"Mate," he said incredulously, "how about poor Phil Hughes?" That gambit started a half-hour conversation about Hughes, about cricket, about a lot of awful things, and also about some uplifting things. This guy had no inhibitions about telling me, a complete stranger, how the week had made him feel.

I'd actually walked in there in a bit of a zombified state, having not slept much for a few days prior, so it wasn't until I went to pay that it finally dawned on me that I hadn't been the target of some scattergun emotional purge. He'd said all of this stuff to me because he'd been framing a cricket photo for me. It wasn't the last thing I completely forgot in the last week, including filing this blog post.

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Embracing Maxwell's unpredictability

Fans pop a vein when his ludicrous tactics fail, shrug when he succeeds. Either way, cricket's first bona fide troll is not about to change

Russell Jackson

13-Nov-2014

I feel a bit sorry for Glenn Maxwell, which possibly isn't an entirely popular stance at the moment. In every generation there are cricketers who elicit strong negative reactions from a fair portion of fans and Maxwell is certainly one of those players. I understand the angst, I just don't share it.

Much of what is said about him - the stuff I tend to read and watch anyway - positions Maxwell as being this wasteful, maddening symbol of everything that is wrong with his generation. Which is a lot to lump on one guy. He's a sort of cipher through which people angrily vent their frustrations at everything from the rise of T20 cricket and the supposed march to hell it entails, to the product range down at the Apple store. To them, Maxwell is the infuriating cricket symbol of the Twitter age and they are not shy of saying it. Often on Twitter.

The two biggest problems he has in this losing PR battle are his unfortunate nickname, The Big Show, and also the manner in which he plays, which is its own unique personal branding exercise. The first he can't help, and in an interview last summer he was at pains to point out to TV presenter James Brayshaw that he hated it and wished people would stop using it. Maxwell appeared genuine in this hope. Back in the Channel Nine studio after that pre-recorded segment ended, Brayshaw immediately resumed using it. On the second matter, Maxwell can hardly be expected to abandon the techniques and philosophies that earned him fame and fortune in the first place.

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How boring is boring cricket?

Having graced the airwaves for more than four decades, he is a broadcasting institution on par with Benaud, despite not having played at senior level

Russell Jackson

31-Oct-2014

Cricket, complete strangers are often wont to tell me, is a dreadfully boring sport. "I've tried but I don't get it all," said an otherwise kindly lady at the counter of a charity shop in which I bought Geoff Boycott's 1981 West Indies tour diary a few weeks ago. "It's just so… so boring."

To many, she was probably correct in that assessment. Even cricket fans themselves often complain that the game is boring. Twitter, the historical high-water mark of mass whingeing, is now basically an overflowing repository of personal cricket boredom updates. I've read loads of them in between overs as Younis Khan and his team-mates have batted Australia into submission in the last week and a bit.

"Hang on a minute, you're bored by watching Younis Khan?" I find myself asking. What I would argue in response to this boredom accusation is not that cricket is never boring, because we all know there's the odd dreary session befouled by glacial over rates and defensive play, but that when it boring it's still not actually that bad compared to the equivalent boring patches of play in other sports.

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Jim Maxwell: Radio commentary's tireless doyen

Having graced the airwaves for more than four decades, he is a broadcasting institution on par with Benaud, despite not having played at senior level

Russell Jackson

17-Oct-2014

There are many particularly welcome occurrences at the beginning of an Australian summer and chief among them is having the radio airwaves filled with cricket talk. Cricket talk means ABC Radio. ABC Radio means our commentary doyen Jim Maxwell.

If you have never played the game at the highest level, it requires talent, the capacity for a lot of hard work and no small amount of perseverance to succeed in cricket broadcasting. Maxwell surely possesses all three and particularly needed the latter when it took him three tries to win a traineeship with the public broadcaster 41 years ago.

Back then, in 1973, Maxwell was a 23-year-old greenhorn calling the likes of Lillee and Thomson, though any Australian cricket lover under the age of 40 could scarcely conceive of a time when Maxwell wasn't a broadcasting institution. His calm, measured utterances remain one of the most recognisable and evocative sounds of an Aussie summer, like Cicadas or the sizzling of a barbecue.

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Cricket shirts: gotta love 'em

Cricket nerds love team shirts, especially ones from their childhood

Russell Jackson

02-Oct-2014

With the passing of barely more than a year since my last house move, I'm packing up and shipping out again this week. The hope is that the new place becomes a family home, and thus it's unlikely we'll be requiring removal trucks again for quite some time.

Given the amount of stuff I've been lugging around my entire adult life, that's something of a relief. I've written about this before but the cricket books are the hardest and most time-consuming to pack, because not only are there so many of them, the removal of each from the shelves brings with it an individual set of memories that need to be processed, sending me down fresh and interesting wormholes of thought each time.

It was a given that I'd take forever to pack up the cricket books but this time what surprised me more than the volume of usual suspects (books, records, magazines and "collectibles" - most of which are far too embarrassing to be owned by a grown man) was the number of cricket shirts I've acquired over the years.

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Johnson v McLaren: a tale of two blows

The South African allrounder had the misfortune of being in the line of fire twice this year

Russell Jackson

19-Sep-2014

Over the last six months or so I've often found myself wondering whether we underrate the bravery of cricketers, and batsmen particularly. Dan Brettig touched on this in his wonderful recent essay on Mitchell Johnson's bouncers and the resultant reign of terror against English and South African batsmen in the past year.

The section of that piece in which Brettig chronicles Johnson's intimidation of the left-handed lower-order batsmen from South Africa resonated most with me because in the recent ODI tri-series in Zimbabwe, I had been fascinated by the way Johnson had again roughed up the South African allrounder Ryan McLaren, breaking his arm in what to me was the defining moment of the series.

"Defining" probably sounds a little odd, because Australia failed to win the series, but for me, as for many others, I'm sure, that result will be immaterial in even six months' time because we never think back on these types of tournaments with anything but an eye for a few standout moments, and Johnson had arguably the most dramatic of those. I'll also think about Faf du Plessis' incredible streak of form, of course, but mainly I'll think about the resumption of that battle between McLaren and Johnson.

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The unquestioning loyalty of the sports nut

True sports fans are like Harley-Davidson loyalists. Poor marketing and tacky innovations will never turn them away from the game they love

Russell Jackson

05-Sep-2014

Many moons ago, during my university years, I had my first and last commerce-based epiphany while sitting through a marketing lecture. The speaker, whose name, voice and face I couldn't recall if I tried, started talking about the way in which the Harley- Davidson motorcycle company essentially had a huge portion of their customers in the palm of their hand because these diehard riders and motorbike enthusiasts displayed what marketers called "loyalty beyond reason".

This meant that no matter how the company behaved, how tacky the licensing deals they pursued or how ubiquitous their brand name became, the lifestyle that surrounded their product and the emotional pull of their bikes for rusted-on diehards was too strong for those customers to resist or abandon. The Apple brand is now probably a more salient example, such is the unquestioning faith a huge number of their customers place in both the brand and the cult of Steve Jobs.

At the time, this idea of loyalty beyond reason made me question whether there were people or ideals or products that I clung to with unquestioning faith. Thinking as loftily of myself as university men are wont to do, I concluded that I was a person of intellectual fortitude and couldn't be pushed around and told what to think. In hindsight, not only was this wrong but it was a supremely ironic thing to think as I sat bored stiff in a lecture theatre, partaking in one of life's great symbolic rituals of conformity and fulfilment of parental expectation.

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The Phillip Hughes debate never ends

He makes buckets of runs but cannot hold his place in the Test side. What needs to work for him going forward?

Russell Jackson

23-Aug-2014

Sometimes I worry that I don't have a strong enough opinion of Phillip Hughes. Like Shane Watson, Shaun Marsh and David Warner, Hughes tends to spur Australians into the kind of animated debate normally reserved for political leaders.

It pays to remember that Hughes is only 25 years old. He seems older than that because he's been around for the last eight Australian summers, yet he's probably still nearer to the beginning of his career than the end. Aside from the fact that he'll make hundreds (39 now at professional level and counting), we're still to see irrefutable signs that he can be the dominant player at Test level that he is against first-class attacks. A lot of people find that very frustrating, perhaps much more than they should.

It's hard to get your head around Hughes, because though you might pore over his impressive statistics and mentally tally up all those hundreds, he still looks like a bit of a slogger. In that respect, he's nothing like Michael Bevan, the player I most readily recall when assessing Hughes' career. Bevan's first-class batting against his Test equivalent was 57.32 v 29.07. Right now Hughes sits at 46.59 and 32.65, and though you'd like to hope those numbers would come closer together, it's still to be seen whether he'll pull it off.

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Remembering Paul Melville

The dashing Victoria batsman was set to be a star for Australia when his life was tragically cut short at 21

Russell Jackson

08-Aug-2014

It might be a grainy old black-and-white photo in a dog-eared magazine but you can see in it the intense stare. The batsman sets off away from the keeper to run, head bowed and shoulders dipped like a sprinter and the bat held firmly in both hands for safe passage down to the other end.

Paul Meville's canvas pads are a sight you don't see in professional cricket arenas these days; battered and caked in dirt from his acrobatic footwork and, at a guess, several attempts at diving into his crease after a quick single. His methods did not always faithfully adhere to the coaching manuals - someone who saw him play told me that he was like a 1970s proto-Glenn Maxwell and that they remember him getting bowled off the first ball of play at the MCG - but that probably only enhanced the feeling he was destined to do things out of the ordinary.

Paul Melville would be 20 or 21 years old in that photo and I'd searched so intently for one that I had time to imagine what he looked like and how he moved. When I found the photo it was everything I expected; not a cap or helmet in sight and a young man bursting with energy. There's something endearing about a batsman playing with only a mop of hair as protection from the bowler and the elements. It was more common in the past, obviously, but it suggests boldness and a carefree confidence.

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Commentary boxes need succession plans too

Channel Nine should work to maintain the standards that its best broadcasters - Benaud and Chappell - have set, rather than encourage a frat-house environment

Russell Jackson

05-Jul-2014

Like for a lot of Australians who follow cricket, Richie Benaud is my grandfather. Ian Chappell and Bill Lawry are my uncles, and the sadly departed Tony Greig was as well, by marriage, I guess. Every childhood summer since I was a toddler they babysat us, waffling away through entire sun-drenched days when it was too hot for us to go outside, or our legs were weary from backyard matches of our own.

As with any family member, you didn't agree with everything that they had to say and occasionally they'd show their age but the bond forged over all of those hours is resilient and it means something. That is the thing we often dismiss about the difficulty of cricket commentary; these people inevitably become a meaningful part of the lives of devout fans. You literally spend hour upon hour, week after week, summer after summer, year after year in their company. The odd petty grievance is inevitable.

With Greig now gone and Benaud reduced to light duties (if any), owing to that bracing jolt of mortality last summer - bracing to him just as much as it was to the rest of us I'm sure - I've started to wonder how worried we should be about the familial ties that younger generations will maintain with the replacements of these doyens of cricket broadcasting. Chappell is the only one who remains constant, and whatever your quibbles over his style and manner, his sagacity is only amplified by the vaudeville behaviour he has increasingly found himself surrounded by in the Channel Nine box. There's more that Chappelli would have forgotten about cricket than most would ever know.

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