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.

Bat like nobody's watching, play like you've never been hurt

My least favourite interior decorating trend of the last decade is WORDS as wall decorations. In the kitchen: FOOD. In the bedroom: SLEEP. Jumping out at random: LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE. And who can forget those old favourites SMILE and DREAM?

Cricket Australia has not. It has really upped the ante in this game:

As Mr Batsy remarked to me this morning, “elite honesty” is like being “a lot pregnant”. You are honest or you’re not. Once you start qualifying things, it’s a very short step to “it’s complicated”.

And of all the qualifiers... “elite”?

When I saw the “elite mateship” and “like an exclusive nightclub” quotes being thrown around when Langer was appointed coach, I assumed it was dirt people had dug out of his memoirs to show how inappropriate his appointment was. That interpretation seemed so obvious to me that it was not until NOW, when I saw this infernal word “elite” again, that I realised my mistake.

The general feeling when the tampering crisis broke was that one of the problems was the way the Australian dressing room had become a sort of isolated bubble leading to a disconnect between players and the broader Australian public. A bit like, I don’t know, they felt they were an elite group inside an exclusive nightclub.

I also thought we were living in a time when the word “elite” is not usually a term of praise. Aren’t “elites” those book-learnin’ latte-sippers? There’s a lot of innocence in Langer’s use of the term. I suspect he was actually trying to come up with an arresting turn of phrase, trying to avoid the clichés he knows he is fond of (“The man in the mirror is almost a cliché…”), and landed on “elite” as fresh take on “gentlemanly” and a fancy way of saying “really good.” He certainly got the arresting turn of phrase bit right.

Clichés and abstract nouns have been the stock in trade of coach and player speak since forever. They are an expected and disposable element of any press conference, almost an in-joke. To see them plastered on a dressing-room wall almost divests them of the tiny grain of meaning they may have still held. If you are trying to internalise a value, the last thing you need is to have it constantly in your face. You stop seeing things you see all the time.

It’s again a kind of innocence. The public denounced the loss of pride, integrity and respect for the game. Cricket Australia’s response: no worries, we are going to make the players say those words lots of times, and just wait until you see how big we can write those words on the wall!

I blame Shane Watson, obviously. When you are averaging around 50 and everyone around you is failing, are you a blessed stalwart of the top order or are you in fact its cursed hoodoo?

I also only just realised Justin Langer is Australia's batting coach. Just the other day - the first day of this Test - I was wondering what message they'd be getting in the change rooms and hoping it would be more along the Ian Chapell lines of "get it together or we're stuffed" than the Power of Passion lines of "you know you can do it, back yourself and think of the Baggy Green, etc etc". So: hmm.

P.S. Katich trained at my local oval yesterday. Must I be everywhere?

Windies Test 3

I’ve been a bit off my cricket. It’s not a good sign when you miss the first day of a Test because you just hadn’t realised it had started, which is what I did with this last one. I might not have enjoyed seeing Simon Katich hole out on 99, but I could have been there and explained that Warnie did just the same thing. And even if I am a bowler’s girl, it was very poor form only half-watching Chris Gayle’s century because I was making dinner. For myself.

It picked up the last couple of days or so. So, things.

Grandstand commentators

I’ve got a certain amount of time for Justin Langer—he’s a famous cuddler—but I start to steal glances at my watch when he goes all shiny-eyed happy-clappy, which is a lot. Every ball, every state of play: an occasion to see the sunrise and live the dream, and if there’s space to fill there’s plenty of pride and joy in wearing the Baggy Green to go around.

It doesn’t stop at the boundary. Post-retirement, behold the terrifying Justin Langer “Power of One” World Tour of Duty, Passion and Self-Belief: getting his black belt, doing a marathon, the Kokoda Trail (here I muttered “Antarctica, surely” under my breath, and, close…), the North Pole. All the chestnuts of the cross.

Balance is of course offered by Terry “Backseat Driver” Alderman, whose default attitude to Australian goings-on on the field is disbelief mingled with disgust. It’s a bit like being at a school assembly where an interminable special guest address is succeeded by a lengthy harangue from the irritable deputy principal.

Unlikely lookalike #342

And speaking of poles and opposites, is it ridiculous to suggest that Doug Bollinger is the sunny half of a pair whose dark pole would be… Dwight Schrute?

Doug being the blond to Dwight’s brunette; the bogan to Dwight’s bumpkin-geek; upbeat, energetic and straightforward where Dwight is sneering and Machiavellian? But both strongly resembling root vegetables. Dougie Bollinger: another brutti ma buoni bowler from the Sunshine State. Do they export all the pretty ones to WA?

Swotto

Shane Watson, after all, “has the face of a dickhead”, according to my flatmate, although I admit this association could have been set up by me saying “dickhead” whenever Shane Watson’s face appeared on screen.