Peter, Peter, Peter

What to say about Peter Roebuck? It’s always disturbing when the group loses one of its members, and he seems to have been a very lost sheep indeed and maybe for a long while.

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to say I often found him a very silly man. You don’t have to be a “tormented genius” to earn affection or be entitled to be mourned and I think there’s an element of hysteria in the accolades that have come from his colleagues in the last 24 hours. They protest too much. Starting with Greg Baum’s “He was tormented as only genius can be. The circumstances of his death attest to it.” I might be misreading the stress here, but surely the one thing that the circumstances of Peter Roebuck’s death attests to is all the reasons a person can be tormented apart from because they're a genius. And Malcolm Knox's citation of a remark made about Roebuck before his death: “Peter could have been anything, a professor of literature or a High Court Judge or a political leader.” Could anyone, given the historically established facts, be a more spectacularly inappropriate High Court Judge? Is anyone more unimaginable as a political leader?

A professor of literature, I’ll buy, and Harsha Bhogle is probably on to something when he says that Peter Roebuck was born to write about cricket. Cricket writing is a natural home for Spartan values blended with excessive prose and clearly I know of what I speak. But contra Harsha, Peter Roebuck was born to write about cricket in exactly the opposite way to how Tendulkar was born to play it, because the latter is the triumph over the proprietary rights of imperialism rather than their expression. There was a lot of Imperialism in Peter Roebuck - his global drift, his missionary zeal, his tragically misplaced applications of muscular Christianity. But he also played against type, he was often refreshingly pragmatic and progressive in his views on the evolution of cricket and I appreciated that.

I do think it’s disrespectful to gloss the unsavoury parts of his life as “flaws”, and I do mean disrespectful to him, though not only to him. If you can’t be seen plain after your death, you’ve been erased in a way that’s more sinister than dying. Committing suicide was Peter Roebuck's final feat of eloquence and the least we can do is listen to what he was saying.

The prettiest bloke to watch

Oh, Special K.

This blog started with a picture of Katich's roar, and together we've been through his bristling 5 o'clock shadows, seen the Hard Man clicking his heels and pondered the quality of Balkan Haut over crêpe layer cake.

And there they were at the press conference - the bristle, the roar, the "deliciously dangerous" of the Balkan Haut.  Half-way through, Katich said "I know I'm not the prettiest bloke to watch", and everyone chuckled, through probably not for the same reason I practically fell off my chair. It was over before I had the chance to put up my hand and ask "How is it you are so dreamy?"

Peter Roebuck wrote of Katich in his postmortem today, "Hairy, cussed and wilful, he has been a man apart." I have stated my position on "cussedness" previously, but I love that he chose to lead with "hairy", and strongly suspect him of owning a cache of Men in Cricket calendars.

All summer I felt someone needed to have a little chat with the Australian cricket team and administrators about Aristotle and Bergson and the distinction between potentiality and actuality. That actuality comes before potentiality, however counter-intuitive that might seem. That things are only possible after they are real. And that, as a result, claims to excellence based on potential wear very thin if you are not actually performing.

I did not expect to have to go on to explain the converse, namely the weirdness of claiming someone is not excellent, based on their potential, when they are actually performing.

ODI Retrospective floor sweepings

I gather there's a World Cup on, but free-to-air me wouldn't know about that yet and dammit if I don't still have baggage from the post-Test part of the summer. I know, such old news. Who do I think I am? A procrastinating obsessive is who: I have Thoughts that won't go away but which take me an age to get out. Some truths are in any case perennial.

1. There were days in January when you couldn't open a paper without a Hallelujah chorus issuing forth hailing the coming of Shane Watson, saviour of the honour of the Australian team and oil on the troubled waters of Ipswich. Congratulations Watto, your 5-year plan to become Freddie Flintoff is complete, you are our very own messianic all-rounder. I wish I liked you more. I accept you are MVP but could you ever be my BFF? (Hint: lose the WTF of the run-outs.)

2. I am glad Shaun Marsh distinguished himself with the bat, because it has given me a mental image of him to replace his showing as the Sexy Gardener in the 2009 Men of Cricket calendar:




Those are impressively air-brushed abs, but they don't quite divert my eyes from that... that "distressed" patch on the crotch. What am I supposed to infer from this jeans lesion? That the Lady of the Manor has been clawing at your groin? That there has been a constant Chafing of your Engorgement? That you have a phallus dentata? Like I said, there were some mental images that needed dispelling.

3. Speaking of images, is there a trope Peter Roebuck is more fond of than the Stages of Man? The passage from boy to man, obviously, but also coming to terms with the onset of decrepitude. There is no action that cannot be analysed as a negotiation of life's great Journey. Michael Clarke at the crease trying to strike a balance between defence and attack? "He has to find his Own Path."

4. This season has been a relatively lean one for look-alikes. Like everyone else I have been charmed by Brett Lee's return, and his boy-scout derring-do. And so:

TNT!

I had just been reading up on oxytocin, the "cuddle hormone", and then I saw Adrian Barath make his century. Adorable! The leap of joy, the being swept up and spun around in Dinesh Ramdin's arms, the salute to the crowd and the team, but the clincher of his place in Cricket Love history was his lean into Ramdin's chest—it bordered on a nuzzle—to go in for a second cuddle. I was combing the interwebs for pictures of the cuddles in particular and thought I had found one, but it turns out it was Barath engaged in yet another delightful cuddle in another game entirely. He can't help himself, he's Adrian Boris "Mr Oxytocin" Barath.

Adrian Barath & Lendl Simmo, 29th January 2009 (WI vs England) (AP/AndresLeighton (c))

It was a long way from Peter Roebuck's polite (?) inquiry of Fazeer Mohammed on Day 1 as to whether Barath and Ramdin's background was middle class or, rather, perhaps, "peasant". Oh Peter. Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter. Oh Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter. What will I do with you?

A more palatable moment in Grandstand camp was when Ponting dropped Travis Dowlin off Mitchell Johnson, which yielded this clipped exchange:

Roebuck (I think): Uncharacteristic.
Maxwell: Most.

Quite!

And I was glad to see that Nathan Hauritz has not lost his flair.

A shame about, well, the rest.