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.

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.

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Steve Smith Feels Great, or the Follies of Lords

There were all sorts of problems with the headlines lauding the brave and valiant Steve Smith, many of them to do with the valorisation of toughness over brain tissue, but for me the glaring one was not that it’s the wrong message, but that it’s the wrong descriptor. “Brave” is when you don’t want to do something but do it anyway. Steve Smith wanted to do something very badly and was intolerant of anything and anyone who tried to stop him. I wouldn’t call him brave any more than I would call a Terminator “brave”.

Usually when a players is injured, you see two pains on their face: the physical pain and then the pain of realising that they might have to go off. When Steve Smith was hit on the arm, there was the physical pain, and then seven stages of annoyance: that he made the error, that he wouldn’t be able to play as well as he wanted to, that time was being wasted, that he wouldn’t be able to play as well as he wanted to, that people would pester him about going off, that he wouldn’t be able to play as well as he wanted to, and then maybe, just maybe, a tiny flicker of annoyance around the edge or back of his mind at the fact that he may “have to” go off. Because he must on some level know that’s a thing, right? Because it kind of looked like he didn’t.

And then he gets knocked off his feet by a ball hitting his neck at over 140 km/hr and the routine starts up again, a routine that is fuelled by a delusion: that if you will it hard enough, you can make it so that nothing has happened. And then, beneath the delusion, a kind of psychosis: a belief that what has happened has, in fact, not happened. “I Feel Great”, says the man with a head injury and what looks like a broken arm. A bit later, there was a moment where he seemed to believe that maybe, just maybe, being given out LBW when you were out LBW was not a “have to” go off situation. That maybe what happened had not, in fact, happened.

It was madness, and I feel like the core terror and fascination of this day, and the reason it will go down as the day that cemented his greatness as a Figure of the game and not just a Champion is because it was the day on which we beheld the naked face of the personal madness of Steve Smith. “Madness” isn’t really a thing, in any scientific sense. I don’t mean mental illness or concussion. We know now he was concussed when he was hit on the head, however delayed the symptoms, and lord knows any of us can have various degrees of mental illness and maybe sportspeople especially so, but above or beyond or beside any of that—and it was there before he was hit on the head—was something so personal and peculiar and powerful, and so removed from the real and the rational, that I can’t think of a better word than madness.

Some might say that “mad” is Smith’s brand. The fidgets and rituals, the unorthodox style, the time in the nets that goes beyond obsession to something like fixation. When people talk about Steve Smith as a “freak”, they are referring to things that anyone could see from the numbers on the page without knowing the person, but the word does double duty as a reference to his personal freakishness, because greatness is never just about the results on the page, but the presence of the person who gets them and the way they get them. Anything you can refer to as a brand though is far too manageable to be madness. This was a glimpse of a monster both appalling and touching, because what was the face of that monster, sitting in the stands? A stony-faced boy at the dinner table who has been made to come in from play.

There was a shift in the perception of Smith after the first test, where the edges of his personhood started to blur around the edges into something more and less than human in an attempt represent something that went beyond extraordinary. Steve Waugh compared him to a computer—“It’s like he analyses every ball, and it’s like a computer: he spits out the answer.” Commentators didn’t talk about personal and technical flaws when addressing the question of “how to get Steve Smith out” but arranged data into various clusters of points to try to crack that code and get inside the matrix. To say that Archer’s answer to the “how to get Steve Smith out” question came as a jolt back to reality is an understatement. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object? It makes a horrible sound.

At the end of that day of the Lords test it was like everyone was dazed from a series of blows and wired on adrenaline, but the difference between the rest of us and Steve Smith was that we knew something had very much happened, even if it wasn’t entirely clear what. We absorbed all of the reality and gravity that Smith could not seem to see or accept. After every extraordinary match you ask yourself: what have I just seen, what just happened? It’s like they stretch the bounds of what is possible and comprehensible and this time it went beyond the physical to the two great Beyonds themselves flashing before our eyes: Death and Madness.

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Ashes 2019 - Test 1, Edgebaston

Booing I

I feel like it is only by a supreme effort of will that I myself don’t boo English players loudly and at every opportunity: walking onto the field, scoring, not scoring, reviewing, ‘milestoning’, walking off the field. If I had the chance to do so without destroying the illusion that I am a grown-up spectator of a genteel game, under the cover of righteousness… well, maybe, maybe not. I honestly think it is more tasteful and honourable to boo gratuitously out of sheer partisan spite than from moral zealotry. The way kiddies at the rugby league leap out of their seats and run to the sideline to boo opposition players trying to convert a try, the most petty and unsporting gesture imaginable, well, it warms the cockles of your heart. Not even kidding.

Booing II

The people booed most at the football are of course the referees and, well, would we... could we? I reckon it would be an implosion of cricket’s self image on the scale of a Bodyline or World Series cricket if the crowd booed the umpires.* Completely inconceivable a week ago, surely still impossible, and yet you can feel the patience wearing dangerously thin. Just as well there is plenty of time to drink restoring cups of tea to soothe the nerves before the next match. And that Joel Wilson won’t take to the field. Wilson's pauses were nothing like the Slow Finger of Doom of a Steve Bucknor or Rudi Koertzen where the decision was quick but the arm raised at the inexorable pace of a 19^th-century bridge. This was just "...... maybe?"

*Also if we adopted the verb “to milestone”.

Redemption I

A redemption narrative is where someone makes up for a wrong with a right. They are supposed however to be the same kind of wrong and right. A moral wrong (like, say… cheating and lying) isn’t ‘redeemed’ by a technical right (like, say… making lots of runs). But moral wrongs like cheating and lying displease crowds and making lots of runs please crowds and therein lies a miasma of good and bad switching places and creating a redemption narrative for Steve Smith. To be honest, I think people fundamentally like Steve Smith and wanted a reason not to boo him any more, just as they probably always wanted a reason to boo David Warner. We’ll see how much technical virtue erases moral stains when he or Bancroft make a century.

Redemption II

Speaking of slow doom, I never saw anything as depressed, as depressing, or as slow, as Peter Siddle walking off the SCG field after being given out on the fifth day of the fifth test in the 2010-2011 Ashes, a series that England won 3-1. Siddle, Smith and (briefly) Khawaja are the only players in the current team who endured that horror season. Nothing would make me (and probably him) happier than if he saw out his Ashes career out with an away win. Hat-trick optional, but most desirable.

Bite the dust

This came to my attention this week:


 
The person who shared the information had reservations:


 
I don’t know whether Tony is seeing what I am seeing, but for me the nub of the problem is very clear. It is this:

‘Written loosely to the tune “My old man’s a dustman”’

Let that sink in. I don’t know the song “My old man’s a dustman.” And yet I do. If you look deep within yourself you will find you do too. You know this song, you can feel it in your bones, and you know it to be a terrible, terrible song. Details flash across your consciousness from another dimension. It is sung in a cockney accent. There is ribaldry - oh, the ribaldry. There is a singalong chorus and lots of “laffs”. It must be stopped.

I resent the fact that the song is mentioned as though it will be a familiar reference to me in any way but the nightmarish race memory way described above. I don’t know how I feel about Denis Carnahan now, knowing that he knows and makes use of this song, and I don’t care how “loosely” the new song is based on this one, I know where that song has been.
I may have got the wrong end of the stick completely and “My old man’s a dustman” is actually an old Radiohead album track (“Creep” has potential, come to think of it). But I am too scared to go and find out.

It is of course all part of the perennial “problem” of Australia not having a real counterpart to the Barmy Army. People always talk about this like it is a bad thing, but maybe, just maybe, the existence of the Barmy Army has a tiny little bit to do with a propensity to sing songs like “My old man’s a dustman” and we are well to keep out of it.

PS.
“Barbie Army” is a very weak name, unless you are an actual army of pink Barbies waving tongs. I agree that any name would be stronger than “Fanatics”, but you can do better than this. If you really must do this sort of thing, how about “BBQ HQ”? “Vegemite Regiment”? I’ll stop there.



Super bass

There was some discussion in the Grandstand commentary box about the expression “eye like a dead fish”. I didn’t catch all of it - it extended over several shifts - but Simon Katich and Jim Maxwell knew the expression, Jonathan Agnew and his BBC friends had never heard of it, and Jim tried to explain it to Chris Rogers, who may or may not have known the expression but was highly sceptical of Jim’s guesses as to where it came from. I didn’t blame him, they were very bad guesses, stuff to do with the eyes on a dead fish “sticking out”.

So, I know this expression, and it makes sense that it came up with Simon Katich because he is the model of the cricketer with an “eye like a dead fish”. Here is my attempt to explain what it means and why. It is a theory pulled out of my arse and then I will do some homework to see if it is right.

When you say a cricketer has an eye like a dead fish it means they are unblinking. They see the ball and they don’t flinch. So:

Fish have no eyelids and don’t blink. 
Dead people have open eyes and don’t blink. 
Dead fish = unblinking squared.

You have to forget about things like the fact that anything dead is also blind.

Now I will have a look.

Result: I am very good at this. I also learned that some of the things Jim was saying, to do with shell shock and the thousand-yard stare, seemed to have been gleaned from the Urban Dictionary. I suspect they were notes handed to him from a producer, but the idea that Jim Maxwell regularly consults the Urban Dictionary pleases me very much.






Beam me up

There was a lot of talk about DRS in the Adelaide Test, because there were a lot of reviews and a lot of reviews overturned. This always leads to a lot of angst about the Rise of the Machines.

Part of it is aesthetic: ‘spoils the flow of the game’. Some of it is moral: Won’t Somebody Think of the Children. A lot of it is what I like to call the Epistemological Circle: a computer can’t know better than me because I know better than a computer. (I have already addressed one version of this argument – “you know when you’ve hit it” – here.)

It all tends to merge together into what I think of as the Star Trek argument. Humans: they’re great because they’re rational, but not too rational. It is an amalgam of tolerance/intolerance of human/machine error/accuracy that goes something like this:

Humans get things right.
BUT it is ok if we sometimes get things wrong, because: human.
BUT it is NOT okay if technology sometimes gets things wrong, because LACKS CHARM.
AND it is ALSO not really okay if technology gets things right because LACKS CHARM.

I tend to be systematically on the side of technology in these kinds of things because I am suspicious of gut instinct/common sense arguments in general. They also tend to be mixed up in good old days/when I was a boy arguments, which I flat-out loathe. It is also true however that my own personal ball tracking ability would never come into conflict with a computer because it doesn’t exist. I have the eye of a stunned mullet.

Struggle Street

Nathan Lyon and the National Character

Simon Katich on Grandstand suggested that one of the reasons that Australian cricket fans had embraced Nathan Lyon is that Australians “love a battler”. Hahahahahaha no. Australian cricket fans love love love success and there is no more merciless derision than the derision of the Australian cricket-watching public towards a “battling” player.

Some previous “battling” may add some narrative interest in retrospect once success has been achieved, but has Nathan Lyon ever really been a battler? Nathan Lyon’s narrative is being the groundskeeper who was plucked from obscurity like Lana Turner at the soda fountain and fast tracked into the national team to answer the national prayers for a consistent star spinner. He has been overlooked under some circumstances and that’s about it. It is not a battler story.

I think he attracts the battler label because, unlike Lana Turner, he looks like a battler. The runt of the litter rather than top dog, the very opposite of Warne. I have previously analysed the Australian public’s dislike of Michael Clarke as an aversion to pretty cricketers (Michael Clarke may be the exception to the rule that Australian cricket fans will love you when you’re successful). Lyon is successful, but “quirky-looking” and the Australian public does love love love “quirkiness”, which feeds its self image as a humorous offbeat people who love underdogs and… battlers. Hahahahahahha no.

Cameron Bancroft

Cameron Bancroft apparently has a very heavy head. We know now why he didn’t flinch at bat pad when he received a knock on the grill and we know now what he was thinking when it happened: “Weird.”

Jim Maxwell

Is becoming a bit of a parody of himself, no? He went on a rant at one stage: “Why is it always all about the ‘next generation’? What percentage of the population is 65 and over? Get them to the Shield games. They can take a newspaper and crossword.” I wanted to point out that marketing to this group isn’t a very long-term strategy. Or isn’t a very “future-proofed” strategy, if I wanted to annoy him. He sounds tired and I know he wasn’t well last year, but I really think he hasn't been the same since Peter Roebuck died. He sounds alone.

Chris Rogers

I love Chris Rogers. I love how you can hear him sort of grapple with himself when he speaks, a sort of stuttering hesitation like he is still trying to make up his mind even as the words are coming out of his mouth. It's charming.

Off topic: Jarryd Hayne

Arrgh go away it’s too complicated. JUST when Parramatta had got its life back together, you turn up like the bad boy old boyfriend. The one who turns on the charm when it suits him and then leaves you dangling for months. The one with the siren call: “But you’re the only one who really understands me. You’re the one who can save me.” Arrrrgh.

Back on track

Back in 2012 I was already saying "When are we going to stop being 3 or 4 for under 50?" Being saved by the captain and having a solid 2nd innings when the pressure is off is part of this pattern, it does not make up for it. I'll be watching.

In case you were wondering how I felt

Parallel story: when I am dodging work to watch the cricket I try to kill more than one bird, in this case making an apple pie during the first session.

There's been a lot of "5-nil" talk in the lead up to this series. To which I say: no amount of crowing “5-nil” will convince me that anything but an away series win will properly avenge the Ashes of 2005. And it will especially not avenge the tragesty* that was the 2011-12 home series loss, which no one seems to talk about. I tell you, the vision of Graeme Swann doing the “sprinkler” in front of the Barmy Army at the SCG is not easily forgotten, let alone forgiven.

The 2006-2007 series, the original “5-nil”, only represented “job done” for one person, Shane Warne, which we know because he called it a day. The pleasure of the 2006-2007 whitewash was the Shane Warne narrative that ran through it and ran through him. Not the wins per se, but the sheer force of will that won the Adelaide Test and the showmanship that produced the 700th wicket. It perfectly encapsulated the command of the elements and the story that characterised his whole career. 

It represented an appropriate counterpoint to 2005 because the great spectacle of that series, more than the losses per se, was the Agony of Warne trying to win the Ashes all by himself when all was collapsing around him. For sheer defiance in the face of the odds, for the attempt to be not only every bowler but every batsman, it was probably an even greater demonstration of will than 2006-2007, and all the greater for being unsuccessful.

Now, however, Test cricket seems to have settled into a too-comfortable pattern of we win here, you win there, I’m OK, you’re OK, trophies going back and forth like a game of pass-the-parcel where every child gets a prize. It’s not okay, I tell you. A while ago people said Australia crushing the English here at home was getting “boring” and I said never, never will I tire of the Melancholy of Nasser, but I think now that was because it came on top of beating them on their home territory - take that and that. Without that added edge, as part of a regular pattern… yes, it is potentially boring. And even if not, don’t pretend 5-nil is good enough.

*James Hooper came out with this portmanteau on an episode of the Back Page a while ago and it has stuck.

This

Yes. Combined age 451, combined chromosomal arms 56. A dick cannot of a Y chromosome an X chromosome make.

1. I’ll say firstly that we have to make allowances for Chappell and Lawry. Every cricketer who took the risk of helping Kerry Packer create the World Series was promised a job for life, so these two will not go anywhere until they die or damn well want to.

2. At the other end of the spectrum, I have never understood or accepted the presence of Mark Nicholas and you can see from the photo that he knows he does not belong there too. The anchor spot is the obvious entry point for a woman into this line up and should happen immediately.

3. Michael Clarke. Simultaneously bores and enrages me. I think this is the polarisation of the impression he used to make on me at press conferences: bland and irritating. He was so perfect at the media thing so this seems a logical continuation and yet not. So not. Apart from anything else we didn’t get a break from him. He went straight from captaining to the commentary box! We needed a rest. Everyone else leaves a decent gap. Don’t be so eager. Stop reminding us of how commercial a proposition you are. He won’t go, of course.

4. Warnie. Has the novelty worn off? His lack of self-censorship and strategic nous was refreshing at the start. Now he mostly appears as the har har larrikin** interspersed with pronouncements from on high about individual players that become media stories. There is no correlation between Warnie’s magnificence as a cricketer (see above) and his presence on the small screen. Warnie is big, but the pictures are small. He won’t go, of course.

5. Healy. Such a nice face. Can we keep him, Mum?

6. Michael Slater and Mark Taylor. Nothing personal, but it is hard to see their presence as necessary.

Funnily enough one of the aims of WSC was to attract more women and migrants to the game. Nine also recently televised parts the Women’s Ashes series, though unfortunately not the most telegenic moment of Elyse Perry’s 200. The tide in this area is turning very quickly. However stodgy the Nine commentary team is, I can’t see the line-up lasting too much longer. They might be hanging out for Elyse Perry to retire, but that might be a while.

** You know the irony about that whole “Gunna have a beer? Eh? Eh?” incident? Warnie is not really a beer drinker, as far as I can gather from the too-many biographies I have read. Too challenging for his palate, I guess. I would imagine he is a bourbon and coke man, maybe scotch and soda, the odd red wine. Not a big drinker in general I think. Most of the pictures of Warnie "drinking" alcohol show him pouring it over his head or attempting to fit his mouth around the whole rim of a glass, in the manner of, respectively, a toddler and a 12 year old. This didn’t stop the 99 Not Out beer designed for him by Moa from being a really excellent beer and by far the best value beer on the market when they started remaindering it.

In case you were wondering about the pie:

I think it speaks for itself.

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.

Second test, Lords, Day 1

Thoughts this morning when I saw the overnight score of 1/337.
 
(in bed) 

1. Ha! 

2. Is this going to be boring? 

3. Will someone get in trouble at Lords for the pitch? I heard someone on the radio who had spoken to the groundskeeper say last night that some well laid plans had been stymied by rain, but, um, this is England. Allow for rain, you guys. 

(making breakfast) 

4. I wonder whether the Australian team could work out some kind of ‘retirement’ system so everyone could have a go, like in kids cricket. 

5. Oh, that’s match fixing, is it? 

6. I bet some kids (and parents) reckon it’s match fixing in kids cricket too. 

Thoughts last night
 
1. Anyone else noticed the role reversal between Chris Rogers and David Warner this series, with Warner anchoring a racy Rogers? 

2. How does Moeen Ali feel about everyone attributing his success to the fact that he is not nearly as good a spinner as Graeme Swann? Every time someone gets out ‘going after’ him, the commentators talk about how there was no need to take the risk because, unlike his predecessor, this guy will reliably send down some shit. I think I might say, ‘Oh yeah? Well, this “shitty” bowler is the leading English wicket taker of the series so far. AND I bat better than Swann and am less annoying. AND has it ever occurred to you that I am in fact Alessandro del Piero in cunning disguise?

<

No? Back to the leading wicket taker thing then.’ 

3. How many advertisement voice-over actors are hired for their ability to sound a bit like Richard Briers? QBE is the latest one, but this is something that has been going on for years, and from now on I’m taking notes. 

Watto

Yesterday, Peter Fitzsimons wrote a column in the SydneyMorning Herald in defence of Shane Watson: ‘Why the Hate for Shane Watson?’. I know, if only Shane Watson could write a column entitled ‘Why the Hate for Peter Fitzsimons?’, their mutual bewilderment could reflect back and forth for infinity in perpetual motion, solve the world’s energy crisis and leave the rest of us in peace. 

That aside, Fitzsimons hasn’t done his homework. He asks whether anyone can recall Watson ‘making a complete prat of himself by brattish behaviour’. Why yes, Peter, yes I can. And if he thinks it is remotely acceptable to ‘call for a lot of reviews’, for personal reasons, just in case THIS time it will work, I’m not sure he knows what cricket is or knows anything about anything. Shane Watson himself may even have wished PF had left that bit out (with friends like those...). I’m pretty sure even Shane Watson thinks he calls for those reviews for the sake of the team, because that’s the kind of fool he is. 

This is the thing: people hate Watto because they don’t like him. He can perform all he wants, but if people don’t like you, they will hang back when you succeed and pounce when you fail. And the law of the playground dictates that if they don’t like you then, alas, trying to be liked will only make things worse. It’s not pretty, but it’s a pantomime out there and there’s no disputing taste. None of the ‘haters’, including myself, know much about Shane Watson, they just know what they don't like. If I was going to try to explain, I might say that the whiff people get from Shane Watson is, in the gentlest terms, ‘immaturity’. Pushing it a little further, I might say ‘a weird admixture of sheepishness and arrogance’. Push it further than that and I’ll only get carried away. What's the point of heckling someone when they've already left the building? 

I would have liked to have compiled a montage of some of Shane Watson’s ‘moments in time’ to his own motivational soundtrack of choice, Whitney Houston’s One Moment In Time. If you have a listen and a watch it’s not so hard to do that montage in your head. Watto, you inspired some of my best work. We’ll always have ‘All Trojan horse, no Greeks.’

Taking the biscuit

Sophia Gardens, Cardiff

It had been nagging at me from the first time they showed the Cardiff ground from the air. That shape, I recognised it. It was a biscuit shape, but not just any biscuit. I could see it in my mind’s eye: a square cracker with cut off corners, a little bit wholemeal. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that that biscuit is none other than Arnott’s Sesame Wheat, a member of the Arnott’s Cheeseboard Cracker Assortment, which is where I probably came across it. I can now sleep easy.

Goodbye, Watto?
Shane Watson can take comfort in the fact that a new form of dismissal will be erected in his memory: LBWFR - Leg Before Wicket Failed Review. It even looks a bit Welsh. When he got out, Mr Batsy said surely that had to be it and how happy he felt despite the game being a disaster, but I felt suddenly, strangely bereft. Shane and I have been in this thing together from the very beginning: lookalikes, hair analysis and bagging Shane Watson is the stuff this blog is made of. In the sitcom in my head, he is the Newman to my Seinfeld: ‘Hello, Watto’. In the last year or so the Problem of Shane has suddenly become a subject of public discussion and I’ve been all, “I didn’t like him first. You should have seen his early stuff.”

After writing yesterday about a career that seems to have been almost entirely made up of playing for his career, I wondered whether that made him lucky or unlucky. Unlucky, because that’s a horrible situation to be in for most of your career, lucky because you’re only in that situation time and time again because you’ve somehow managed to hang on. How many times has Shane Watson actually been dropped for reasons other than injury? I can remember Marsh making the call last summer (only to be un-called by Mark Waugh) and ‘Homeworkgate’… when else? Obviously he’s been productive and useful enough to get there and stay there, pulling something out of the hat just when it seemed to be all over. I’m not quite at the point of speaking about him in the past tense, we’ll obviously call for a review when the finger is raised.

Plus that’s an Ugly Christmas Jumper

So. Lookalikes, tick. Watto, tick. Hair? Easy. Ricky's back for Swisse Ultivite for Men and needs to be told that’s not a toupee on his head, it’s a merkin.