Batsy replies

Anonymous writes:

What do you make of the new Shane look, unkindly called ‘Scrawnie’ by the tabloids?

Anonymous, I’m glad you asked. Or I was. I wrote out a four-point response, assuming I knew what I was talking about, then actually Googled “scrawny warnie” and... yikes. I think I can still get some use out of my initial armchair serve, if we do a little reshuffling and allow for an element of digression.

1. There is almost always something a bit wrong with Shane’s look, and it’s almost always in the “trying too hard” direction. A bit too much hair product, a bit too much teeth whitener, a few diet shakes over the limit. Twas ever so. When I first came across Warney in 1998, he had a near-middle hair parting and a floppy fringe that made him look like the very worst kind of over-fed private-school frat-boy. And that’s the Mills & Boon heart of the Mystery of Shane: “He was everything I most despised... and yet... I found myself strangely drawn to him.”

2. I have seen this situation storyboarded as “unreconstructed Australian male turns uber-metrosexual, cherchez la femme!”, and that’s obviously nonsense. As Shane quickly and rightly pointed out, “I have always been High Julio, Julio among Julios, Laird of the Lairs. A vain man, with advanced hair.” I myself have always seen the pairing with Liz as in fact a four-way between the most lovingly tended eyebrows in the business. Situation normal all gussied up.

We need to look elsewhere for la femme here. Shane claims the diet-shake tip came from St Kilda player Steven Baker’s mother, which just shows how little really does change. Shane! Stay away from the mums with diet products!

3. This section was supposed to be about the actual weightloss, which I hadn’t actually looked into properly. To summarise: Reference to the great Shane Slimdown of the 2001 India Tour. Suggestion that he may be replacing one meal a day with a packet of cigarettes.

4. Cosmetic surgery? Not that you asked, but here’s what I think anyway: there’s so much you can do to yourself in the way of injections, fillers, and resurfacings these days that a great deal of plausible deniability is created around the question of cosmetic surgery. I also believe Shane to be a student of the “It’s not a lie if it’s none of your business” school of thinking.

After all that, is there an answer in there? I do prefer a higher-bodyfat Shane, but I’m sure that Shane will be back. Reversion to form is arguably another of his specialties.

As for your first question:

Is it true that Mise en Abyme once opened the batting for Pakistan in an ODI?

I’m pretty sure that’s one of the subplots of Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, of which something next time.