A portent ......

Being the first session on the first day of Atomou’s three day test.

Ahhhhh , the Ashes! THE Ashes! THE reason for holding our collective breath all year until this time – every year! An ever-renewing celebration of death!

Now, NOW, we’re getting into the serious stuff. The true adoration of ashes! No longer the celebration of the life of an entertainer who died “youngish” but something far more important! This is a celebration that affects the very valves of Oz’ thumping heart!

Kerrrthump! Kerrrrthump! Hear that? That’s not the sound of the bat hitting the little red stone; no, it is the sound of every aussie’s heart every time they hear the word “ashes” and every time the aussie warriors come out of their bunkers to do battle with those pommie bastards! These valves, the valves of their belligerent hearts – they open and they shut and in their opening and in their shutting, they spurt out ever thicker venom, ever more poisonous hatred for THOSE horrible creatures who brought us down here, down to the antipodes, to Oz, an act they did not for tourism and entertainment purposes but as a form of vile punishment. Horrendous punishment for diminutive crimes. A crust of bread tucked under the apron of a starving woman with a dosen starving fledglings!

I ask you!

Vengeance, then is all the more urgent and victory over THOSE Pommie Bastards is always ever sweeter!

The hatred is so powerful all the more because it so undeniably valid. The history between our nation and THEIRS is clogged with THEIR disdain and hatred for US! Us, the real men! Us, the real women! Us, the pioneers of a race of mortals who… in turn will themselves behave just like those pommie bastards (but let’s not allow real history get in the way of a good myth here, ey?)

“Pommie Bastards,” we yell, as we throw our plastic cups full of sparkling Moet at them, our enemy! Pommie Bastards, they shout at the Barmy Army, the Pommie cheer squad, who must, by law, sit on the benches across the opposite side of the field.

The cricket played for the urn is not cricket. It is a brutal war that echoes its mother war, the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans!

There’s a reason why we call Warnie a hero and it isn’t his prowess on the Garfield of cricket, formidable though that might be. No it is because of the first three letters of his name for one and then, for added grunt, the letter following them. War! Warn! The stuff that myths are made of!

But ashes are tricky things!

When real, they are the end matter of all mortal and creatures and things. But they don’t have to be real. They can be imaginary, symbolic, mysterious, mythological.

In fact, so far as the cricket trophy is concerned, they are pure myth and, so far as myths go, it is an uninteresting myth, at that! A bloody and gruesome rivalry over a mere myth, a nothing! Or over something that may or may not exist inside a funereal jug! “Bah… humbug!” as the good doc, on Unleashed once remarked.

Orestes’ ashes, though! Ah, there’s a myth! A real myth, so far as myths go. A myth and a half! It’s a myth full of passion, a myth of two brutal murders, of filial love and filial hatred, of a tear-jerking recognition scene, of a shocking scene where a mother pleads with her son for her life. A myth in which the unsteady and ever-altering will of the gods plays havoc with the lives of a house. The whole house, from its first seed to its last………………

Holy Shit !

I was shocked yesterday to see in one of those newspapers that they give away at railway stations a photograph of a member of a precious protected species – the Wallabies – with one eye staring at the camera and the other eye having a little holiday somewhere in the back of the chap’s head.

He had some interesting facial embroidery accompanying his wandering orbit.

The story (sorry, I’m too slack to go find it – you can dig it out and I’ll post it) went on to say that THIS French rugby squad was terrifically well behaved and had almost weaned themselves off using the Christmas hold (a handful of nuts) as a primary part of their normative tactics.

But it is clear that they are certainly clinging to their other old chestnut – the digital eye massage.

One of these has got to be Os

I think that this is one part of the Australian defence sorely lacking – the reprisal – and I am hoping that the Wallabies can enlist the services of my favourite game play persuader Os du Randt, (through sheer force of personality) to persuade the French (who, after all, have a chicken as their mascot) to cease and desist in playing with our boys’ wedding tackle and encouraging the Frogs to leave their opponents eyes comfortably ensconced in their sockets.

I’d like to send a personal thank you to Voice for the Aardvark joke. Killed me.

If you missed it, you’ve either got a long search mission or you can send me an Email stapled to a tenner and I’ll explain it…..

The problem with the renos, Voice, is stopping the car to change the flat tyre – or just putting up with the flapping until we get to the party.

At 5 for 548, we cross to the commentary box.... Hung ?

“Lillie approaches from the Vulture Street End, Boycott pads up, its bowled him, Boycott’s off stump knocked out of the ground, no shot offered……”, the lounge room roars into action, grown men cry, dogs bark, people flood the street tossing hats in the air rejoicing, backs are slapped, beers are poured, this is summer this is cricket, this is heaven, their best batsman bowled without offering a shot, life doesn’t get any better than this, ah yes, cricket where the only thing better than cricket is more cricket.

Yes cricket, the one true national game. Forget your football codes cricket is life and life is cricket. Understanding cricket is easy. Get more runs then they do, simple. Nothin’ too hard bout that. And yes the culture, the joy, the atmosphere, its quasi-religious and coming from an atheist that’s saying something.

As a kid growing up in Wollongong all my mates played cricket and for me batting, bowling or fielding I couldn’t care less, just playing the game was all I needed. Weekends were cricket in the juniors Saturday morning, Grade in the afternoon. Sunday morning surf then when the nor’easter came in cricket in the park with me mates. Mum had to come and get me for tea as the sun had set ages ago. She’d call out from the street “Hung, get home, it’s as black as, tea’s on the table, how can you see that ball anyhow?”, “But Mum, a century beckons”, I always wondered why mum called me Hung when my name’s Xavier, anyway some things are a mystery.

My Dad, an Englishman tolerating us colonials, would get the bus to the bottom of Bulli Pass and hold up a sign “SCG”, someone would always pull over and give him a lift. I was too young to go along at first but then my initiation came, the SCG, the hallowed turf, the smell of the freshly cut grass, the crowd, the banter between the Poms and the Aussies, always witty, never violent or abusive and supporters of both sides could sit together and barrack for their team. Mum would pack ham and mustard sandwiches and Dad would shout an ice cream, bliss.

Then as a young man going to the test with my mates, eskies full of beer, pies and hotdogs, hot chips and seagulls. Doug Walters would stride out and the crowd would erupt, “Douggie, Douggie” we’d chant. If he got a boundary the noise was deafening, all of us would rise as one, “You bewdy”. Then tragedy, Douggie caught in the covers, “Poms can’t field, how’d they catch that “.

Then as I aged a bit more and the Hill disappeared and my brother-in-law, Brad, and I would sit in the stands. One birthday, which falls in January, somewhere between the 4^th and the 6^th, hint hint, we went to the SCG and watched India play, Azzarudin, mate, me and Brad wanted to make him an honorary Aussie, he was brilliant. But it was against the Poms that was best, the old dart, the mother country, those were the days.

Tutu and I moved to Adelaide in the eighties and loved it. 15 minutes to the oval, no rain, 5 days of heaven. Saw the mighty West Indies, Adam Gilchrist, V.V.S Laxman, Wasim Akram and the graceful Brian Lara. In the first few years here, Tutu would bring books to the game to read but it gets hot in summer, 40 plus, so now she drops me at the Oval and goes on a spending spree on my credit card, I mean am I a winner or what ?

Andrew Strauss Not Getting it Either

So for those that don’t understand cricket, don’t worry. Just pretend you like it or compromise like Tutu and read a book, enjoy the fresh air, the sun, the community, being as one with total strangers, applauding your opponent for good play, all of these things are cricket and oh yes check the scoreboard occasionally.

Hung One On – from Deep Fine Leg ………

On the way to the MCG, at the MCG and on the way home

As a young woman, the realization that in order to prosper in the workforce I needed to be able to talk about cricket came as a huge relief.

If you knew the extent of my lack of interest in the sport of cricket spectating, you might find this puzzling. It’s hard to pinpoint the cause of this militant lack of interest. It might be a female thing; it might be a reaction to my father’s seasonal lack of availability, or to his one-eyed barracking. My father was your archetypal one-sided sports fanatic. It was quite late in my childhood that I fully understood the role of the other team on the ground. Until then, listening to my father’s exclamations during the endless TV broadcasts, I thought the members of his team were the only actual players, battling blind umpires, unfavourable weather, or worse, the occasional unforced error, in an effort to claim their rightful title of match winner.

In any case, this early disaffection with the game of cricket was only reinforced as a University student, where endless discussion of cricket scores was lumped together in my mind with endless discussions about cars as uncouth “engineer’s talk”.

Fast forward a few years, and the burning ambition to be able to pay for food and rent found me working for a manufacturing company in a largely engineer dominated IT department. As the cricket season commenced I reflexively turned off whenever the inevitable discussions started. But I couldn’t help noticing that I was spending a lot of time talking to myself, and this was highlighted during a period of relative inactivity for my group, when half the day was spent arguing about cricket (and the other half perfecting the giant paper ball). It became painfully obvious at a farewell for one of our group, where the others bonded with management over a cricket discussion while I found myself a lonely outsider, that something needed to be done.

So I decided to bite the bullet and follow the cricket. I shamelessly enlisted the aid of a co-worker who had both demonstrated some knowledge of cricket and shown some interest in my company (no doubt confirming in the mind of many engineers reading this piece the dastardly use of feminine wiles by their female colleagues.) Over a coffee break I confessed the reluctance of my resignation to spending endless weekend hours watching cricket on the tele, half-expecting him to recoil in horror. It took me a while to realize the significance of his counter-confession that some weekends he himself had to miss the cricket and that on those occasions he just checked the score intermittently, but was still able to hold his own at work on Monday. Imagine my relief and delight when I realized it wasn’t strictly necessary to know about the cricket. All I needed to be able to do was to talk about it.

Riffing together we came up with the phrase “at one stage there…” as in “at one stage there Australia was 3 for 103” or “at one stage there Warne was 54 not out”. All that was needed was to check the scoreboard once during the cricket broadcast!

The day before the next lunchtime gathering I searched the newspaper for the cricket news. I arrived at work the next day with a few facts printed on the palm of my hand. After everybody had eaten enough to satisfy hunger, and the conversation turned to cricket, I surreptitiously glanced at my hand and announced “At one stage there Australia was 2 for 75.” This was greeted by a number of wise comments, and I was part of the group. Emboldened by this success, I further announced “At one stage there Steve Waugh was 75 not out.” This was met by a puzzled silence and I found myself on the outside once again. Later my ally explained to me that the correct pronunciation of Waugh is “Waw”. Never having really listened to a cricket broadcast, I had somehow come up with the idea that it was pronounced “woe”. Since at that time Steve (or Mark?) Waugh was captain of the Australian cricket team, this was a major blunder.

My second big effort was Christmas drinks at the pub, where I arrived unprepared but was thrilled to hear the cricket news being announced on TV, and immediately memorized the first piece of information. Later I proudly announced my hastily memorized factoid, and once again it was well received. Then somebody asked me “Who won?” Unfortunately I had been so engrossed in memorizing that I had omitted to note this apparently important detail, and my face fell. An employee with all the social grace of, well, a young engineer working in IT, piped up “You can’t be very interested in the cricket if you don’t know who won.” The members of my immediate group, who by this time were in on the joke, were in stitches. I decided to own up rather than look a total moron, and by that time everybody had drunk enough to take it well.

Boxing Day 2008, and a couple I haven’t met yet are the hosts for the post-Christmas neighbours gathering. The husband greets us at the door with “I was just watching the cricket”. I have a moment’s panic; since I’ve been working at a small non-cricket oriented company the start of the cricket season has passed unnoticed. But through those earlier years of intensive training in cricket conversation I manage to avoid the crimes of appearing uninterested or asking who’s winning. I settle on asking the score, and the moment passes safely.

Thankful for this reminder, and with job interviews pending, I search the web and find the ABC.Net cricket page. There I discover an invaluable innovation, the Live Game Log. The first log entry is a summary of the state of play at the commencement of the day, and the follow-up entries are brief over by over summaries logged in real time. All the information needed to contribute to a cricket conversation available at your fingertips. At one stage there Kallis was not out for 26.

with thanks to Voice – for establishing the perfect level of involvement …. and anticipating a rejoinder from Hung …..