My Funeral, Your Ashes
A tale of two makeshift men
Not until his 307th first-class innings was Simon Katich asked to turn himself into an opening batsman
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Not until his 307th first-class innings was Simon Katich asked to turn himself into an opening batsman. His cool opening batsman’s temperament was with him from birth. Today a ball rapped him near the knee-roll, everybody shouted and the third umpire hit play on the slow-motion replay. Katich survived, and forgot about it. No sooner did the next ball leave Jimmy Anderson’s hand than Katich was shuffling across the crease and tickling it off his backside for four.
Surviving and forgetting: it’s a handy knack in an opening batsman. And batting’s different for openers. All batsmen must live with the daunting sensation of starting each innings afresh on zero. For an opener, it can be doubly daunting; the team, too, is on zero. This morning Anderson wasn’t moving the ball much but nor was he offering much loose. Katich kept flirting and missing. And forgetting – and it worked. Soon he was leaving balls he felt sure about and pushing singles off balls he felt really sure about, and when he wasn’t sure he’d loosen his hands on the handle so that no edge would carry far.
Katich’s body is abnormally hairy. This, too, is abundantly handy. It helps cushion the blows every opening batsman cops. Katich copped a couple: on the shoulder blade from Stuart Broad, above the elbow off Steven Finn. He was hobbling a little, as well, a kind of limping and left-handed Gordon Greenidge. And, as with any good opener, his run trickle gently accelerated: 12 in the first hour, 19 the next. He lasted till lunch. In a sense, the job of the opening batsman – Katich’s job these days – was done.
Full postAudacity and ambiguity
Forty-three, which is the number of runs Kevin Pietersen scored today in Brisbane , is roughly par
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Forty-three, which is the number of runs Kevin Pietersen scored today in Brisbane, is roughly par. It tells us nothing. Yet when a grass-scorching straight drive took Pietersen from six to 10, you sensed the destiny of the Ashes might lie in his hands. A minute later he was swaying down on one knee and throttling a bullet drive towards gully, the most audacious way possible of negotiating a dot ball. That’s when you sensed that he sensed it too.
To go from 13 to 14, Pietersen patted the ball away as softly as his hands could manage, ensuring the fieldsman would take a while to get to it, and started galloping. You knew then that he was thinking, and trying. As he hammered away at the popping crease, his legs were splayed even wider than usual, making an upside-down V. When he covered up in defence he permitted not one glimpse of wood. He looked not simply dangerous – dangerous is Pietersen’s default setting – but assured, as well. If the ball pitched on or near leg stump, he pulled, hooked, glanced, tugged or shovelled it away, sometimes falling forward as he did so. Anything around off stump – anything not wide or overpitched, that is – and he wasn’t interested.
Preparing for cricket is an inexact science. We assume that heaps of preparation is better than some preparation and that some preparation is better than no preparation. But we are guessing. In three warm-up matches, captain Andrew Strauss has squirrelled away every run on offer. This morning, when it actually mattered, he cut the wrong ball at the worst moment and neglected to roll his wrists. Pietersen, against those same warm-up opponents, has dallied just long enough to know he is more or less middling the ball. Today, his shot selection immaculate, he plain-sailed to 39.
Full postIf it rains…
In Brisbane, precipitation changes everything
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
The Go-Betweens were the Robbie Kerr of pop music. They were clever-seeming Brisbane boys, at once shimmering and wry, the planet theirs for the conquering. The planet, alas, was at that moment in thrall to more workmanlike sorts: Boons and Marshes, Huey Lewises and Phil Collinses. And so The Go-Betweens, like Robbie Kerr, never quite made it to household name status even in Woolloongabba. Their fifth record, called Tallulah, opened with a violin and a man’s voice, slightly parched, and these words: “It rains for days so you stay inside and lock your door.”
They sang of death, heartache and Kerouac; of fur traders living in exile and steel-haired sisters sleeping in feminist bookstores. Yet this least Brisbane-like of bands was the most Brisbane-like of bands. For if songwriters Grant McLennan and Robert Forster had one preoccupation, verging on obsession, it was rain. Rain “surrenders to the town”. Rain hits “the roof with the sound of a finished kiss”. Rain is an ex-lover’s handwriting – “like mud in the September rain” – that keeps drip-dripping in your skull. Listen to the first half a dozen Go-Betweens records. The one constant is rain. It swoops in and it vanishes, then it’s back again, a light sprinkling of dust over every shift in mood and circumstance.
A recurring fascination is this: how once the rain has tumbled, things are never quite as they were. Cricketers understand this well. It rains. Everybody scatters. The rain stops. Everyone returns. And the ball does things it most definitely was not doing before. When he was 28, Forster was howling: “When will change come, just like spring rain?” He is 53 now, and the thought tantalises him still, his most recent solo album beginning with one frozen guitar strum and one calm assertion of a lesson learned: “If it rains, now we’ll change…”
Full postTo the pickets, with love
Batting is a business of quandaries and possibilities
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Batting is a business of quandaries and possibilities. Just occasionally, in the seconds before a spinner who flights the ball lets go, the possibilities hover at your lips yet out of tongue’s grasp. And the quandary is clear-cut. Do you dance? Do you stay? Dance and you might turn the ball, another budding ball of the century for all anyone knows, into a full toss by the bowler and four runs for you. Stay and you are safe: comforting, quiet, keep-that-shoe-behind-the-popping-crease safe. The ones who bat with a sort of love in their hearts, who see that it’s a game and that a game must involve chance, they dance.
This summer’s climactic high point could come as soon as next Thursday: the moment Graeme Swann bowls for the first time to Michael Clarke. Swann is a flighter. Clarke is a dancer. Together they land us back in 1904, cradling lit stoves in our laps to keep warm. Should everything go right for Swann, England will probably retain the Ashes. If nothing much goes wrong for Clarke, the destiny of the Ashes will temporarily stop mattering. For those hours, or minutes, batting will cease being a business and become something like a painting in an art exhibition. Sometimes, when Clarke’s feet win the race and the fielders freeze stock-still as the ball goes skimming to the pickets, it will feel like the entire six-storey gallery.
Other times his feet are not fast enough. He is unable to get to the ball before it bounces or on the half volley. So he pats it away. Still he has won the contest. For the next delivery, nearly every time, is shorter, and flatter. This allows Clarke to step back and cut – the stroke he considers his most important against the spinners. And the ball after that, the quandary is the bowler’s. Does he loop it? Does he zip it? Nothing is working. All this hails from that one moment’s acceptance of chance. Two balls later Clarke is still savouring the rewards.
Full postStanding in the rain
In a hilly suburb of Adelaide, on a morning so still that even the crows must have been sleeping in, Andrew Hilditch decided to catch a bus to the solicitors’ office where he worked
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
In a hilly suburb of Adelaide, on a morning so still that even the crows must have been sleeping in, Andrew Hilditch decided to catch a bus to the solicitors’ office where he worked. This was years ago, not long after he had stopped playing cricket. By the side of the road he stood and stood. The stillness in the air gave way. It started to rain. He stayed standing. Some chunks of hail swooped down. Watching them bounce along the footpath, he stayed standing. A taxi driver slowed in front of him, trying to get his attention. He shrugged and stayed standing. Reluctantly, he hoisted his old briefcase – slightly worn, but he cherished it, a gift from his father-in-law – and held it over his head. And stayed standing.
Instantly the briefcase’s battered condition revealed itself: it was full of holes. Water gushed down his nose and cheeks from what felt like a dozen leather pinpricks. Top-secret court documents in that briefcase shrivelled, then clagged together, an unreadable mash. A kindly woman, bespectacled, she was wearing a purple headscarf, tugged at the sodden left elbow of his suit sleeve. “Son,” she said, “you do know, don’t you, that the bus drivers are on strike today?” Andrew stayed standing.
It is not a story you hear him tell, not now that he is the chairman of selectors. Yet somehow it sums him – not that we feel like we know him, not really – up. Once he has hit upon a strategy, he sticks to it. If subtle signs emerge that the strategy is not working, he sticks to it. When it becomes apparent that the strategy is doomed and was a wrong-headed strategy all along, he sticks to it.
Full postModern tourists miss going bush
Few travelling English cricketers have skirted the continent from west to south quite so contentedly as Andrew Strauss and his men this week
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Few travelling English cricketers have skirted the continent from west to south quite so contentedly as Andrew Strauss and his men this week. Historically the tour, by now, is a shambles already, a haze of form clouds and injury strife, defeat sticky in the throat and a sun-bronzed nation’s cricket watchers holding back their laughter. Then comes the final straw: some sort of practical joke, surely? A two-day train ride, eerily straight, with smoko breaks every few hours, cross the Nullarbor Plain.
“Not a very interesting journey … Nothing but saltbush and sand,” concluded allrounder Percy Fender in 1928-29. Eighteen summers later Denis Compton was aghast. “One of the bleakest spots on which I have ever set eyes … We were not sorry when the train pulled to a halt in the main street of Port Pirie.”
Card games in the sitting room filled the cracks in conversation on that October 1946 train trip. For a few brief seconds in time, all eyes darted up. “It was on this journey,” reported Compton, “that we had our first glimpse of the Aborigines, but as Peter Smith, at this stage, held a very good hand, the rest of the ‘school’ … did not take so much notice of this event as it probably justified.”
Full postThe Club with No Ears
What are you supposed to do when somebody falls out of love with you
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
What are you supposed to do when somebody falls out of love with you? No one knows. What do you not do? About this, the doctors and professors and the psycho-gazillions graduating out of the world’s universities do have a bit of a clue. You do not turn inwards. You do not retreat. You do not stick one’s fingers in one’s ears. You do not chant na-na-na-can’t-hear-you when someone with whom you do not totally agree says something. You do not ignore your elders.
It stands to reason that the same rules should apply when a couple of million people fall out of love with you. This is roughly what has just happened, if the opinion surveys and front-bar chatter can be believed. A cricket-loving public has fallen out of love with cricket the way Ricky Ponting’s team plays it. Yet there was Ponting being interviewed by Peter Wilkins the other night, on The 7.30 Report, on some golf course, his putter under one arm and a finger stuffed in each ear.
The interview ran six minutes. It had as much gristle in at as fairy floss. For a few testy seconds, though, all that pink sludge nearly made Ponting choke.
Full postEleven Graemes in a Dressing Room
In keeping with the So You Think You Can Select spirit of the times, I give you this: an XI of Graemes (and Grahams).
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
In keeping with the So You Think You Can Select spirit of the times, I give you this: an XI of Graemes (and Grahams).
Apologies, faint ones, to Graham Yallop, who might have slunk into a few folks’ teams at number five. Sorry, too, to Graham ‘Jock’ Edwards, of Central Districts and New Zealand, outfoxed for the keeper’s gloves by a man named Fowler. No apologies for my 12th man – for he was the equal of three 12th men – the late Graham Roope. “Wherever,” wrote Mike Selvey, “it was anticipated might be the likeliest place for a catch, there Roope would be found.”
THE GRAEMES
1 Graeme Smith (SA, capt)
2 Graham Gooch (Eng)
3 Graeme Hick (Eng)
4 Graeme Pollock (SA)
5 Graeme Wood (Aus)
6 Graham Thorpe (Eng)
7 Graeme Fowler (Eng, wk)
8 Graeme Swann (Eng)
9 Graeme Labrooy (SL)
10 Graham McKenzie (Aus)
11 Graham Dilley (Eng)
12th man Graham Roope (Eng)
Full postTwo Men in a Brewery
With a cautious nod and eyes wide open with suspicion he shuffled into the room, not like Garry Sobers or Dick Diver or the Great Gatsby but like the man he actually was, a man with a serious job at a brewery
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
With a cautious nod and eyes wide open with suspicion he shuffled into the room, not like Garry Sobers or Dick Diver or the Great Gatsby but like the man he actually was, a man with a serious job at a brewery. His collared grey shirt was tucked tidily into his trousers. I half expected him to do what he’d always done and start jogging on the popping crease, knees climbing up past his bellybutton, pad-flaps and buckles shaking everywhere. But he was not wearing pads and buckles. Those days were over long ago, and when they ended they’d ended a little bit harrowingly, and with a batting average of 31.
Forgive me these few minutes of non-Ashes digression. For today is November 6, Graeme Wood’s birthday, and though my heroes now tend to be long-dead novelists or forlorn singer-songwriters, not a November 6 goes by without me thinking of the hero who came first.
Except I don’t, anymore, think just of him. I think also of the Friday afternoon, in a tiny side room in that brewery on a highway, when it was me and him.
Full postHussey searching for form of relaxation
Future fans and boffins might well dwell on the day, yesterday, that Ricky Ponting added this interesting yet eerie nugget to the collective cricketing wisdom
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Future fans and boffins might well dwell on the day, yesterday, that Ricky Ponting added this interesting yet eerie nugget to the collective cricketing wisdom. “I don’t,” said Ponting, “think it was so much the bowling in the first innings that got him out. It sounds like he hit a cut shot straight to a bloke in the covers.”
It is interesting because it makes you think. What is form? If – as Mike Hussey did against South Australia on Sunday – you wander out and try first ball to drill Aaron O’Brien through the covers, it suggests a mind and a bat in peachy condition. The ball hitting the cover fieldsman on the chest is a side issue, surely, a case of out of luck not out of form.
It is eerie because Ponting’s words are a rough opposite of an old maxim of Greg Chappell’s. Some unhappy day, after some or other single-digit score, Chappell said something like: “I’m not out of form. It’s just that the bowlers keep getting me out.”
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