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.