Butcher than butch

The Observer's Will Buckley likens the Australian team to the famed writer, the late Norman Mailer, who was described by another novelist, Jim Lewis, as being "the greatest lesbian writer since Gertrude Stein." According to Buckley, this was because "Mailer was so aggressively heterosexual that he had crossed the line from macho to butch."

For Mailer, substitute the Australian cricket XI, who can lay fair claim to being the greatest lesbian sports team since Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova doubled up to win a Wimbledon and a couple of US Opens. Ricky Ponting's men are that butch. They are butcher than Terry Butcher at his butchest.

Not that this was always the case. A quarter of a century ago Australia were losing the Ashes and Kim Hughes was in tears, a double humiliation that convinced the Australian selectors to stop selecting curly blonds as captain and start picking Mailer clones. Allan Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh and now Ricky Ponting, all hewn from the same baggy green cloth. Has there ever been a ballsier quartet in all of sport?

Success followed with a unique, at the time, run of 16 Test victories; followed by another 16 streak, which they attempted to better on Sky Sports last week. Being Mailerish, the achievement was not without controversy as their record-equalling win was surrounded by insult and injury. The Indians wanted to flounce off, the Aussies stood their ground. The world and his Australian wife took the Indians' side. Ponting's men were on the cusp of history, yet despised in their own land. Totally butch.

Meanwhile, Iain Fletcher, writing in the Independent on Sunday, describes the new-found peace between Australia and India during the Perth Test.

The Sunday Telegraph's Scyld Berry says that after Australia's loss at Perth, "England will have the comfort of knowing the Australians are not invincible" looking ahead to the Ashes.