The Australian Cricket Team, c'est moi

It came to me overnight as in a dream: I am under the weather, with a mountain of work in front of me that will see me labouring through pretty much every weekend until Christmas. I am the Australian Cricket Team. Or: the Australian Cricket Team, c’est moi.

I came down sick on the second day of the 1st Test and have been a lumbering allegory ever since: gloomed, clumsy, unfocused, poor appetite. Yesterday after the first half hour I had to go to the doctor. I toiled in the afternoon but then downed tools around five to “see Hussey get his century” – had I but known!

How to handle this awesome and unexpected metaphysical distinction? By continuing to follow the game am I engaged in a recursive loop of deterioriation – the worse it gets the worse I feel the worse they are the worse I am?

A nap this afternoon didn’t do anything, when I turned on again so little had happened for so long that Aggers leapt on a ball from Marcus North that seemed to show some turn: “something seemed to happen there...”

I really need to get out of the house. I am getting out of the house.

Test 2 Day 1

Gah. Who are these people? Am I with them?

I’d accepted on a theoretical level that things would need to get worse for Australia before they would get better, because of the in-built trauma of the downward slide that gives it momentum, but the acceptability of the idea in the abstract is a long way from its palatability in concreto. In other words, nice idea, but oh God the pain, the terrible pain...

Is it worse as spectator? I mean OK no, it’s not worse as a spectator, but at least as a player you have something to do, you get hit and that means you have work to do – be it only to work out what to say to Mark Nichols – and the work absorbs the pain that focuses your mind on the work.

I hear the wicket and all I can do is screw up my face or pull my hair and there’s a limit to that sort of thing and so most of the emotion just clangs around inside. I suppose this is why spectators start hitting each other. As for me, I took advantage of the groundwork laid by the game’s fast food sponsor to do some emotional eating. KFC is doing a very blokey burger range at the moment with things like hash-brown inserts - if I didn't know Warnie was already helping Maccas design a burger I would suspect his handiwork.



This allows me to segue to the Adelaide scoreboard, pictured here from this time last year, which is a fine looking object in itself, and the bar in the base of it has always struck me as one of those supremely blokey combos, like a beer cooler with a built-in transistor radio in reverse.