Cakes, texts and tenors

In the otherwise venerable SCG museum, there is one hideously mawkish souvenir - a commemorative red hankie, one of several thousand handed out by the Sydney Daily Telegraph on the occasion of Steve Waugh's retirement in January 2004. So the legend goes, Waugh never took the field without his lucky red snot-rag, and the paper rightly thought that such an item would come in handy for the 40,000 people bidding farewell to their hero.

For if there is one thing that the Australians do better than cricket, it is sentimentality. For instance, it is now 23 years since Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh all bowed out in the same Sydney Test against Pakistan, and we still haven't heard the end of it. Mind you, this match might just do what 2005 did for 1981 and bump that one down the list a notch or two.

Only one day in, and the game is already dripping with nostalgia. It all started yesterday afternoon, with the painting on the outfield of the sponsor's logos. Beneath the great big "3" of 3 Mobile, there are the text-speak motifs: "Thx Glenn" at the Paddington End and "Thx Shane" at the Randwick End (though Shane's contribution to the text-message industry surely deserves a commemorative blimp at the very least.)

Oh yeah, and at midwicket beneath the Brewongle Stand there is a hasty late addition: "Thx Justin" reads the lonely and lesser-spotted logo - onto which no fielder dared to stray for the first hour of play, for fear of smudging their trousers with freshly sprayed red paint.

Poor old Langer has been a bit of a spare wheel in this valedictory parade of the Titans - Caesar's chariot has been remoulded as a Robin Reliant to accommodate him. If McGrath's announcement was low-key compared to Warne's, then Langer's was almost subterranean. "Langer retires just in time" was the headline in yesterday's Australian - it was probably no more than a bad pun on his first name, but it could also have been a comment on the need for the organising committees to adjust their send-offs.

Take today's tea in the press box, for instance. There, greeting the hungry hoards of hacks, were two grinning images of Warne and McGrath, as created in icing sugar on the top of a pair of commemorative chocolate cakes. Mike Gatting and Mike Atherton were both in the vicinity, no doubt armed with an extra-sharp cake-knife, but where was Langer's gateau? His announcement had come too late for the caterers, though he did at least have a profiterole mountain in his honour (which bore an uncanny resemblance to a gnome's hat).

And while all that feasting was going on (the frenzy was almost as dramatic as the moment when a single tray of scones, cream and jam was let loose in the Melbourne press box) the next act of the Sydney schmaltz-fest was being played out in the middle of the pitch. Sean Ruane, a man improbably described by Andrew Flintoff as "The Operatic Voice of Sport", set up his microphone in front of the Member's Pavilion, and belted out the Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli hit: "Time to say goodbye".

McGrath, Langer and Warne, who would doubtless have preferred to spend his 20 minutes smoking a fag out the back, stood obediently on the balcony, more or less to attention, drinking in the moment. Incidentally, the lyrics of that song include: "I'll go with you to countries I never saw," which could be a comment on the itineraries of modern-day cricket tours. Not that anyone will have known that, of course. No eye in the house would have been dry enough to read the song-sheet.