Defenestration

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The window for pre-Ashes thoughts is rapidly closing. I’d better jump through it.

I thought sacking Mickey Arthur was rearranging the deckchairs, but then I heard they’d given the job to Darren Lehmann, and then I saw said Lehmann at the press conference and, well, he’s a stroke of genius. Stroke as in cat. He was completely mesmerising. That smooth, heavy-lidded, drop-dead calm… I think the word is sangfroid. Beware the big man with long eyelashes. For all his goofy smirks - and that sly, winking undertone is a bit of a mafia kiss in my opinion - he’s terrifying, charismatic, self-possessed, in short, everything that the Australian cricket team is not and one yearns for it to be. 

Someone on the Back Page asked whether he’d be able to maintain team discipline, as “good old Boof”, and I thought “Are they crazy? Have they seen him?” I would not want to run into him in a dark hotel corridor if I was coming home after curfew. Well, maybe I would, in a parallel universe, but not the rhetorical “I” that is a member of the Australian cricket team. He’s another Buddha Warrior of course, and bless him for giving a soupçon of excitement and hope to what was a wholly depressing prospect. The reality will hit and no doubt blow the soupçon out of the soup, but I sure needed the lift.

Having said all that, Mickey Arthur’s performance at the same press conference was extraordinary grace under pressure and compelling in its own right. I have no actual cricket judgement on these turns of events, I just emote with the times, like a baby groping at a mobile. That’s also about my level when I’m watching the game, something brought home to me more often now I watch cricket with someone who actually knows the names for things. I see a man get out because the ball went “through” him. “So, was that… the blockhole?” “No, that was the gate”. I see a batsman go swish (yes). “Was that a… sweep?” “No, that was a drive”. You’d think I’d pick these things up after almost 15 years watching. It makes me wonder what I’m actually looking at. Coloured shapes in motion, apparently. Fuzzy dice.

Speaking of superficiality, I got a little look at some of the English players during the ICC Champions Trophy and was struck as always by how peachy their complexions are. It seemed to me watching Cook that “thin skin” can go the other way, he seems to be lacking a layer that would stop you from seeing his thoughts. Pouty when things don't go his way, despite the jawline. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not, it just seems so different to a hide like Steve Waugh’s that seemed impenetrable in either direction. 

I used to think English cricket was floppy because their summers were so mild, and while they were traipsing on village greens, every other cricket-playing nation had developed a playing style hardened in one sort of furnace heat or another. That’s past now, of course. I suggested they burn the smelly dressy gown and they did. We may need to have a look at the smelly baggy green. Ashes! Ashes! Ashes!