Eyes Wide Shut, or the Horrours of Headingley

I believe we were talking about how amazing matches go beyond the possible and comprehensible. To which we can now add the tolerable, palatable, and digestible. I guess we know now who has stepped into the Messianic Ashes All Rounder shoes of Andrew Flintoff. Spinning 73 runs out of that 11^th-wicket partnership was certainly a loaves and fishes-worthy trick. I for one look forward to the day when Ben Stokes presents whatever Australian Ninja Warrior has become in 10 years time or has a bucket of hissing cockroaches thrown over him in a ditch in the South African jungle.

The quandary for me all week has been reconciling the fact that this was a “great” match that I am “glad” to have watched with the fact that it was a “horrendous” match that I felt “sick” watching. At the start of the final over it was all I could do to squeak “Patty” from under a blanket like an expiring consumptive. Don’t tell me it has something to do with Cricket being the real winner. I’ll believe that when you find me an English person who believes that anyone or anything but England was the real winner of that game.

It was like a reverse sublime, where the impossibility of conceiving what was happening kept getting slapped around by the reality of it, quite literally toward the end. Wake up, wake up. Eyes wide open and shut at the same time. You could say that the Australian team’s ability to comprehend took too long to adjust to the reality, but it should never have had to in the first place. You can believe something is impossible, you can even know something is impossible, but the rule in sport is that you have to act as if it were possible. Ben Stokes certainly did. The problem isn’t about brains coping with the reality, but actions reflecting the possibility. Who cares what anyone thinks? I’ve always found Pascal’s wager distinctly unconvincing when it comes to believing in God, but it really works for sport. Act as though an England win is possible and you lose nothing if it turns out you’re wrong. Act as though an England win is impossible and boy will you suffer eternal damnation when you’re corrected.

There’s a lot less at stake for the spectator—nothing, really, when it comes down to it—so the tingling suspense between fear and hope with each dice throw of the ball can be felt as a kind of horrible pleasure (cf. the excellent analysis of King Cricket). Kant (and after Pascal, why not Kant?) thought pain was part of any really good pleasure because it’s the pain that makes you feel alive. Kant was a little bit of a bondage and discipline type, but I think the argument works. At some stage the experience tips into the sublime, the pleasure “mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair.” Yes.

The Man from Victoria

Moving from an aesthetic to a tactical quandary: who and where is the Great Australian All Rounder? There’s a satisfying combination of dash and heft in an all rounder, a combination Shane Watson tried and failed to achieve his whole career, and we seem to have trouble coming up with them. If you Google “great Australian all-rounders”, the first page throws up this fantastic bunch of non-sequiturs:

If you click on the link, you get a top ten that’s a bit shaky: Mitchell Johnson, Steve Waugh, and Shane Warne are the only players from the last 30 years (that’s again Shane Watson you hear howling in the distance). The judgement of the list’s compiler, Kovvali Teja, might leave something to be desired, but his SEO skills are really outstanding.

The Great Australian All Rounder of our times is Ellyse Perry of course, which isn’t much use to the team playing at Old Trafford in a couple of days. Meanwhile, it seems we must await the coming of the mysterious, and hugely gifted, Man from Victoria.

-->