19 December 2012

Cricket in the age of mechanical reproduction


Jim Maxwell did an Ozzy Osbourne on Monday and bit the head off poor Tony Harrison, Chair of Cricket Tasmania, for not getting more people to Bellerive. Sometimes you can sort of hear Jim Maxwell steam up and froth a bit, and it’s often about ground-attendance related things (killjoy security staff is another red rag). Jim, even if I completely agreed with you, it’s not okay to froth at people, especially a guest, and remember, as Richie says, that you are also in my loungeroom.

But in any case, I’m a bit tired of this conversation.

In this particular case:

1. Tony was right. As he kept saying, his number-one problem was scheduling. This is a time of year when you tell good friends that you don’t know when you’ll see them next because there’s so much stuff on and stuff to do in the lead-up to Christmas. Yes, I could enrol in a time-management course. You ask too much. I do however think that Cricket Tasmania should have wheeled Ricky out on a non-working day and I hope they promoted it properly.

2. Kerry, watching all five days of cricket at the ground is a “tradition” in England because they desperately need the vitamin D.

More generally:

1. Attendance at the ground is no gauge of interest in Test cricket. Test cricket is broadcast on television. Plenty of people must be interested in watching it there or it could not be sold for high prices to commercial television.

2. If people anywhere prefer to watch it at home it is not because they’re soft anti-social cocooners. You get a lot more insight into the game and the theatre of what’s happening in the middle from television coverage. It offers more to both the aficionado and the novice. Being at the ground is a different kind of theatre, about pilgrimage and rituals and sacred ground and being part of a mass of humanity. It has a lot of ‘aura’, as Benjamin would say, but most of that is not about the actual game, it’s about wearing watermelons on your head with your friends, literally and figuratively speaking. When all that aura converges on a big game moment you have an unforgettable experience that’s all about the game, but those moments are only what they are because most days and most games are not like that.

3. Cricket at home is its own ritual. An early cricket memory is my family visiting an uncle and aunt in Mornington in the 70s, and us all sitting together quietly in a darkened room with the hot sun outside and a bright black and white TV set in the middle. We didn’t go there to watch the cricket, it just happened. I have no memory of what was happening on the screen and wouldn’t have understood it at the time anyway, but I remember well the quiet and concentration and sharing something with people we only saw once a year. I remember the aura, the “field of subtle, luminous radiation surrounding a person or object”.

“Cricket” also means a backdrop to summer time and down time, the murmur of the radio or television through the house as you wander about your business, dipping in and out of it, checking up on it from time to time if you’re out and about. It surrounds you like the weather, it’s a mood that fades in and out, it’s a constant but undemanding companion. That’s Test cricket, that’s part of its special beauty, mechanical reproduction doesn't dim that. Even being at the ground can be about the charm of dropping in and out: you come across a suburban or country game and pull over for a few overs. I always find myself a bit affronted by the requirements of punctuality and relentless attention in other sports.

4. Ok, I am a soft anti-social cocooner. I want a couch and a good beer and the chance to have a nap, cool quiet and time to think. As Lucinda Williams ponders, is it too much to ask? Am I going overboard with all that stuff?  Commentators don’t have to ponder, don't have to choose, they can enjoy the comforts of the home and the theatre of the ground at the same time. Now, I’m not saying that commentators, who have a guaranteed seat behind the wicket, good television and internet access, shelter from the elements (I include other people in that category), and private catering (with bonus gifts of strawberries and lobster), have lost touch with what going to a Test Match means to other people, namely losing all of that, but… oh, wait, I am. People in corporate boxes shouldn’t throw stones.

5. Three or five days is an enormous commitment, no other game asks you to take time off work. For this reason, most cricket is and has always been played in a limited format, counted in overs or wickets or runs – a weekend, a day or afternoon, an evening. Test cricket might be the “high” form of the game, and a wonderful thing it is, but it’s not the original or vernacular form, and arguably not its lifeblood. Historically, Test cricket is the spin-off from the limited forms of the game, not the other way around, stop with the moaning about the 'decline' of cricket into T20.

But thinking about conditions and policies at the ground and what I’d do or not.

1. Gimme shelter. As many sheltered areas as possible. We all wear anti breast cancer scarves on McGrath Day while courting skin cancer. I realise there are light and line of vision problems to overcome, but we can put people on the moon. Somewhere for unsheltered people to go when it rains, see comment on passes out below.

2. The security is fine, Jim. Baiting and barracking the security staff has become part of the fun at the ground and you only need one arsehole experience to be grateful they’re there.

3. Price and ticketing. You’ll have the day-off-work cost even if ground entry is free. But yes, I had to spend $130 to get a seat that would be sheltered from the sun all day on day 2 of the New Year’s test at the SCG and that’s a lot of money. It’s a lot less if you have a higher tolerance for physical discomfort, but I’ve done my time on the concourse.

There have to be passes out. You can’t go in and out at the SCG, though I think you can at the MCG. Cheaper test passes and more unreserved seating sections to allow for more floating spectator intake.

4. Drink. I don’t drink the light beer at the cricket (all that’s available at the SCG), but observation suggests that it just means guys buy two drinks at a time instead of one, which doubles the drink queues because the four-drink limit means one person can now only buy for two, and creates enormous toilet queues.

5. Food. I actually don’t know about the food. I started rhapsodising about the possibility of Bourke Street Bakery pies, food trucks and buying picnic packs with your ticket, then I heard how it sounded and imagined what that would look like. ‘Healthy’ options in these settings are generally miserable and even more overpriced than the junk options. A recent Sumo Salad experience left me poorer, hungrier and angrier than any Chiko Roll ever has. In the end, it might just be that bad food you wait too long for and pay too much for is part of the ritual of a day at the game, and the only way to get around that is to BYO. However: please provide vinegar for the chips and you might want to ask an American to explain hotdogs. This is a bog-standard, non-foodie Chicago hotdog:

I want what they're having.

And that’s all. Because I seem to have taken a morning off work to write about the cricket.

06 December 2012

The man without scriptwriters

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Do you think the ‘iconic’ Ricky Ponting moments will be the swear-shouting at Duncan Fletcher during the 2005 Ashes and the ARROGANT PONTING MUST BE SACKED headline on the 2007-2008 India tour?


Steve Waugh had that last-ball century at the SCG, and Shane Warne was so blessed from a dramaturgical point of view, had so many ‘defining’ moments, even without the off-field play, that they defined his character – Hollywood, the Human Headline. But I worry that Ricky rather got the rough end of the narrative stick. He has been plunged willy-nilly into a great deal of drama, and been an astonishing performer, but he has possibly not made as much good theatre as he deserved on the field. It’s been said – I’m sure I’ve mentioned this – that Ricky’s captaincy lacked a sense of timing. Is that Ricky’s story? His lack of story?

I stand to be corrected. As of writing, I’ve deliberately avoided any research to refresh my memory. The pugnacious teenage prodigy is a good story, and even if I’m wrong about the above, I reckon “pugnacious” will still end up the dominant motif here. Ahem, Bourbon and Beefsteak. When people described Ponting this week as the most “competitive” of players, a real “competitor”, they mean “scrappy”. He gets into the truant schoolboy story book, no problem, “eternally scruffy and frowning” like William. I remember him blowing a kiss to his new wife when he made a triple century. That wasn't a bad moment, I asked a newsagent for their newspaper poster with the photo.

I also remember him just missing a double century in Hobart some time and just missing a series win in India. He saw out the Steve Waugh era and has seen in what I guess will be the Michael Clarke era. I know everyone has to come after someone and before someone else, but hasn’t he had to tie up more dag ends than most? It's telling that the big significance of Ricky going for me is that it's end of the Steve Waugh era, the last player on the national team who had played under Waugh.

If Michael Clarke suffers from his excessive good looks, I don’t think it is accidental that Ricky came to be tarred with the “ugly Australian” brush. I’ll always believe that people thought a little worse of Ricky during the 2005 Ashes because he didn’t look like Andrew Flintoff, and gave Anil Kumble way too much benefit of the doubt on that 2007-2008 India tour just for looking like Anil Kumble.*

Some people would say the “ugly Australian” era began with Steve Waugh, in both senses, but I think Waugh was redeemed in the public imagination by all that Hey True Blue and poetry in the dressing room stuff (“Clancy of the Overthrow”). Steve Waugh was an unemotional player, but in that respect a sentimental bloke. Ricky could be a hothead on the field, but was also unsentimental. Sometimes his eyes would flash black for a moment and you’d see the hot and unsentimental together. I don’t think I fully believed the lack of sentiment until I saw the bit of the retirement press conference when he said that not going to the Ashes was easy because he wasn’t good enough. It took me back to when he was asked whether Warnie had been naïve to take the diuretic, and he answered, “And stupid."

I'll be going through the clippings in the Useful Box this week to see what comes up that I've forgotten. More dag ends, more scraps. None of this is a criticism: I like a bit of a mess and I like a bit of a fight. The dominant motif after all is not "pugnacious", but "scrappy".


* That Bollyline affair made me so angry I wrote a letter to the Herald that wasn’t published (bit of a theme developing here), probably because it contained the following impossible sentence: “As a thirty-something woman who came to cricket late in life, what leaves the sourest taste in my mouth about this sport is the constant invocation of a ‘gentlemanly’ code of conduct which, when deciphered, seems to mean pretty much what it always has, namely an absolute horror of “fuss”, whether positive or negative, and a rather casual attitude towards racism.”