All hail the Marriageables

Andrew Wu in the Herald today suggested this Australian team needed its own name in the style of the Invincibles and proposed the Unflinchables. I’d like to submit a counter-proposal of the Marriageables, as a nod to the alleged selection policy of Great Leader Justin Langer and—more to the point—to the fact that the entire world badly wants to marry Pat Cummins, whose dreaminess is of such magnitude that it bathes the whole team in its gentle glow.

That’s no endorsement of Justin Langer’s cheesy patriarchal paternalism. It is in fact vexing that all this is happening on his snaky watch. After the “good enough to allow them to marry my daughters” line, and his “These are like my sons” during the Lords Test (making him a father who would put his kid on a bike without a helmet even though he thinks they’re maybe-probably-haven’t-really-checked “mandatory”), he just needs to drop the “as a father of daughters…” chestnut to score the trifecta of enraging expressions that need to be consigned to the rhetorical garbage bin.

It seems inevitable though that in the light of the Ashes victory, the narrative of this team’s success will be that after the nadir of Australian mongrelism that was Capetown, it was born again as bunch of fresh-faced plucky contenders, many of whom, yes, you’d say were the sorts of bloke you’d be comfortable taking home to meet Mum, were it not for the fact that if you took Pat Cummins home to Mum she would whip him out from under your nose as soon as look at him (“Can you give me a hand in the kitchen, Pat?”), with Dad hot on her heels.

The fact that this victory was achieved with very little input from the doghouse duo of Warner and Bancroft will only cement that narrative. The fact that this victory was almost entirely reliant on the input of Capetown Captain Steve Smith… let’s not dwell. He’s nothing if not a Special Case. A captain again? People talked about Steve Smith as one of those batsman for whom captaincy only improved his batting, but maybe it was actually holding him back and we just couldn’t tell because we didn’t know how much more he was capable of. He looks comfortable. The great mystery of Tim Paine is that he has the look of the character in the Gallipoli film who dies with a letter from his Sweetheart in his top pocket, but who against all odds has ended up squadron leader at the end of the film, and he looks comfortable too.

The English team looked like hollow men walking out onto the field yesterday evening to shake the hands of the Australian team and like it would take a superhuman effort to even turn up on Thursday. There has to be another brilliant chapter in this series though, doesn’t there? It’s really the height of ingratitude to be banging cutlery on the table after everything that’s been served up so far, but there you go. Take this woman’s hand.