days and have a dim enough view of the world as it is. Shane Watson told Quentin Hull he thought Australia's bowling performance was "solid". Well, it was certainly back-to-back something. From my imperious position propped up among the pillows that something was "boring". Especially since it was all a rerun of the previous day with the two sides changing places, up to and including dropped outfield catches from hapless brown-haired fast bowlers. Is it Mitch or the pitch?

Play up young men! Amuse me! And so to bed.

Test 1 Day 1

Good, right? I should say I thought that even before The Hat-Trick that Stopped a Nation, partly because I was so dreading total awfulness that the fact we looked at least competent at all times yesterday registered as a genuine win. That's a bit sad.

But also, isn't it Ben Hilfenhaus who won the day by playing up to the "1st ball" hoo-hah and getting a wicket at least thereabouts? It certainly made me let my breath out. That stuff is a bit superstitious, but I was at the Gabba on the 1st day 4 years ago and the English nerves and despair were certainly palpable, bedazzling and convincing.

I enjoyed Siddle as well of course. I've seen that particular "Come On!" before, specifically from Warnie taking out Herschelle Gibbs with a Gattingesque ball in the 1999 World Cup second semi-final against South Africa (this game is my only, my only source of traditional cricket insanely-detailed-historical-reference nerdiness, please let me keep it). It's the cry of the doubted bowler returning from injury, channelling the cry of the doubted team.

I was sure I'd made the Wild Thing comparison with Siddle before, that "I am a stomping roaring monster" thing, but I can't find it so at the risk of repeating myself:

Other notables: Greg Chappell spotted in the crowd wearing, I swear, pince-nez.

Speaking of shameless dandies, I also got around to watching the new Warnie show on the internet last night. Awkward. I sat through most of it, though I was forced to skip the "Bumble's Bits" (or whatever) segment, in which David Lloyd simulates being a painful old bugger cornering you in a pub, for fear of stabbing myself in the face with a fork.

Well, ready or not, here it comes.

I have been reaching for the "awkward adolescent" cliché when thinking about the current transitional phase of the Australian team: spottiness, all odd angles and unevenness, etc. It's probably the non-physical traits of adolescence that are more pertinent: paralysing self-consciousness and self-seriousness, for example. But the comparison is very hard on adolescents and the team is growing down rather than up. I don't know, I just don't know what to do with them when they're being like this. I am in knots of anxiety about this coming summer, and those knots are only tightened by the pull of Pollyanna-ish hopefulness. Maybe the awkward adolescent is me.

Wikipedia tells me that Pollyanna had something called "The Glad Game", which consisted in "finding something to be glad about in every situation". I was at the WACA on 31 October for the T20 game against Sri Lanka that started the cricket season, and let me tell you that the WACA purveys some of the finest hot chips I have ever eaten. No really, I made lots of notes about the chips. For example I find there's a point in a bucket of chips - about half way or two thirds through - when you start to feel remorseful and not needing any more but you still finish them and then feel a bit sick. These chips however were somehow both delicious and clean: as wicked in terms of fat and salt as you could want a chip to be, but untroubling of digestion or conscience. Magic chips. Like the magic chalk circle that somehow managed to restrict the batting rather than the fielding in Australia's first innings. But also the enchanted scene one wanders through when leaving the WACA to get back to the city, with the floodlights streaming over Queens Gardens.

Lovely! That's my story for the moment. The sports section today is all about Hauritz being dropped for the new guy but I really don't know what to do with that either. When things aren't going well, the shuffling around starts and it's never a good look or feel, but I'm not qualified to offer an opinion and honestly hasn't there been enough opinion in the last few weeks? So, so much opinion. That's the other thing that happens when things aren't going well. Let it begin, I think I am ready after all.

Hello birds, hello sky, hello George

When it’s a warm afternoon and Haurie and Mitchell are at the crease but not on the free-to-air, there is nothing for it but to tuck the laptop under the arm and hasten to the pub to watch the cricket while pretending to work.


The main action when I sat down seemed to be lots of slow-mo replays of verbal exchanges between Sreensanth and Haurie. On Survivor, people are always talking to each other while trying to look like they’re not talking to each other – the more earnest the message the more casual and offhand the delivery, and it looked like that.

Then there was Harbhajan being pathetic in the field and suddenly Mitchell gawn, bowled. It was a worry because according to the board, once Hilfenhaus replaces Mitchell, the only person left is someone called “George”, and because I am very late to the program this just sounds to me like the team bag-carrier or someone they’ve rung in so hurriedly they only got a first name. He comes out after not too long and looks a very newly-hatched chick indeed. Incredibly fine, white, smooth skin for one thing – that can’t last for long, surely. Unless, when the rest of the team heads for the ice bath, he perhaps runs a tub of ass’s milk? Sprinkled with a few rose petals? Hee hee.

George: Mate, you’ve got to try it. Combined with the petals of the [insert name of rose, eg. "Charm of Paris", "Samantha", "Carefree Wonder"], you would not believe what it does for the complexion.

Other Member of the Australian Cricket Team: Ah…

George: It’s like silk, mate, like silk – go on, feel it…

OMACT: [strangled pause] Yeah, I’m not going to feel it, mate. Piss off.

I may just like George. We’ll see. Seeing him bowl later on he looked not just young but from a whole other era - gangly in an almost underfed way, unfortunate ears, like an Anzac.

5 mins to beer o’clock and I get my first sight of Katich of the season, unless you count his revelation as Mr October in the Men of Cricket calendar a few days ago, and that was a good moment too. Australia’s not in the best position, but it’s so cheering to see everyone again: "Hello birds, hello sky, hello Hussey, your jawbone is looking squarer than ever, ah, Watto, we meet again, I thought of another nickname for you over winter. It's Shane “Who Asked You?” Watson. Mind I don’t have to use it."

Anti-Podean

No really, I’ve had so much work in the first half of this year, and all my time off was spent watching The Wire. A strange few months.

I didn't mean to leave the 1-day series untouched: I had a whole spiel worked out in my head that culminated in baptising Shahid Afridi "The Organoleptic Shock". Plus a bit of a whinge that no one was making any connection between the limpness of that series and the abandonment of the round-robin format. You have the two coolest, craziest, strike-a-posiest cricket-playing nations in your backyard and you don’t make them play each other? That’s no way to run a ratings show.

Then after that, well I don’t have cable television, and – like the proverbial tree in the forest spliced with some personal solipsism – when I can’t see or hear the Australian cricket team through my television screen or radio transmitter I have trouble believing that they actually exist.

But in the depth of winter some distant rumblings of the summer game to come…

Exhibit A:

I saw my first Ashes television ad today, with the footage of Ashes cricket from different eras spliced together, and thought it did a good job of doing what it is supposed to do, which is generate a little excitement.

I appreciate it partly in contrast to last time. In 2006 there was a disturbing "underwhelm by all means" trend in advertising. NSW CityRail launched a big PR campaign with a series of billboards carrying words to the effect of: "CityRail. There's still a few problems, but we're working on it."

Then the launch of the campaign for the 2006-2007 Ashes series. Not that that series really needed to be advertised. Perhaps the powers that be decided that such was the level of anticipation, so goaded and girded and geared up for a grudge match was the Australian public, that the only responsible thing to do was to throw out a giant muffler in the form of the damp and confusing slogan:

The Ashes, a sporting contest over 100 years old and only interrupted by world wars, is definitely on. Oh good. No world war on the cards then.

Let's say they meant "on" in that belligerent sense: “You’re on, mate”. In which case, an instructive example of how qualifiers can weaken. Someone somewhere added a "definitely" to IT'S ON ('nuff said) and got: "Ooooooh, now you've made me really mad!"

Exhibit B:

Continuing the poorly-chosen-words theme, the SMH ran a cricket-focused front page picture and story the other week about Usman Khawaja's selection for the Australian Test Squad. With the headline: "Accomplished, calm, elegant - and a Muslim in Test squad". So let me get this straight: accomplished, calm, elegant… and now you're trying to tell me MUSLIM? And in a TEST SQUAD??!! Get out of here!!!

After reading the story, the headline was maybe a stab at the idea that there are a lot of other things as notable and interesting about Usman as the fact that he's a Muslim: the latter fact isn't really the story here. Which would have been a more convincing line if they hadn't made that the story there.

Exhibit C:

Channel 9 are showing some live cricket tonight: maybe those rumblings I hear as I put my ear to the cold winter ground are things that happen (deep breath now) on the other side (nnnnnh)… of… the world (whoo!). Dead rubber no. 2 of a 5-match ODI series against England, right? See, I do know something. I may have a look. I’m worried I won’t recognise any of them.

PS. Howard’s rejection. Gee, no one saw that coming. It seems the ACB/CA has spent the last 30 years painstakingly replacing, straw by straw, the stuffing Mr Packer knocked out of their shirts all those years ago. If they only had a brain.

Ne me quitte pas, Kooka

There are a few lines at the end of Jacques Brel's Ne me quitte pas that set a sort of high/low benchmark in grovelling desperation, a ne plus ultra of dirt-licking, dignity-dashing bargain-striking:

Let me become
the shadow of your shadow
the shadow of your hand
the shadow of your dog

I mean, "Let me become the shadow of your dog" – really? Wow. I'm not sure whether I'm impressed or appalled.

I do believe however that yesterday afternoon at the SCG I saw Nathan Hauritz strike that series of bargains with the ball he took off Mohammad Yousuf. And it worked! I don't think things went so well for Jacques somehow.

I mean, I love an athletic, razor-sharp display of strike-force fielding as much as the next person, and goodness me they worked hard and well in that department yesterday. But I don't think I have ever seen such raw need on the field as that displayed by Haurie wrangling that ball to the ground, with the rest of him scrambling desperately to keep up. "Don't leave me", indeed.

It was gawky, painful, doubtful… wonderful! Is this the story of Haurie all over? That's my girl!

A Batsy New Year

I met Tom Parker once. At the inaugural Festival of Cricket at Bowral, back in I think 2005, I signed up for the "Curators Clinic" and cadged a cigarette beforehand from a moustachioed bloke puffing away outside the tent… this bloke turning out of course to be Tom Parker. It was a very interesting session (except my inner 10-year old boy kept digging me in the ribs, going: "He said 'cooch'. Heh heh heh… He said 'cooch'. Heh heh heh…. He said 'cooch'. Heh… etc.") and ever since I look on the SCG groundstaff with a self-important and proprietorial air: "Oh sure, that'd be Tom, that roller dates back to 1923 you know, etc. etc"

I'm heading to the match tomorrow and the next day and it will be the 10th anniversary of the first time I went to an SCG Test Match. I remember the moment: emerging from the entrance passage between the Churchill and Doug Walters stands and being struck by the intense green of the oval at an unfamiliar flat angle and it all seeming very close, intimate and genteel. It put me in mind of this painting, Fernand Khnopff's Memories, a big favourite from the Symbolist Period of my adolescence:

Ah, Memories indeed: I also left at tea after a horrible fight with a boyfriend. Happy days!

All things being equal, I probably prefer to watch cricket on television. Well may I don a white burqa and religiously keep up the fluids, I still seem to skirt the edges of heat exhaustion by the end of the day each year. And the attempt to mitigate this effect takes one into very sternly priced categories of ticket indeed. Nota bene, Commentators Lamenting Test Cricket Attendances from the Paid Comfort of a Media Box.

But it's become a family tradition to dip a toe into the live atmosphere each year and I do like to put a Lovely Picnic together, the nature of which has also settled into something of a tradition over the years, this tradition being: "Traditionalist". Fruitcake. Egg Sandwiches. Lemonade. If the Famous Five wouldn't have eaten it, it doesn't go into the cooler bag. Oh yes, plus a box of Arnotts Barbecue Shapes. And that "lemonade", well, it's actually G&T in a lemonade bottle… But APART FROM THAT…

Christmas

I know at least two people who got a 2010 Men of Cricket calendar in their stocking this Christmas, one of them being me.

First impressions: I can't ignore the fact that 2010 is about half the size of 2009 while costing 50% more. But since this may well turn out to be the case, and it is charity, we'll let that raised eyebrow rest.

Stylistically, it has taken a leaf from the 2009 Coogee Rebels Cricket calendar, with mostly unclothed players looming in moody black-and-white against a black background. I rather miss the variety of locations and dress-styles of 2009, which conjured up an entertaining series of narrative scenarios. Like "The Gardner" in a steamy Danielle Steele novel, or "The Day I Jumped Into the Pool With All My Clothes On".

The hot issue of 2009 was "to wax or not to wax"? Katich and Hilfenhaus fly the flag again for the hairy man and run away with the whole show as far as I'm concerned. James Hopes is a portrait of confusion, sniffing his own hairy armpit while wearing 3-day facial growth and showing a little giveaway chest stubble. Nathan Hauritz: totally unsuited for this kind of gig, but displaying hair that defies the girly stereotype. Mitch: great tatt but a slightly constipated performance compared to his easy breezy 2009. Chest chair question cloaked in mystery due to being hunched over.

Boxing Day Test PS

Watson began irking me when he declared Flintoff his role model in the immediate aftermatch of Ashes 2005, combining tastelessness and sucky-ness in a way that he has since made all his own, and he has certainly picked up his hero's ability to relentlessly hog attention.

Of course I gurgled with delight in the 1st innings when Watto was run out in the 90s. When my viewing companion suggested I was being unpatriotic, I put it to him that if Watson kept getting out in the 90s he would be fulfilling both his duty as a batsman to the Australian team and my own requirement that he undergo maximum personal suffering. UnChristian, absolutely, but not unpatriotic. Obviously it couldn't last, however much Watson's 90s in the 2nd innings felt like it stretched an eternity.