Padded up

Obviously I had no thoughts about the 3rd Test. Or the 4th Test. Or did I? Possible scenarios :

• No thoughts about the Tests
• So absorbed in Tests that distance of reflection impossible
• Thoughts about Tests, but too absorbed in life to put them down

Maybe a bit of all three. David Warner’s century was certainly fun, and I recommend watching David Warner bat with menfolk around, preferably with a couple of them under 15. But otherwise it was all a bit of a fizzer, non? All the runs, yes, but how many runs does one batsman really need?

People will remember the runs, but I give you some other things that have left their mark on the 2011-2012 test cricket season:

The Bupa ads.

You have to dislike an ad that is coy about what it is advertising, but the real source of irritation in the "What would you do if you met the healthier version of yourself?" scenarios for me is their emotional palette. Where is less-healthy You’s suspicion and resentment? Where is healthier You’s pity and disgust ? And if science fiction has taught me anything, it is that any story that begins with you meeting another version of yourself, ends in a frantic fight to the death. Perhaps we could have a follow-up series: young woman selves suddenly leap at each other’s throats over the cafe table, older woman selves suddenly start chasing each other around the park, middle-aged man selves suddenly stab each other in the gut.

The drinks-break Gatorade bottles

These have morphed from one enormous comic phallus wheeled out onto the ground, to two smaller ones strapped to the backs of guys on segues, both remaining however within the realm of an early Woody Allen sex comedy. I look forward to the day they jump a genre and we see the drinks carriers arrive via Gatorade-bottle-shaped Thunderball jetpacks.

This year’s KFC

Still in the realm of hospitality, there’s the 12th man who carries the drinks, and then there’s the 13th and 14th men, Mitchell Johnson and Cameron White, who have the hidden but crucial task of sitting in the dressing room Fresh Testing chicken sandwiches for the rest of the team.

PS

I woke up in the middle of the night with a crucial codicil to the last post about Michael Clarke. You can’t separate the good looks from the marketability. When the Australian public looks at Michael Clarke, they see the face that launches a thousand products, but this only because when a marketer looks at Michael Clarke, they see a model. If Clarke seems especially promiscuous from a commercial point of view, it is only because he is the captain who can be let loose on an unsuspecting television audience during normal programming time and ratings periods. They don’t show those Steve Waugh Johnnie Walker ads outside of cricket matches, you know. And the "face" of Swisse during prime time is Sonia Kruger, not Ricky Ponting. For all we know, Steve Waugh was desperate to hock himself on the market, but what product would you stand him next to and make it look better?

Border-Gavaskar Trophy, Test 2

The SCG

My first visit to the SCG was when my Uncle David took me (and maybe my Dad?) to watch some cricket there some time in the mid-1980s. Based on how many people were at the ground, we were probably watching part of a Sheffield Shield match. We were somewhere near the Hill, but not on the Hill, because my overhwhelming memory of that afternoon is of the turquoise plastic seats which, combined with the heat, made me sweat through my thin home-made grey cotton “Buffalo Girl” skirt to the point where I was sure it looked like I’d wet myself.

In my imagination a couple of young guys behind us made a derisive comment about it when I stood up. I don’t know whether they did or whether I was so feverishly self-conscious and afraid they would that I hallucinated it. Once I’d registered the problem I was wholly absorbed in worrying about it, trying to minimise it by perching on the edge of the seat and working out how I could gauge its extent without exposing myself to further ridicule. Ah, sweet 16. It wasn’t a great afternoon. The cricket seemed physically far away and I had no idea what was going on.

The next visit was this time in 2000, when the cricket seemed close and the ground was like a secret garden. That particular low angle across the ground was highlighted during this year’s test by the tribulations of Joe the Cameraman on his segue.

Michael Clarke

Kerry has been going on and on and on and on and on and on all summer and for some time previous that the Australian public has been very unfair in its treatment of Michael Clarke and would get its comeuppance. He reckoned this test was that time of reckoning, but I don’t know. I don’t know that runs were ever the problem and I’m not sure than runs overcome the problem. I think the Australian public demands a certain admixture of mongrel in its cricket captains and Michael Clarke is too well-behaved and, when it comes down to it, too good-looking for people to really warm to him.

Too good looking: hardly his fault, of course, and better and worse Australian cricketers have suffered before him on this count. (I’ve always suspected Michael Bevan was unfairly overlooked because of an excess of prettiness. Head to head with Steve Waugh in a number of epic batting partnerships, he could never win against the Gristle King.) The last pretty blond captain was Kim Hughes, enough said.

Too well-behaved: When Clarke started, he really did have puppy-like appeal, all bright and bounding and energetic. But instead of developing some of the more rascally, poo-in-the-slipper aspects of puppydom – he would have been well served by a Bourbon & Beefsteak-style incident during this period – he channelled all that enthusiasm into becoming the very straightest-backed, teacher-pleasing boy in class. The shiniest shoes, the first hand up. Being a swot is not a good strategy for winning hearts and minds, especially if winning hearts and minds is what you appear to be swotting up on. Did you hear the pointed references after the Sydney win to looking forward to spending a long night in the sheds enjoying a few coldies?

It’s a hard line to walk, being a good member of a team, a good employee of Cricket Australia, and a convincing man of the people. And beyond the stylistic issues there are the more substantial ones of dissing Andrew Symonds and dumping Simon Katich - obviously bigger problems for me than any “bros before hos” line of attack. I don’t know whether those problems can be solved, but I'm pretty sure runs won't do it.

Border-Gavaskar Trophy, 1st Test

I've learned from this Test that I have a bit of a tin eye for fine batting. I have no beef with Tendulkar and I enjoy the sense of occasion that swells around him, but once he'd settled in on Day 2 I was happy to make other plans and leave him to it. It’s like the incredible economy of effort and sense of ease is so effective that I can no longer see that anything is happening at all. As a technical dunce with zero experience I need things spelled out in big bold characters and only really respond to a vigorous spanking. A little more action, a little less sublimation, you get the idea.

At first I thought this was the opposite to my taste in bowlers. I used to say that Warnie fascinated me as a debutant because his wickets were like supernatural conjuring acts compared to the relatively transparent mechanics of fast bowling. But who am I kidding? As true as it is that Warnie is a tactical magician with all the freakish proficiency of a Tendulkar with the ball, I probably wouldn’t have paid attention if he hadn’t also played up the part of the big, bold character of the magician and put on the whole stage show.

Thing I

I have been following Ishant Sharma on Twitter purely on the back of this charming description of himself as “foodie, tidy and happy-go-lucky”, but I’m finding him just as charming as a visitor. So long and bendy and likeable, smiling sheepishly whether he’s been bouncing or been bounced.

Thing II

Harsha introduced Geoff Lawson twice on Day 1 as “Henry Lawson”. It made me wonder if he thought that was in fact his name, but it could have been some extra-dryness on Harsha’s part. I know “Henry Lawson” is the hidden stepping stone between “Geoff Lawson” and “Henry”, but it stays hidden, right? It’s either “Geoff Lawson” or “Henry”, right? Not “Henry Lawson”. I’ll give Harsha the benefit of the doubt. He seemed sad when he first came on and I thought he might have been missing P. Roebuck.

Thing III: James Pattinson, man of the thatch

When Warnie was first selected for the Australian team, he wore a fragrant beached mullet and only started to take wickets when he culled the party out back.

Twenty years later, young Australian bowlers have learned from their forebears and tame the mane prior to selection, but cannot escape the long arm of the search engine. I give you James Pattinson, c. 2008-2009:

*

 

* See here.

Sous le pitch, la plage

Well, there are mystery spinners, mercurial fast bowlers and batsmen maudits. Philip Hughes. Gosh, we talked about inner turmoil last summer, and when Hughes and Warner were batting it was a black hole down one end and a wide sandy expanse up the other. It was painful when Hughes got out, but it’s just stressful to watch him play. That kind of hell paved with good intentions is too close to home. It’s not the enthralling kind of stressful of watching Nathan Lyons on strike when Australia are 9 down and need 30 to win. Dave Warner again at the non-striker’s end, a picture of phlegm, casually leaning on his bat, filing his nails. Then he’d come on strike and everyone would run away, I don’t think I’ve seen a batsman left alone with the bowler and wicketkeeper like that before.

Warner Cricket Love: Warner pats his seniors. He did it to Ponting twice during a drinks break in their batting spell and to Haddin when he came out to the crease, little taps on the arm or back. I think you’d have to have a pretty special personality to get away with that. He also gave Haddin a lovely high hug around the neck when he made 100.

For a while it seemed like Warner would never live down/live up to that 29-run over, but it probably bothered the rest of us more than it bothered him, the man doesn’t seem to have an “inner”. He reminds me of the other Warner in some ways – certainly in his bowling action and there’s something in his post-match interview style as well, but maybe they just share a rhinoceros hide. (Nb. Poor old Warnie’s hide, the toasted cheese sandwich finally rose up against him.)

Dancing boys

Well I wasn't wrong about New Zealand bringing their traditional dash. Holy moley they punch above their weight in impossible good looks and general Uprightness. Daniel Vettori is old news to me, but I'd overlooked Brendon McCullum. Dean Brownlie! Doug "Bounce Me and I'll Flash my Dimples at You" Bracewell! And I don't mind a man who comes back for seconds, thank you very much Mr Easy Ryder. I'm glad they've nevertheless kept a spot open for a "Goofy-Looking Guy called Chris".

My friend Rachel and I used to amuse ourselves casting members of the New Zealand cricket team in 19th-century novels. Chris "Darcy" Cairns. Daniel "Slightly Diffident but is it Because he has a Sad Secret?" Vettori. Adam "Natural Son by Creole Temptress" Parore.

A couple of things.

Day 1: Hilarious first over. All that sawdust. More cowbells!
Day 2: When Vettori reached 96, I wrote a note: "out on 99?". Close. Somewhere Shane Warne whispered one of his spells into the winds and made it happen.

And then somehow or other at the end of the first day I found myself with a ticket to Hobart next weekend. It happened in a bit of a flurry but there it is, I'll be touching down early morning of Day 3. Bellerive's the only major cricket ground in Australia I haven't visited, and maybe Ricky will do something.

Obviously I am "Intrepid Maiden Lady Traveller" from an early 20th-century novel. Bring me my Baedeker!

Right, then

It's just as well I actually read the sports section today, because I mightn't have otherwise twigged that the cricket season starts tomorrow.

I've obviously been in a bit of denial about the whole cricket thing, which is partly the whole "if a wicket falls in a foreign land and is not broadcast on free-to-air TV, did it really happen?" thing, partly the whole "if this is the start of the cricket season then this year is definitely done and dusted and what have I done with my life?" thing, and finally, obviously, the whole "Oh God, Australian cricket" thing. I can barely look.

I will, tomorrow, because the start of the cricket season is a ritual unto itself, and that's something to be observed even when the actual watching doesn't promise much fun. Let's play Polyanna again: New Zealand can be a dashing lot and I'll have my jar out for all the new bugs.

And let's sink the whole "cricket book-Chinaman" thing, too, to start the season off with a clean slate. It was so offhand and breezy when it first popped up in my life, but has grown concrete feet.

A couple of things I'll salvage:

1. I was talking to a (non-cricket-watching) friend how the elusive figure at the centre of Chinaman could only be a spinner, that there were no "mystery fast bowlers", though in the course of that I did find myself "explaining" to her (it's good when your friends know nothing about cricket, you can tell them anything) that bowling in general was the more cerebral art in cricket. When I started being interested in cricket, my father "explained" to me that bowling was the "working class" art in cricket, and at the intersection of those two ideas lies a whole history of cricket, class and colonialism, which Chinaman partly draws on. PS I also just enjoyed reading it, it's funny and well-written.

2. I bought a little secondhand Pelican paperback from 1964 called "Learning to Philosophize" by E.R. Emmett, because it's always interesting how people approach these things, and I suppose I had to buy it when I flipped it open and in a chapter on "value judgements", saw this:

It's very interesting what Emmett says about this. He starts off by talking about what we mean when we say "A is better at chess than B". Because "Chess is a game and the object is to win", being better at chess is about winning more often. There's a bit of debate about whether "winning more often" means "has won more games in the past" or "will win more games in the future" - and therein lies a selector's debate in itself - but ultimately when we say someone is better at chess, we mean their aptitude for winning, and it would be using the term "better" in an "odd and irrational" way if we were basing our judgement on stylistic considerations, eg. that A was a "lively, attacking, enterprising player" whereas B was "dull, stodgy and safe", regardless of who won.

Then comes the comment pasted above. In cricket, a better batsman might have made more runs or potentially make more runs, but aesthetic considerations also come into play: I might call A a better batsman "because I find his style more pleasing, attractive", so this is an extra thing to analyse out when you're working out what someone means when they say "better". Learning to philosophise yet? Such fun people.

What's interesting to me is that, working backwards, Emmett is implying that, to a certain extent, and to its observers at least, cricket is not a game and the object is not to win, and I can't decide if there's another class issue here. Is this Gentlemanly hauteur with regard to vulgar concerns like winning? Or an acknowledgement that cricket is a spectacle as much as a contest?

That was all. Bring on the dancing boys.

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.

CRICKART I

There are two or three things on my plate, none of which is especially topical except in my own lunchbox, but I figure anything already on the sports page is ugly enough look after itself – who will look after the below but me?

1. Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew.

2. Other recently purchased cricket books.

3. The Cricket Art (& Poetry) Prize.

I’m going to start at the end and work backwards.

3. The Cricket Art (& Poetry) Prize.

I went to the exhibition opening/award-giving ceremony of the Cricket Art and Poetry Prize on 6 October at the SCG. I always like an opportunity to sneak into the members enclosure after hours.

Sometimes I think it's the sheer amount of breathing space built into cricket that makes it amenable to various forms of artistic contemplation. The big green reflecting-pool of a field, the players scattered like clouds or sheep, the balls punctuating some sort of virtual noosphere where the action is really taking place, the sigh of late afternoon... These are the elements that make up a recognisable cricket aesthetic, a sort of "village green" iconography. There was a great variety of styles in the exhibition, but there was also a distinct group of “genre” pieces in this sense.

This aesthetic is really made up of two or three subgenres:

- Flat-Perspective Naïve
- an emphatic variety of Naïve not connected to perspective that I like to call High Mambo-Drysdale Naïve.

- Deep-Perspective Impressionism

Flat-Perspective Naïve

Top to bottom: Lizzy Newcomb: "Tactics", Bryan Bulley: "Dubois from the Cemetery End, gardens #2 Oval, Darwin", Wayne Elliott: "Wheat Town's Cricket Match", John Windus: "Facing Up in the Park".

[Nb. all images (c) the artists, and I have deliberately made these images low-res so as not to be of reproduction quality.]























High Mambo-Drysdale Naïve

Top to bottom: Jan Hynes: "Street Cricket, Late Afternoon, South Townsville", Elisabeth Lawrence: "The Call for Drinks", Bob Marchant: "Caught Out by Bluey Fielding in the Gully" 

(Presence of a Dog obviously a key feature of this subgenre.)

Deep-Perspective Impressionism

 

Top to bottom: Paul Collins: "Club Final", Christine Atkins: "Country Cricket", Luke Harvey: "The National Game", David Charlesworth: "The Maiden, Kolkata (Calcutta)".

Hybrids

And once you have types, you can identify hybrids:

1. Peter Campbell, Owzat
This one combines the naïve flat perspective with impressionistic brush-style. I like it a lot, those frozen floating poses of the players are like little Giotto angels. Plus when you think about the combination of flat perspective and realism, you realise that this framing and perspective is effectively that of a television screen and that gets big bonus points in my book. The television set is after all the village green for most of us.

And this one:

2. John Spooner, Last Wicket, Williamstown
This one combines Impressionist and Naïve elements in a way that is really Post-Impressionist: split scene, high colour and bloc colour, and those are some serious Post-Impressionist Trees (cf here and here).

The winner of the art prize, along with most of the paintings in the exhibition, didn’t belong to one of these genres, and I think it would be extra hard for a member of these genres to win the prize, because of the familiarity of the chord they strike.

My favourites were:

Suzanne Healy: "Test Pattern"

and

Tarli Glover: "Love"

Batsy replies

Anonymous writes:

What do you make of the new Shane look, unkindly called ‘Scrawnie’ by the tabloids?

Anonymous, I’m glad you asked. Or I was. I wrote out a four-point response, assuming I knew what I was talking about, then actually Googled “scrawny warnie” and... yikes. I think I can still get some use out of my initial armchair serve, if we do a little reshuffling and allow for an element of digression.

1. There is almost always something a bit wrong with Shane’s look, and it’s almost always in the “trying too hard” direction. A bit too much hair product, a bit too much teeth whitener, a few diet shakes over the limit. Twas ever so. When I first came across Warney in 1998, he had a near-middle hair parting and a floppy fringe that made him look like the very worst kind of over-fed private-school frat-boy. And that’s the Mills & Boon heart of the Mystery of Shane: “He was everything I most despised... and yet... I found myself strangely drawn to him.”

2. I have seen this situation storyboarded as “unreconstructed Australian male turns uber-metrosexual, cherchez la femme!”, and that’s obviously nonsense. As Shane quickly and rightly pointed out, “I have always been High Julio, Julio among Julios, Laird of the Lairs. A vain man, with advanced hair.” I myself have always seen the pairing with Liz as in fact a four-way between the most lovingly tended eyebrows in the business. Situation normal all gussied up.

We need to look elsewhere for la femme here. Shane claims the diet-shake tip came from St Kilda player Steven Baker’s mother, which just shows how little really does change. Shane! Stay away from the mums with diet products!

3. This section was supposed to be about the actual weightloss, which I hadn’t actually looked into properly. To summarise: Reference to the great Shane Slimdown of the 2001 India Tour. Suggestion that he may be replacing one meal a day with a packet of cigarettes.

4. Cosmetic surgery? Not that you asked, but here’s what I think anyway: there’s so much you can do to yourself in the way of injections, fillers, and resurfacings these days that a great deal of plausible deniability is created around the question of cosmetic surgery. I also believe Shane to be a student of the “It’s not a lie if it’s none of your business” school of thinking.

After all that, is there an answer in there? I do prefer a higher-bodyfat Shane, but I’m sure that Shane will be back. Reversion to form is arguably another of his specialties.

As for your first question:

Is it true that Mise en Abyme once opened the batting for Pakistan in an ODI?

I’m pretty sure that’s one of the subplots of Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, of which something next time.

Happy Birthday, Sister Sledge.

It’s Shane Warne’s birthday, which seems a good time to make a comeback and usher in the new cricket season. If you will look at “This Day in Shane Warne” below, you can see that Shane shares a birthday with Nana Mouskouri (1934), Jacqueline Bisset (1944) and the lead singer of Sister Sledge, Joni (1956). That’s not a bad haul. And I don’t know why I haven’t been calling Warnie “Sister Sledge” for the couple of years since I isolated that factoid.

This photo was taken on this day 6 years ago. It was a sort of office picnic at Sydney Uni. It’s a bit gloomy, and maybe that’s because we had just lost the 2005 Ashes. But we (my old flatmate and I, I am not being royal) tried to make up for it with baked goods, unwittingly setting a precedent for Ashes to come.

I don’t know if I should buckle and get cable or if that will be the end of me. I’ve been dipping into the internet and feeling a bit enthusiastic when we’ve doing well, but I couldn’t tell you much about what’s actually happened, I haven’t even caught the new spinner on Youtube. I’ve been putting in a last-ditch effort at hibernation these last couple of weeks, watching entire TV series on the laptop in bed. It gets very mise en abyme taking The Complete Works of Liz Lemon to the video store counter on a Saturday night, I can tell you, but no more looking into a glass darkly! Unless it’s the cricket. On with the show!

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.

Come in sucker*

*Paul Keating to John Howard, sometime.

This is what might have been the headline of today's cricket column by Paul Keating, if he had one. I so wish Paul Keating had a cricket column. Ponting's on the cover of the Sydney Morning Herald today, but above him is Paul Keating chewing out the Labor Party for being obscurantist neanderthals practicing sicko populism. Sigh. Maybe he could be a writer for the slip cordon. Shane Warne would certainly have embraced the opportunity to tell someone he was going to do them slowly.

Ponting joined the Australian cricket team in the same year Labor began their 16-year reign in New South Wales, time will tell how long he'll outlast them. If he doesn't make runs I can't see the pressure for him to go letting up any.

I've written about my feelings about Ponting before, which is a reminder of how long this business has been going on. At this stage I'm just grateful of the shift in the conversation. I can cope with Clarke as captain, but the only reason I can see for Shane Watson being appointed vice-captain is that he looks like he'll stick around for a while and he's not a wicket-keeper. I wonder if Haddin would have had more of a chance if the current referral system hadn't been put in place?

Wide Shut

There was a hit song in the 80s called "Wide Boy" (Nik Kershaw?), and I never really knew what a wide boy was or how I'd use the term in my daily life, but thank you Shaun Tait, now I do.

Oh, World Cup, you went on and on and then all of a sudden you were an overnight flop. I went to bed at around 1, setting the radio alarm for 3, and then just lay in bed listening to the game play itself out with my eyes closed, every so often muttering "Wide boy...".

When I turned it on the commentators were clucking about how poised the game was, possibly even a bit tipped towards Australia. India were 4 down and needed about 90 from 15 overs. I think maybe the heat or the noise gets into the commentators' brains. The week before when Australia were 8 down for 169 against Pakistan, Ian Chappell started criticising Shahid Afridi for not being aggressive enough in his tactics. Nine down for 176 and still, apparently, he doesn't know how to "press the advantage". And at the end of the innings the Pakistani team should not be having a celebratory huddle on the field but rather rushing into the dressing rooms to "work out how they're going to make 177 runs". Sigh.

Is it the same psychosis or just automatic pilot that led one commentator last night to trot out the "cometh the hour, cometh the man" line when Ricky Ponting was heading towards a hundred? I am glad Ricky had a good innings but when there have been so many other hours that called for that Man, better hours, needier hours, hours and hours and hours of waiting and waiting and waiting for the man, games where nothing happened, twice... Well.

I blame World Cup commentator bitterness not on the gloom of Australia's performance but on how I feel about Harsha Bhogle's new hair. Harsha, for shame.

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:

Post-scripts to the aestas horribilis

A 3-week lie-down is probably about right after the aestas horribilis that was. But now there are a few relics from the summer that need themselves to be put to bed.

RIP No. 1: Warnie*

The television show, of course. The saddest thing about it’s last scheduled appearance was that all through the replacement programming (Two-and-a-Half Men repeats, don't ask me how I know), they kept the original Warnie-heavy advertising for hair replacement and fast food (I swear it was on in the next room and I overheard it, don't ask me how I know), and Warnie even had to pop up in an inserted segment to announce the winner of a competition attached to the show.

It was a show that was difficult to watch, like poor Warnie had become his own bunny frozen in the headlights. He is a great naif (my uncle compared him to Candide, which just shows you the sort of stock I am from), but I don't know that that's a great asset as an interviewer, unless you actually are a child, or actually Norman Gunston. The presence of Alicia Goring only showed up how much poise, smarts and naturalness was lacking everywhere else.

* I used to spell this "Warney", and one of the problems with that was that it could drift into adjectival territory – "I'm feeling a bit Warney" – and then you have Warne himself being Warney rather than being the model for other things being Warney, and hence a parody of himself, which... might not be so far from the truth sometimes.

RIP No. 2: Marcus North

Poor old Marcus North. In a summer when No. One. Could. Stop. Talking. about the decisions of the selectors and all possible permutations of the Australian team line-up, Marcus North was dropped and would appear to be still falling in a bottomless vacuum, such has been the absence of resonance, ripple or even screaming. The universe just reformed itself around the gap and put on a blank face. I never loved Marcus North but nevertheless, ouch.

RIP No. 3: The Series

It has taken me 20 years of using email to work out how to use message filters. Which means all my Australian Cricket Family newsletters now go into one folder where they can accumulate unopened all together rather than scattered unopened through my Inbox. This has made it possible to have a run-down of the summer through a clutch of newsletter headlines like The Complete Works of Shakespeare in One Hour.

Now, I have tried everything I can think of in terms of file formats and resolution to make this screen grab legible when pasted here. It’s not, but it should be when it’s clicked on so it opens in its own window.

So do that, and let that be the end of the matter.

SCG II, sans sandwiches

So I went to the SCG today for any raging against the dying of the light or just to hold their hands at the end. It seemed the right thing to do, it's close by and, erm, it was free, which is a bittersweet blessing because that only happens when the end is expected to come soon: the ground PA kept reminding us during play how we could get our refunds if we had bought a ticket. And I'll admit I didn't pack a lunch.

On the way to the ground in the bus I was overcome by a feeling of dread only comparable to a recent occasion when I had to eat tripe. Kerry O'Keefe has been extravagantly bullish all series and usually exhorts Sydneysiders to come to the ground on difficult last days but even he had fallen silent on this point.

At the ground it was easy enough to avoid the "out" Poms draped in flags, only to find myself surrounded once again by "sleeper" Poms activated to standing position when the English team came out onto the ground. Never mind.

*

One of the features of both days at the SCG has been overhearing very knowledgeable and civilised conversations about cricket between Englishmen and Australians, and feeling a bit ashamed of both my ignorance and chauvinism. Today I swear I heard a boy next to me, who could not have been more than 10, remark to his companion of a similar age: "... a Mike Holding sort of ball..." Quite!

*

I haven't seen a batsman walk off so slowly as Peter Siddle this morning. I would have thought the trip back to the dressing room is one you want to get over and done with, but he took baby steps like he would only be truly out when he went through the gate and could extend his time at the crease just a bit more by staying on the field. Maybe he wanted to soak up the pain properly and soberly before having to face the barrage of sporting homilies in the dressing room. That's sort of why I was there. Not the not getting into the dressing room bit of course.

But egg sandwiches

As my parents, brother and I queued to get into the SCG today, we brightly said to each other, "Should see Australia batting today!" "Yes, plenty of batting!", "That's the good thing about Day 3, you often get to see batting and bowling."

I may have rather sharply remarked at that point that we could have seen batting and bowling on day one at the MCG, which was unnecessary, because we all knew we were pushing it. And: yes (the next stage of grief from "but no"?).

We were at the back of the Victor Trumper stand and completely surrounded by supporters of England. Not the singing ones, fortunately, "standing" ones - we only realised we were surrounded when they all leapt to their feet when - oh, which milestone was it? Someone's 50, 100, 150... maybe Cook, Bell, Prior... The middle session was the hardest I think, I could barely look at the scoreboard, my brother and I got out all of the SMH's cryptic crossword. Then it was just that dissociative free-fall when you know all is lost and you just cheer all the bowling changes - sure, why not Hussey?

But: egg sandwiches.

I also took way too many pictures of Hilfenhaus standing far below near the boundary. But he would place himself in the centre of a grass diamond itself at the apex of a grass checkerboard with his hands on hips and weight on one leg.


Turmoil update

It now seems likely that Beer's creased forehead is due to thick skin, which is just as bloody well, no?

Test 5 Day 1

Today I slept in and when I finally turned on the television at 10.45 am I was a little concerned that we might already be several down if we had gone in to bat. But all was (relatively) calm and it trickled on in a grim and halting sort of way, thoroughly brightened however by Usman Khawaja who looks more like the real deal than anyone on the team for a long time, n'est-ce pas? P. Roebuck noted his "absence of inner turmoil" which alone is an enormous relief and would mark him out from... everyone? I'd say even Siddle has a little inner turmoil. Perhaps not Brad Haddin. Shall we try to rank the squad from most to least inner turmoil?

1. Mitchell Johnson: inner turmoil, outer turmoil, all-round turmoil.
2. Phillip Hughes: is it the cursed Katich "Ashes ruined my life twice" spot?
3. Shane Watson: despite entrenchment, still looks like someone trying desperately to fit in.
4. Michael Clarke: inner turmoil in denial that it is inner turmoil.
5. Mike Hussey: developed a haunted look during his rough patch that he hasn't quite shaken off.
6. Steve Smith: is his quizzical look inner turmoil?
7. Michael Beer? To be honest, I'm just going on the creases in his forehead.
8. Peter Siddle: inner turmoil like an upset stomach rather than an existential condition.
9. Ben Hilfenhaus: disappointed but knows he has a job as a calendar model if he gets kicked off the team.*
10. Usman Khawaja: it could all change very soon, but he looked the serene machine today.
11. Brad Haddin: I don't think so.

* That said, where is the Men of Cricket Calendar 2011? Where?

What I did yesterday

The other thing was that I dropped into the SCG yesterday when the teams do their net sessions and the public can wander in to have a look. I came across this phenomenon by accident a few years ago, when South Africa were touring and I've dropped in the day before the match ever since. I don't stay long, maybe 15-20 minutes: I check out who's playing in the nets (yesterday: Prior, Collingwood, Bell and KP, and Cook signing autographs) but mostly I like to have a sit in the Ladies Stand, watch the pitch preparation, and soak up the sort of portentous calm of an empty pre-match stadium. It's part of the ground I wouldn't normally have access to and a very pleasing atmosphere. I took some photos and here they are.

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?

Please, a paddle

Well, surely this was waiting to happen, how many lucky escapes from first innings collapses have we had this series? And only the one recovery that amounted to winning a game.

I had the ultimate Boxing Day yesterday: a beach swim before a late breakfast of leg-ham and egg in front of the toss, then rising from the couch only to make myself a turkey and stuffing sandwich, a bowl of cold pudding and custard, or to go for a nice nap. The pudding however was seeking solace after Ponting's dismissal, the nap seeking oblivion after Hussey went, and the couch useful mainly for having a back I could push my head into.

But the "oh no oh no oh no" when the wickets fell was nothing to the "OH NO OH NO OH NO" upon seeing Johnson spraying one so far down the off side that the fact it wasn't called a wide can only be a Christmas miracle. There's being up shit creek and there's not having the paddle.

So can we move off the sports and onto the comic pages? Let's shall.

1. I noticed before the start that BOTH the English and Australian anthems have sprouted fiddly trills at the beginning in an attempt to distract from what dogs they are. The Australian one has certainly done that for a while, I hadn't noticed it on God Save the Queen, though I must say the whole of God Save the Queen makes the Australian anthem appear less of a dog.

2. Early in the piece, Kevin Pietersen diving after missing a catch off Watson, in the soccer sense of the term.

3. I've only just noticed Chris Tremlett's cheekbones. In the 80s, whenever I saw Ivan Lendl I could not put aside the idea that every night before going to bed he would strap two tennis balls to his head so that each one nestled in the hollow of a cheek. Same deal with Tremlett, substitute cricket balls.

4. Bresnan: a return to the potatoey English bowler of yesteryear (specifically, 2005) - the love child perhaps of Caddick and Harmison?


5. Oh ads, the irony you conceal. I had the sound down, but there appeared to be an ad where the Aussies "gave the Poms a chance" by batting blindfold. You can stop that right now. "Just keep walking" also had a barb that was surely not intended.

Anyway, to the barricades/couch for day 2.

But if I didn't have little faith I would never have discovered the phrase "petty fidianism"

“The Real Mitchell Johnson”, if that is his real name, accused me in the comments yesterday of petty fidianism and look, I admit it. When Michael Slater quoted Latin sage Bon Jovi (“Good cheer”) before the start of this match – “you gotta keep the faith” – I was tempted to paraphrase Monty Python – “what are they gonna do, bleed on them?”

But why wouldn't I have little faith? There’s only so many times you can hear “It’ll be different this time, I can change”, only to come back in from putting the washing on the line to find the Australian team again blotto on the kitchen floor.

Even now, you would have thought a truly joyful bowling effort and a juicy first innings lead would ease the collywobbles in the Australian top order, but... what is it? but... but oh? BUT NO. Lord help me I am even developing feelings of thankfulness – real and not just grudging ones – for Shane “The Wodge” Watson.

But let's speak of other things:

Terry Alderman: welcome back Terry Alderman, your relentless indignation is like an old friend. He managed to maintain a rant about short deliveries and their uselessness in getting wickets right up to, through and out the other side of Peter Siddle getting a wicket with one. That’s top-shelf crabbiness. He followed it up with a good spray at the old chestnut of Drinks Breaks.

The KP sleaze bomb:
Here’s a curious thing. They did a little ring-side interview with Mitchell Johnson on Channel 9 toward the end of the day yesterday, and they asked him whether any of the wickets were particularly special. He said they all were, of course, but that he supposed Pietersen’s wicket gave him special pleasure because KP had been repeatedly asking him for his phone number and saying he wanted to be friends. I suppose this is a new form of sledging? I would give anything though that it weren’t and that Johnson was simply declaring his revulsion at the overture.

Because there are in fact suggestions afoot that Kevin Pietersen is waging a terrifying campaign of sleaze in the antipodes. The speeding in the yellow Lambourghini of course, and then in the last session yesterday he actually draped his arm around an umpire and it looked like Strauss came up to detach KP’s hand from the umpire’s shoulder. Dude, stop touching the umpire. It must be quite a stress on the whole team to keep KP’s sleaze fallout to a minimum radius.

But no

I thought there was a glimmer of hope when Andrew Strauss decided to bowl. Wasn’t sending the other team in a famously series-turningly fatal move in Ashes lore? I was so mesmerised by this possibility that Anderson’s first couple of balls even looked... could they be a bit wide? But no.

Is “but no” the motto of the series?

I had thought for example that the Adelaide start was not just bad, but freakishly bad, "freakish" meaning "an aberration of nature", "statistically unlikely to happen again very soon". But no!

“You’d think they...” “What if...” “Surely...” But no. But... but... ? No!

I am grateful for Jonathan Agnew, who somehow manages to sound soothing even when he's saying "4 for 49".

Warnie

When Picasso first showed his portrait of Gertrude Stein and people said it didn’t look much like her, he replied: “It will.” Who would have thought the same principle would apply to the 2007-2008 VB Summer of Spin Shane Warne plastic figurine?

People have texted me to ask if I am driving the campaign to bring him back. My position is that I am all in favour of his return, on the condition that he arrive at the ground in a golden helicopter and is lowered to the pitch as fireworks are let off around the ground and “Thus Spake Zarathustra” blares from the speakers. I think that's about the level and flavour of the idea.

Yeah, I got nothing

Speaking terms again

I “stopped talking” to the cricket for an hour or so yesterday morning. For the rest of the day I managed to keep everything down to a manageable level – the volume, the tension, the expectation – except for a bad moment when Channel 9 decided during the rain to show the end of the Adelaide Test from 4 years ago. Ouch. I turned around to see them all – Hussey, Warnie, Brett Lee – tumbling over each other like labrador puppies. So golden and healthy and happy! Sigh.

A friend has offered to take me out for a “session in the nets” in the quest to get me out of the house. I am going to have to develop my technical knowledge of the game if I am going to be able to “enjoy” watching Kevin Pietersen, as Jonathan Agnew suggested even the most ardent Australian supporter must. But do I really want that to happen? Mayn’t I hold on to the warped lens of my bigotry? I don’t think I would know who I was if I started enjoying watching Kevin Pietersen.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow. One thing this series has put paid to is the idea that there is anything especially Australian about chirping and crowing when you’re on top.

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.