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.

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!

Sentimental education

Illustration for Tom Brown's Schooldays by Arthur Hughes

Last night, I saw the Steve Smith press conference from across an RSL dining room and it was quite close enough to get the message.

On Wednesday, I spoke to my counsellor about some free-floating anxiety. It’s everything and nothing anxiety that gets hoovered up out of the ether, and it can be useful to spread the contents of the vacuum bag out on the floor and see exactly how ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ it is and just in case there is, I don’t know, a lost earring in there.

Part of the everything-nothing was the ball-tampering crisis, and my counsellor said she knew quite a few people who were going through a bit of an identity crisis about themselves and being an Australian because of the scandal, and… I’m going to have to interrupt you there. There is nothing about this incident that challenges my sense of who I am or what being an Australian means. I have no idea how that even works. The sum total of my personal ball-tampering-related anxiety is a) feeling really sorry for Steve Smith, and b) a pathological conviction that any mess whatsoever is ultimately my fault and I have a responsibility to fix it.

What is crucially missing from my own existential make up in this equation is the experience of cricket through the eyes of a cricket-playing child. I have never idolised a cricketer, fantasised about being a cricketer, attempted to emulate a cricketer’s action. I have never had the experience of me being small and them being big. I have never bonded (or dis-bonded) with a parent, teacher or any other kind of authority through cricket. I have never gone through any complicated formative experiences to do with friendship, enemies, teamwork, or peer pressure through cricket. There is no Bildungsroman in my experience of cricket.

Some good articles have been written about the connection between cricket and the national Bildungsroman in order to explain the level of response to this incident. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Either way, it’s a narrative that leaves me cold or rather at room temperature, because I’m not trying to claim any moral or intellectual high ground from this fact, it just is what it is.

I am in awe of our cricketers in the sense that I am in awe of their extreme physical and mental discipline, their extreme personal sacrifice and above all their tolerance of extreme psychological exposure and pressure to perform. Early on in this saga, someone drew a parallel between Steve Smith’s “I’m embarrassed to be here, quite frankly” press conference of Hobart 2016 and his “I’m embarrassed to be here, quite frankly” of Capetown 2018. Their point was that “embarrassment” didn’t cut it, quite frankly, and Smith was going to have to do better to avoid embarrassment being the symbol of his weakness as a captain.

There’s something else to be drawn from this parallel. When do the actions of our national cricket team launch a thousand headlines and letters to the paper? When does public contempt rain down on them like hailstones? When they misbehave, yes, but also when they lose. Where do you think they get the message you must win at all costs from? People try to annex moral ground in these situations by making out that in both cases it is about playing the game properly and players showing appropriate respect for their position. Batsmen are losing their wickets out of some lack of character, not because of technical error or lapse of judgement. 

Somehow the amount of the money they are paid is invoked as both the reason they do not perform properly (what can you expect from mercenaries?) and the reason they must perform properly (I demand my money’s worth!). And the eternal, eternal refrain of “there are hundreds of others ready to replace you in a heartbeat, mate, so you’d better shape up quick smart.” Um, this kind of argument is why unions were invented. 

There is a moral dignity we expect from our cricketers because of the complicated ideology attached to sport in general, which is very much bound up with its relationship to children - the child we were ourselves, the children we see watching now, the adulthood training that sport is supposed to represent. Sport is inseparable from this dynamic, and the morality of players is important relative to this dynamic.

We are also all adults however, us and the cricket players and, as adults, not particularly big or small, or big and small in different ways and at different times. Good people do bad things. As adults in the ordinary world, there is a moral dignity we need to afford to cricketers, as we do other human-sized adults. However big your own existential angst in response to this situation is, I'm sure it is dwarfed by Steve Smith's.

Pandora's box

I have a friend who is gay and from a very traditional family. One day she told her family she was gay and all hell broke loose so she took it back and everything went back to the way it was before. I don’t know how you do ‘take back’ that sort of thing, but the fact that it worked shows just how much some people are happy to know things but need not to be told them - really really desperately need not to be told them. If you do tell them it collapses some membrane between what they know and want to know causing the two liquids to combine and combust.

This is the only way I can explain what is happening here. I felt the shock as much as anyone else when Steve Smith looked us in the eye and said yes, we tried to tamper with the ball, we talked about it at lunch. But when I break down the content of what he is saying I can’t work out why I should be shocked. Ball tampering is common practice. Under ICC codes it is a relatively minor offence. Players of all nations have been caught ball tampering, been shown to ball tamper or admitted ball tampering. Captains of many nations have been caught ball tampering. Shahid Afridi, in some sort of daze, bit into a ball on camera, making no attempt to hide it. We have to assume the incidents we know about are a fraction of what happens, and we do assume that, because ball tampering is common practice and something you are taught about as a schoolboy. We accept ball tampering as part of the game. We accept ball tampering as part of the game.

Shahid Afridi claimed he was trying to smell the ball. Faf du Plessis, captain of the team we are currently playing and filmed a few years ago engaging in sharp practice with a mint, mounted the defence that it isn’t ball tampering if it doesn’t work. It was fantastic. “Can I truly said to have tampered with the ball if my attempt to tamper did not in actual fact alter the condition of the ball?” They pushed poor Hashim Amla out in front of the cameras to say “um no you are.” Complete bullshit and everyone knows it’s bullshit. It’s predictable, laughable bullshit, which we predict, laugh at, and move on.

It seems then that this absurd evasive dance is also part of the game, as much as ball tampering itself. The absurd evasive dance of pretending you haven’t tampered with the ball. Dissimulating when you’re on the field, denying when you’re off it.

“Absurd evasive dance” might seem like a good description of poor Cameron Bancroft putting a bit of tape down his trousers, but there was no dance to it, and that was the problem. It was a good example of why lollies are a better tampering tool. Part of the absurd evasive dance is its elegance, genius, sleight of hand, gaslighting. Bancroft is no Shahid Afridi. Steve Smith made no attempt at absurd evasive dance whatsoever but looked us in the eye and said yes, we tried to tamper with the ball, we talked about it at lunch. He did not play the game. And all hell broke loose.

It seems we need - desperately need - to preserve a part of the universe which is free from the law of non-contradiction, a place where we can know and not know at the same time. Okay. So punish Steve Smith. So long as we are clear on exactly what rule he broke.

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.

Nine-inch nails

Power. Control. Composure. Parramatta. You read that right. Drop an Eel in the middle of Auckland and it turns into a Cowboy. I suppose it makes sense that a club with the reputation of finding it hard to stay the distance has made the short form of the game its own, and Mr Batsy says Mr Norman perhaps takes opposing teams out for a night on the town the day before a match, but let’s not be snide. It’s a new year, a new game, everyone looks as bright as a new penny under the Auckland sunshine (?) like it’s the first day of school. New clothes, new shoes, new haircuts, everyone looks a bit “different” after the holidays - older or fresher? a different training regime? or nothing more than the new haircut? I will have to stop calling Clint Gutherson “Hipster Boy”, for example, as I now believe “a Trendy” is the more correct term. Then there’s the one who you realise isn’t just different but actually a new boy. He came to Parramatta because the burden of having to introduce himself as the I Luv CoffeeBurleigh Bears Co-Captain had become intolerable.

The future, and the Auckland sun (I’ll say it again, ?) was so bright
I had to draw the lounge room curtains against the glare so my eyes could adjust to the new order and ease in to the rhythms and flows of the winter code. I’d made the effort of course for a look in on He Who Must Not be Named, who didn’t feature much in the end, grubbering one to the Trendy for a try instead of grubbering it to himself, and leaving the big run to How Much Can a Burleigh Bear. I had a whole $4 on a Parramatta win (against the Dragons, this whole thing was against the Dragons by the way), the dregs of my 2016 investment in the NRL season, now a magnificent $6.53. I imagine my final winnings will be a play off between compound betting and shortening odds, but I’m all in.

Mints wouldn't melt in his mouth

Thank you, Faf, thank you South African cricket team, thank you, South African cricket team auxiliary staff, you have achieved what seemed to be impossible. You have generated affection for the Australian cricket team and interest in this series by sheer force of relative unlikeability.

We weren’t really feeling much about anything, or nothing positive. The lukewarm flame of the first two Tests were hardly motivation to emerge from the cold soup of rancour served as entrée to this season.

But then your transgression, petulance, disingenuity and argy-bargy snapped us to attention and sent us down the surest path to support for one’s team: desire to stick it to the opposition. Just tell me, quietly, was this whole thing staged by James Sutherland?

I was fascinated by Amla’s performance at the press conference. I don’t know how anyone can be both artless and disingenuous at the same time, but he managed it. On the one hand I wondered if he’d been hoodwinked himself, on the other hand I wondered if he was the worst of the lot, complicit in a shameless tactic to use his piety as a human shield.

The renewed interest then had a knock-on effect on the perception of the extreme makeover of the Australian team. Whereas before it might have seemed a depressing exercise in deckchair shuffling (or perhaps a new set of cheap ones from Bunnings), now I’m… gosh, could that be a little bit of excitement? Oh what the hell… excited to see how the new bugs fare.

It would be nice to think the broom has swept aside some of the alleged Australian cricket team culture, à la Molesworth:

In order to sukceed all new bugs should take a vow of silence for i year. When a senior pass they should lie down and let him walk over them. They should ofer swetes saing go on take the whole bag. They must clean shoes and think of pleasing others.

Maybe it will be more like:

Head of skool: i am head of skool captin of games martial of the squash courts custodian of shooting and garter principal of the natural history museum.

new bug: So what? i am not impressed by wot I hav seen around here. The old brigade hav been in too long. There hav got to be changes. The younger generation is knoking at the door hav some buble gum.

Perhaps a happy medium would be best, as it always is. And, under the circumstances, go easy on the buble gum.

Outrageous fortune

The season of Rugby League ends tonight with a Sharknado (Sharks + Storm, boom tish), so it is a fitting time for me to reflect on my recent addition of a winter sport to my repertoire.

My team is Parramatta, a legacy of growing up in Eastwood in the 1970s. I hadn’t paid much attention to them until a few years ago when I took up with someone who also happened to be a Parramatta supporter. It was 2012 – not the best time to start paying attention, nor for that matter the years after. In 2015 they crowned their solid record of losing from a leading position by showing there was no lead so great they could not lose it. Thirty-nil up against the Cowboys (the Cowboys!) at half time, in the second half it turned out the Cowboys had just been trying to make things a bit interesting for themselves. It was a plummet so steep it broke records. Not just disappointing but champions at disappointing.

The heartbreak of supporting a losing team is well-known, but what I hadn’t counted on was the heartbreak of losing individual players. When a Parramatta player starts to look gifted, useful, or charming I hear the rumble of distant thunder. It started with Jarryd Hayne, a player so good he had to not just leave Parramatta but code and country. Chrissy Sandow, a delight to everyone but his coach: also deported. Reece Robinson, a pleasure to watch and indeed simply look at: allowed to stay in the country, but obliged to switch codes. When Phil Gould said Semi Radradra was the best winger in the competition, I held my breath and waited for the terrible sigh. With Jarryd I have now experienced the pain of seeing a player return to another team, mitigated by the belated realisation that he is much better seen than heard and that, once heard, one doesn't want to see him either.

Most of that has been about the slings and arrows of the game itself but in this season of course the levees well and truly broke.

In the Herald on Friday, Andrew Webster conducted his own review of the past season and its exceptionally high level of “sinuendo”, starting with Mitchell Pearce in January.

Since then, the off-field melodrama has degenerated into a blur of match-fixing investigations, salary cap shenanigans, players consorting with bikies and brothel owners and being pinged for drug possession, sex tapes leaked through social media and whatever Sharks bad boy Andrew Fifita might do next.

He is politely non-specific, but it won’t escape anyone’s attention that between the bookends of a Rooster and a Shark is a nest of Eels. People were saying “How much more can Parramatta take?” back in the halcyon days of Corey Norman being busted with ecstasy. They eventually stopped saying it, because a) you get bored of saying the same thing over and over again and b) their question was answered: a lot, lot more. Bring it on: champion disappointers breed champion stoics.

The irony of course is that at the same time as the off-field shit has hit the fan, Parramatta has had a really good season on the field, certainly the best since I’ve been paying attention (though that is not hard). Without the 12-point strip, Parramatta would have made it into the finals. And the numerous departures of players, whether in nominious or ignominious fashion, have allowed an influx of some remarkable talents. One of these has been so tear-inducingly prodigious and joyful that I both can’t bear to mention his name – such is the fear of the distant rumble – and can’t bear not to. The nays have it, I won’t. I couldn’t bear the responsibility.

Maxwell Henry Norman Walker

I met Max Walker once. It was at the inaugural “Festival of Cricket” at Bradman Oval. I boarded the train to Bowral, a self-styled lady reporter complete with pen, notebook and camera. I had booked myself in for a whole day of panel sessions with various people on the cricket sidelines - selectors, writers, groundskeepers, artists - and was seated alone at a table in the marquee with my notebook out when Mr Walker came and sat next to me. “Taking notes?” he said, and chatted about the “mind-map” note-taking technique he’d picked up studying architecture. He was friendly and avuncular and it was nice. I believe Dean Jones’ when he said that Max Walker could talk to literally anyone. I’m not just anyone of course (of course!), but certainly anyone enough. In the days between autographs and selfies you (I) took photos of famous people. Do people look more like their caricatures as they get older? I mean that nicely: smiley, horsey, smiley again. I might read one of his books.