My Funeral, Your Ashes
The Hangman’s Way
At six past midday on Wednesday, Alastair Cook got a ball that was neither wide nor full and he greeted it like a stork helping itself to water
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
At six past midday on Wednesday, Alastair Cook got a ball that was neither wide nor full and he greeted it like a stork helping itself to water. Long legs bent gently down. With head still, then a snap of the wrists, he sent the ball skimming not too hard, but just hard enough, away from the green and burgundy railings of the Ladies Pavilion and through the covers, his 120th run of the innings, his 697th of the series.
Today Phil Hughes, second delivery he faced, got a ball – not quite wide, not quite full – and stood flatfooted. Only his little arms moved. They hanged the bat out in the ball’s general direction. Ball duly thudded into bat and wobbled off towards gully.
On Slate.com this week, Christopher Hitchens writes entertainingly of the delicate balance between creating a decent cup of tea and an undrinkable one. Always choose a cylindrical, narrow-mouthed mug. Pre-warm the mug. Carry the mug to the kettle rather than the kettle to the mug so that the water when you pour it is actually boiling. Then – and hang on tight as you can to this last bit of advice – put the tea bag in before the water. Reverse this order and you’ll swallow the consequences: a tepid, colourless muck to drink, a “dispiriting tampon surrogate” to dispose of.
Full postCaught (Dropped!) In The Memory
So ends another Ashes summer
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
So ends another Ashes summer. It begins, traditionally, with a boy buying the new season’s issue of the ABC Cricket Book, which this summer asked the ABC cricket commentators to recall their favourite Ashes moment. Terry Alderman was actually present, watching on the dressing room TV, at his moment: Old Trafford, 1989, Cook bowling to Boon, the Ashes regained and a pinch of bliss to soothe the still-seeping humiliations of ’81 and ’85…
“The moment David Boon whipped a ball off his pads,” Alderman said, “is forever ingrained on my mind.”
Geoff Lawson, who was watching from the players’ balcony, chose the same moment. Only different. “Boon,” said Lawson, “sweeps to deep backward square leg.”
Full postFawlty Hours
Let us begin by listing the signs of promising improvement seen in the Australian cricket team today
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Let us begin by listing the signs of promising improvement seen in the Australian cricket team today. Spinner Michael Beer did not bowl a no-ball. There end the signs of promising improvement.
The day dawned brimful of sparkle. Australia had not quite a half-chance but better than a quarter-chance of levelling this Ashes series 2–2. Rob Smyth, the Guardian’s majestic over-by-over wisecracker, thought this monstrously unjust. Like a ferret catcher with the smell of ferret in his nostrils, Smyth hunted down the following oddity: England’s batsmen, at the time of writing, were averaging 48.71 runs per wicket and Australia’s 29.37, a differential of 19.34, a differential like no differential England had ever known in the full sweep of Ashes history.
Hats off. It was a cracking stat. But it was about as relevant as pointing out that were this Ashes series played to Sheffield Shield rules (six points for a win, two points for a first-innings lead in a draw), then Australia (14 points) would top the table over England (12 points) – thanks to their fairly humungous 481 at the Gabba, and provided they did indeed win here in Sydney. Which pretty much immediately looked like a numpty-brained proviso.
Full postPupwatch
The world moves in apt and mysterious ways, and so it was that on Michael Clarke’s first afternoon as Australia’s captain in the field David Hasselhoff was sitting in the crowd
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
The world moves in apt and mysterious ways, and so it was that on Michael Clarke’s first afternoon as Australia’s captain in the field David Hasselhoff was sitting in the crowd. Hasselhoff is a world-renowned TV lifeguard and crime fighter who used to get around in a talking, thinking, rocket-powered car named KITT. Which made The Hoff’s presence at the SCG doubly apt. For what comes higher on any new captain’s wishlist than a car capable of telling you what to do and then zooming you the heck out of there should things go awry?
Seven balls into England’s innings, the dog days of Ponting were over and the Pup Era upon us. That’s when Clarke tossed Mitchell Johnson the new ball. Ponting’s preference had been to hold Johnson back till after the drinks break. But for Clarke, Johnson immediately made that seventh ball wobble, and Clarke, in appreciation, clapped hands above his head at second slip. Second slip was where another glamour bat, Kim Hughes, had posted himself on his first day as captain 32 summers ago. Hughes promptly dropped Javed Miandad, twice – sitters, both – and Javed freewheeled along to 129.
The good news for Clarke today was that he spilled no catch. The bad news was that no bowler looked likely to give him one.
Full postSweet Fifteen
He awoke a Test cricketer, and for the rest of the day being awake felt dreamier than the deepest sleep
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
He awoke a Test cricketer, and for the rest of the day being awake felt dreamier than the deepest sleep. His first ball brought his first runs, a tidy tuck off his thigh pad. His second ball was wider and announced his first boundary: a perfectly middled pull stroke from outside off stump, which takes some doing, audacious yet safe, which takes some explaining.
Usman Khawaja’s third ball was his first dot ball, gloves flung high and away from strife. Seventh ball, a roll of the wrists and a clip through square leg, heralded his first all-along-the-ground boundary. On his eighth ball he unfurled his first cut shot, chopping it down straight, the ball rebounding high off the wicket and zigzagging away. That took him to 15 and prompted the day’s first so-crazy-it’s-worth-asking question: when did an Australian cricketer last begin his Test lifetime with 15 runs timed so sweetly or gathered so blissfully?
On his ninth ball he blocked one, another first. Successful negotiation of his 16th ball marked his first maiden over. Richie Benaud, meanwhile, was savouring his first eyeful of Khawaja in the batting flesh. Khawaja was 20 not out when Benaud began invoking the giant-booted maestros of yesteryear, wondering aloud “if Australia’s just found another one”.
Full postThe Ballad of Nugget and Krystyna
Speaking of a sick-in-the-gut feeling, that’s when it hit me, a creeping unease
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
There was once a beer-bellied bloke named Nugget who graced TV and magazine ads in one of those old-style cork hats that keep the blowflies off swagmen. Nugget was the public face of Kerry Packer’s range of cricket merchandise. Nugget’s job was to make children nag their parents into buying junk. Seldom did a summer’s day go by without you seeing Nugget. He was as much a part of the living room furniture as Lenny Pascoe’s scowl. Nugget’s beard was scratchy like spinifex and he had tree-trunk legs that his King Gee shorts could not quite contain. A dead ringer for Rod Marsh, Nugget was, except Nugget always wore khaki and Bacchus never sold commemorative beach towels, green-and-gold waterproof wallets or necklaces with little bats on them.
Who remembers Nugget now? Who knew Cricket Australia, no longer in bed with Mr Packer, is still flogging Nugget’s old gear?
Yesterday, day of Ashes retention, was a day of retail like any other, and the white merchandise van parked outside the MCG was trying in vain to rid itself of fluffy lions, fake urns, sombreros, cufflinks, baggy-green fridge magnets, silver-bat bottletop openers, mini-transistors and balls that bounce on seawater.
Full postThat old greyhound squint
When Ricky Ponting wakes up on Test match morning, he is not the type to help himself to muesli and a Swisse Men’s Ultivite pill only to spend the next half-hour wondering whether he should have gone for a couple of bananas instead
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
When Ricky Ponting wakes up on Test match morning, he is not the type to help himself to muesli and a Swisse Men’s Ultivite pill only to spend the next half-hour wondering whether he should have gone for a couple of bananas instead. On Monday at the MCG he genuinely did go bananas – thinking he’d seen an inside edge, then getting hissy when three umpires insisted he hadn’t. But none of that made today a day to ditch the habits of a lifetime and start second-guessing himself. Instead he went on radio and TV. Heat of the moment, he explained, dunno what came over me, blahdy blah … And then he blew a little raspberry. In “my heart” and in “my mind”, he still reckoned Kevin Pietersen had inside-edged the bloody thing.
So if this was to be his seventh-last day as Test captain, maybe even as a Test cricketer, he’d stare it square in the eye with that old greyhound squint. Out he bounced, the same as he ever was, lean, baggy-greened, hungry-looking, his creams dazzlingly creamy against his sun-browned forearms. He stationed himself out of position at mid-on, to protect his battered pinkie, safe but not hiding, not even for a second. He spat on his palms. He urged on his men. He tinkered with his field settings and he fetched bowlers’ caps off umpires, to save his bowler the walk. Seldom did you spy Ponting staring off aimlessly towards the tram tracks of mid-distance.
When, after 20 minutes, a catch was there for the catching, it was Ponting who caught it. Another near-catch looped over bowler Ben Hilfenhaus’s head, and it was Punter who gave Hilfy two consoling slaps on the shoulder. While Ryan Harris writhed on the ground, a pincered crab on the sand, Ponting crouched glaring at Harris’s sockless left ankle, thinking perhaps that if he glared at it long enough the bone might magically heal before his eyes. When a half-shout went up for an attempted lbw hoax he didn’t join in – no blowhard insincerity today – and nor did he hoop and holler when a tailender got out. Ponting, unlike his underlings, simply smiled and jogged in, the ninth man to reach the team huddle and the last one to leave it, not missing the chance to pass on a nugget or two's wisdom to his bowler.
Full postLetting go
The final week of the fourth fastest-scoring year in Test history – 3.34 runs an over, and counting – is upon us
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
The final week of the fourth fastest-scoring year in Test history – 3.34 runs an over, and counting – is upon us. Yet no prettier or more telling strokes were glimpsed in Melbourne today than 14 statements of non-scoring intent.
And let us understand this aright: when Kevin Pietersen leaves a ball, a statement is what it is. It is no mere gesture or modest away-shuffle, and it is certainly not that ultimate cricketing misnomer, the “no-stroke”. Like a man plucking a dagger clean out of a rock, Pietersen heaves his hands and arms high and twists backwards at the ribcage. His bat finishes horizontal above his head, the stickers sky-side up. His gloves are out of danger’s way and his arms a metre apart, elbows pointing at, taunting almost, the gully fieldsman.
It is all a whir, a blur. But peer through that and into his eyes – Pietersen’s oddly sad, brown eyes. At first they are fixed on the approaching ball. Then the instant the ball is past him, the eyes flick up and onto the bowler’s own eyes: a silent declaration of a small battle won.
Full postGone fishing
“In a pond with no fish,” goes an old Russian saying, “a crab is a fish.” Twenty-first century Australian cricket throws up numerous variations on this
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
“In a pond with no fish,” goes an old Russian saying, “a crab is a fish.” Twenty-first century Australian cricket throws up numerous variations on this. Such as: in a pond with bugger all fit and capable opening batsmen, Shane Watson is an opening batsman.
To his credit, Watson is an opener whose plant-foot-and-plunder style of driving the ball has cemented in many of his countrymen’s hearts a warm sort of feeling. This feeling falls just short of affection. It is more a grudging, qualified trust, the kind that at 10.29 this morning persuaded the pink-shirted lad at Q23, on the fourth tier of the MCG’s Great Southern Stand, to lean in towards the blue-shirted lad next to him.
“Watto’s on strike,” announced the lad in pink, “so I’m pretty confident.”
Full postThe (woman's) style is the man
“Each profession begets its particular style of play,” wrote that master back-of-a-postcard essayist RC Robertson-Glasgow, in the days when cricketers had day jobs.
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
“Each profession begets its particular style of play,” wrote that master back-of-a-postcard essayist RC Robertson-Glasgow, in the days when cricketers had day jobs.
The village undertaker always kept wicket and spoke only when appealing. Professional gardeners, not minding monotony, bowled medium pace. The parson and the schoolmaster were invariably batsmen, careful and correct, whereas motor mechanics swung lustily and farm hands didn’t hurt easily. Caterers, meanwhile, were wont to get distracted. “One eye,” noted Robertson-Glasgow, “is always waiting for the van that brings the tea. But a wise captain does not rebuke them.”
That’s old hat and mischief now, what with academies and under-age talent squads swallowing boys up before they’ve time to consider what other than a cricketer they might like to be, much less to be it. Suppose, though, that a team of eleven, for just one week, were to embody the qualities peculiar to their wives’ and girlfriends’ professions. Hold back disbelief and imagine the woman’s style is the man. It could transform a side’s character. Might it, too, shake an Ashes series around and upside down and out of recognisable shape?
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