End of winter means family are no longer strangers

 

Roar Guru

By David Wiseman, 11 Oct 2008 David Wiseman is a Roar Guru

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 1980s, Adelaide, Australian Open, England, Gabba, Horse Racing, Jason Akermanis, John McEnroe, Melbourne Cup, New Zealand, Roger Federer, Rugby League, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, US Open

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For sports fans, this is the calm after the storm, a quiet spell until the cricket gets serious, which this year is in late November. The last six weeks were pretty good to us. The regular seasons of the football finished and then ramped it up a few notches with a month of finals football. Leading into the Grand Finals, the coverage was virtually round the clock.

And now the footy season has ended. Talk about cold turkey.

You know you’re in trouble when a rained-out Mercantile Mutual match between Tasmania and South Australia at Bellerive leads off the weekend’s sports new.

It’s so bad I’m even going to miss seeing Billy Brownless, Phil Gould and Jason Akermanis.

Dare I say it … Hutchy as well!

Yes there’s the cricket from India now, but for the time being the action in the middle hasn’t matched the over-the-top hype; Motor racing isn’t my bag and the Rugby League World Cup will make news more for off-field activity then on-field.

The A-League is happening, but at this point in time, it is not equivalent to the NRL/AFL.

From around the globe there are bits and pieces, but still they’re no substitute.

At the end of October and beginning of November, horse-racing takes over and then disappears just as quickly. (Like me, do you hate those people who for the entire year don’t even know what a horse looks like, then the day before the Melbourne Cup are now ‘experts’, except all they’re doing is regurgitating what they’ve read and heard).

If you are able to make it through to the summer, you have the cricket, tennis and golf to look forward to.

Golf in this country is currently sitting in some thick rough, unsure as to how to make onto the fairway.

After a hectic and draining schedule, the big names don’t want to fly across the world, even if they get appearance money. They want to spend time with their family and get some rest.

Ironically, when travel wasn’t as easy in the 50s, 60s and 70s, Australia attracted the big golfing names. Between them, Gary Player (seven) and Jack Nicklaus (six) won the Australian Open title 13 times from 1958 to 1978.

Lee Westwood is the only non-Australian to have won the title since 1994.

Golf in Australia is facing the same conundrum that Australian basketball, and to a lesser extent Australian football, faces – that people have no problem watching the foreign stuff, but you can’t get them to watch or care about the local product.

What doesn’t help is that there are too many changes from year to year. People like routine, and in an effort to shake things up, golf can’t provide people with that.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Australian Open tennis used to have the disrespect of the tennis fraternity. Many of the big names were AWOL, so you had guys the caliber of Roscoe Tanner, Brian Teacher and Johan Kriek take home the trophy.

This isn’t the case now.

But then again, with the Australian Open being a member of the Grand Slams, you wouldn’t have thought it would have been a problem in the first place.

John McEnroe now laments his lax attendance at Kooyong/Flinders Park. He played in every US Open between 1977 and 1992 but in only five Australian Opens over the same period.

He didn’t make his first appearance Down Under until 1983 where he lost in the semi-finals to eventual champion, Mats Wilander.

Given this good first time effort, you would think he would have been back. But he missed four of the next seven tournaments.

In recent years, the Australian Open gets bigger and bigger, but all I can think of is that by Bruce getting excited about the statistics Roger Federer is generating, he is being unfaithful to football.

They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone and I think that will be the case with the Triangular One-Day tournament. Some years it was flat as a tack, and other years it was fantastic.

That’s life and that’s sport.

You can’t manipulate it like some Reality TV show so that it is always going to be exciting.

Once Australia goes three up in the best of five series, who is going to care about two dead rubbers? At least with the old format, it culminated in a final.

Even if the series is level at two games a piece and comes down to the final ball – who cares?

So Australia beat New Zealand over five one day matches. The most excitement the new format will bring is what all these new trophies will be called and what they will look like.

Some people hated them, but I for one will miss the one–day games which didn’t involve Australia.

They produced some of the best and most memorable cricket ever played in this country – off the top of my head there was the South Africa–New Zealand match at the Gabba, England–Sri Lanka at the Adelaide Oval, and those classic Pakistan–West Indies matches from the summer of 1992/93, when the Pakistanis didn’t even bother to hide the fact they were throwing the game (that collapse at Adelaide, and then successive innings of 81 and 71).

So do what you can to get by?

Some suggestions that have worked for me in the past are to get out of the house or spend some time with your family.

Word of advice from past experience – if you’re going to spend some time with your family, you might want to introduce yourself to them before you get too familiar.