Don’t make me come over there

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Oh, go on then. Two more sleeps before I get on a plane and sort them out. Hovering over Lords like Mary Poppins, I realise a lot of these UK grounds are Sesame Wheat shaped. I guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles (boom boom).

The only written note I have from the Fifth Test is a quote from Geoffrey Boycott at the start of England’s second innings, after being made to follow on. Nathan Lyon had just tried something tricksy with Alastair Cook, who wasn’t having any of it. Normally Geoffrey addresses his remarks to the anchoring commentator, but this time he was so overcome with glee he spoke directly to the batsman: “Come, on Alastair, bore him to death all day, make him work for a wicket.” That's entertainment, Geoffrey-style. We might have put on a better show if we hadn't tried to be so entertaining, non-Geoffrey-style, but it's always the way with the Australian team. When they win it's through aggression, when they lose it's through aggression, they figure it's a 50/50 bet but they should probably spread their bets a little more.

When the end was nigh on the fourth day, Michael Clarke was relaxed and smiling in the slips like an office worker at 4 pm on his last day making jokes about stealing stationery and what he won’t miss. I'm going to call that “inappropriate”. I’ve never had a problem with the way Australia celebrate a win, but you don’t celebrate before you’ve won a game and you don’t celebrate when everyone is unhappy because you lost the f***ing series in an incredibly irritating way. And what player, let alone a captain, has ever shown jollies about retiring? Grandstand played an interview Jim Maxwell did with Clarke after he announced his retirement and he weirdly deflected really obvious and predictable questions about his best memories and highlights from his career – “just focused on this game, mate, really haven’t thought about it.” It makes me wonder whether, in the immortal words of Jennifer Aniston, “there’s a sensitivity chip that’s missing”. Maybe after all this time the Australian public never liked Michael because they smelled an affective bypass – which is to say because they couldn’t smell him at all.

No doubt there'll be a Letter from Lords at some point. For now, away! Those bottomless carpet bags look like a good carry-on option.

A heckler claim

The real Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke. Why didn’t we like him? I don’t know him, so I can’t say it is because he is not very likeable as a person, but maybe I didn’t like him because I never felt like I knew him. He always had a guarded, studied feel when he spoke, whether being smooth or defensive. However prickly Ricky Ponting or Steve Waugh could be, they conveyed thereness, transparency, “I’m giving it to you straight, mate”. That’s a persona too, of course, and I suspect Michael Clarke really is a guarded, studied person, in which case he is as upfront as anyone else. Which brings us back after all to his likeability as a person. Person or persona, we just didn’t like that person or persona.

He seemed very serious, which isn’t a celebrated Australian trait (cf. Adam Goodes): intense, driven and ambitious. All elite athletes are all of these things, as a matter of fact and necessity, he seemed to be so as a matter of principle and choice, as a personal creed. If he turned out to be a Scientologist, you might not be completely surprised. I read an article or interview about Michael Clarke years ago that referred to a motivational tract he had on the wall in front of his treadmill that went something like, “When you think you’ve practiced as much as you can and have pushed yourself as far as you can, remember someone else will have done more and gone further and they’ll be on the other team”. I don’t know why this seemed more New-Agey than any locker-room speech or Eye of the Tiger, but it felt lonely and private and something that maybe shouldn’t be shared. Michael Clarke: too open?

I stand by my earlier diagnosis of the problem as Too GoodLooking + Too Well-Behaved + Too Marketable, which is consistent with my even earlier diagnosis of being like a pair of fake breasts. It’s a shame so much of this seems to come down to not being a blokey bloke’s bloke – I believe leaving your team mates to be with your girlfriend is still illegal in some Australian states – which is such a tired, easy character. Bob Hawke was a born-to-rule Rhodes Scholar but everyone’s mate. Paul Keating grew up in Bankstown but developed an unacceptable interest in Mahler and antique French clocks, which no level of mongrel on the field could ever overcome. Shane Warne is an engineer’s son who went to Mentone Grammar (albeit on an athletics scholarship). Michael Clarke is a Liverpool boy who developed an unacceptable interest in wine, underwear and being a good boyfriend, which no level of mongrel on the field could ever overcome.

I don’t warm to him for superficial reasons – New-Ageiness – and substantial ones – Symonds and Katich – but I think I have talked myself out of the idea that the problem is “fakeness” or lack of transparency. It’s probably the opposite: he’s too upfront about who he is – clean, modern and aspirational, which shows some integrity when he must have known he was supposed to be everyone’s maaaaaate. 

Tonight

However shocking it was to be 3 for 10 in Trent Bridge, by the time we were 6 for 29, I felt misty-eyed for the halcyon days of merely 3 for 10. And as depressing as our series losses in 2009 and 2013 were, the disappointment of what were relatively narrow defeats seems so gratifying now compared to the humiliation of the current gaping one. Humiliation and boredom: ironically, the series feels close to being a waste of time precisely because of the briefness of the games. I will still hold out on 2005 as a worse defeat than this one, mainly because I felt Shane Warne’s pain as my own. There is no valiant champion of this series whose superhuman efforts are all for naught. But that also made 2005 a better series. I don't know what to look forward to tonight: win or lose, it's lose/lose.

Spot the difference II

Root catches Rogers I - Benevolent Universe

 

Root catches Rogers II - Indifferent Universe

Everything was going so well, I had it all worked out. Forget the first innings, this is our first innings. We’ve got 60 in the bank, not 331 taken away. We’ve got a day 2 and 3 pitch, we’ll just pile on the hundreds like at Lords and make it one of those “only one innings required” games. Sorted. I was riveted by Rogers and Warner as they started off, or rather I was attempting to rivet them to the spot with my eyes. I was trying to do the “watch what is happening rather than what happens” thing, partly so I didn’t just cringe at the expected blow every ball. We had a lot of luck, which seemed only fair, and everything seemed to be going to my plan, then Chris Rogers got out. As the third umpire pondered a close no-ball at length (a “noey”, Heals called it the other day), surely a million silent petitions went up. “God, thanks for sending that poltergeist to Cook and Bell and for everything else, just give us this last one bit of luck and I promise we’ll take it from here and won’t ask for anything else ever.” God said “Okay, just this last one and then that’s it. I’m outtie.” And then that was it. The universe staged a mocking replay of Rogers getting out and in this game of “Spot the Difference” the difference was no more Mr Nice Universe.

Is England in fact another India for Australian cricket? It has long been standard wisdom that however all-conquering we are elsewhere, Indian pitches contain kryptonite that saps our powers and it is a completely different ball game. Australia and India seem to have a kind of truce. India lose here, shrug and say, “Yeah, but we’ll win at home and that’s all that matters”. We lose there and glumly say, “Yeah, but what can you do? Indian pitches.” Despite the fact that there has been a clear pattern of us winning the Ashes here but losing in England (apart from that time when we also lost here) for the last ten years, and despite the fact that swing was identified as a problem ten years ago, the main response seems to be to throw a couple of county cricketers at the batting order and hope for the best. Hopefully they do more than that, but when we head over to England the mood, from the outside at least, seems to ride on the spirit of the most recent victory at home instead of the most recent loss over there, in a way that never happens when we go to India.

I don’t see why any of this is the “nail in coffin” for Clarke. Sure, it’s another personal batting failure to take into consideration, but how is everyone else’s batting failure his fault? When there’s a bowling failure you can raise questions about captaining decisions like bowling rotations and field positions, but is he supposed to have some magic dust advice to blow into the ears of batsmen before they head out? Is he supposed to ride to the crease on a white horse and sweep our innings off its feet? It’s nice when that happens and people go fuzzy about “captain’s knocks”, but surely this is more of a coaching than a captaincy issue. Will we actually see Lehmann… squirm?

Conversely, how lucky is Duckface to be the putative leader of this team? Before this series someone from inside the English camp said that Cook had his problems but with the appropriate support structures around him he was just fine. Like a flat foot needs orthotics? It’s not exactly praise of the foot. Cook started to look nervous last night when a boundary brought the deficit down to a mere 275. “Why is the camera looking at me? Was that a danger sign? Am I supposed to be doing something?” It’s like he stands outside of himself and tries to arrange himself in captainy shapes and make captainy motions. He is immensely flattered and probably immensely relieved by this performance, surely no more success has ever come to a less convincing captain.

I’d rather see us all out for under 300 than see the English chase a humiliatingly low total. And I’m not sure what we could do at the Oval that would be any consolation. When was the last time we faced a dead rubber as the losing side of an Ashes series? I can feel a creeping gloom approaching, a rising damp. Is this what it feels like to be English?

Trent Bridge whodunnit

I’ve only really experienced catastrophic collapses second-hand: England all out for 51 against the West Indies, West Indies all out for 87 against Australia, Australia all out for [can’t remember beyond 9/21] against South Africa… and I’ve wondered how it was to experience it first hand. Turns out it’s a combination of disbelief, frowning and comfort eating. I was finishing up some stuff in the kitchen when the game started, so had the radio on and the ACF streaming on the laptop, and the streaming was seriously about 2 balls behind the radio, so Aggers and Bloers would start screaming and I’d have to stare at what seemed like an endless age of innocence before the meteor struck. It seemed impossible it would continue and it seemed impossible it would not continue, because it was like landing in the middle of an English schoolboy’s daydream, and while the daydream is preposterous, he is calling all the shots. I sat back and made popcorn.

I have mentioned before that I have a very poor sense of causality in sport and see it essentially in terms of colour and movement like a tiny baby. So as far as my judgement goes, what happened last night may as well have been caused by a poltergeist as any skill, design or lack thereof in batting, bowling and fielding. I can barely watch people hold valuable fragile objects because whether they will drop it or not seems almost random to me, as if anyone at any time could have a petit mal seizure and lose their grip or be knocked over by a surprise albatross (YOU NEVER KNOW); as if the object itself could decide to wriggle free. I’d say that this attitude is derived from my own clumsiness, except I’m pretty sure the clumsiness is derived from the attitude. If I’m sceptical about my ability to avoid or control inanimate objects at will, why bother trying? So I’m both fascinated by the skills with objects sportspeople demonstrate but also unable to really see those skills and hence believe in them fully. I tend to understand causality backwards: we won, therefore we played well, we were just lucky that playing well led to a win. After all, if we’d lost we wouldn’t call it playing well any more. After 15 years watching cricket I only realised last game that when I watch the ball I am only watching for what happens – runs/no runs, out/not out – rather than what is happening. It explains a lot about my lack of progress in the "understanding" area.

Anyhoo, I’ll be touching down in Heathrow a couple of days after this series ends and this is starting to look more and more like being lowered into the lions’ den. Can we make it out from here? Once upon a time I thought of Australia as good at come backs when all seemed lost, but maybe that was when it was possible to wake up in one of Shane Warne’s daydreams instead of this one.