How I missed cricket’s Ball of the Century

Shane Warne, Image: Jenny Evans, AAP

1993 was a good time to be an Australian in Britain, especially if you were the sort of Aussie who likes sport. Which, really, is the only sort of Aussie who ends up in Britain.

The Wallabies had just backed up the Rugby World Cup win with a successful tour of Ireland and Wales, marred only by the ‘bagsnatching’ incident in Neath, which didn’t involve handbags, but did involve rucks and definitely involved snatching.

Greg Norman won the British Open.

And The Ashes were on.

The Ashes provide the very best experience for watching Australian sport. Or rather, they provide the best experience of watching Australians watch sport.

Not the nailbiting experience of rugby Test, with its prayers, curses and nailbiting packed into 90 minutes with only a break to have your shoes urinated on.

Nor the corporate idiocy of bewigged muppets singing John Farnham while Lleyton Hewitt gets owned at Wimbledon.

No, The Ashes provide five days of leisurely barracking, cheerfully prodding the Poms sitting a row behind, applauding when your batsman gets out, and generally having a good time, with sport as the focus. All fuelled by full-strength beer, as the nanny-state experiment is yet to catch on in the home of cricket.

Cricket is, or at least it aspires to be, a gentleman’s game, and that’s usually reflected in the behaviour of the spectators.

1993 was a good time to watch a good team do it. I’d suggest it was also one of the last truly great Ashes tours, not so much for the results (Australia won the six-match series 4-1), but for the quality of the players.

And by quality, we’re not just talking about playing ability, although there was plenty of that. With established players like Border, McDermott, Hughes, Healy and Steve Waugh the team was brimming with talent.

But this was a team which still was able to go out and have a beer generally unmolested, and when they were, they’d more often than not invite the molester to sit down and have a beer as well.

It was the sort of series that every sporting fan has a favourite memory of. The series being what it was, that memory is usually the same the world over. The series being what it was, for me, that memory also involves beer.

For 1993 was the year of The Ball of the Century.

I dug it out on YouTube the other day and it’s still amazing to watch. Not just for the youth and slimness of Shane Warne, but the sheer incredulous look on Mike Gatting’s face as he realises he’s out. Umpire Kenny Palmer’s look of “WTF?” is priceless.

The ball hits outside leg stump, somehow crosses across Gatting and clips the off-stump bail. Journalist Martin Johnson summed up the delivery as “How anyone can spin a ball the width of Gatting boggles the mind”.

I was at Old Trafford that day. It’s a fair comment on Australian fans in general that my best Ashes memory is actually missing the Ball of the Century.

In an effort to break into Fleet St, I’d travelled to Manchester to do a shift on the Daily Sport, which is not a sporting paper, but tends to cater to the more, shall we say, downmarket end of the British reading public. (Did someone say Two Big Jugs, Barmaid?)

They weren’t without a sense humour though, and on discovering I was an Australian, sent me to the cricket. Or more precisely, sent me outside the cricket.

Because XXXX, who were the official team sponsor, had come up with an innovative and hilarious promotion.

They had “hired” two Australians to put up a XXXX billboard outside Old Trafford, but the Australians had demanded prepayment in beer and of course, the sign was only halfway up, with bits of paper hanging down. The Australians were actually the Australian ad execs who’d come up with the idea and insisted that if there was beer to be drunk, best not to entrust it to the unreliable hands of actors.

The Daily Sport dispatched me to spend the day with these layabouts, dressing me up in “Australian national costume” of shorts and a hat with corks. This would have been embarrassing were it not for the fact that the costume wardrobe was also used by the Page Three girls who were having their pictures done.

So while the Ball of the Century was being bowled, I was sitting on the ledge of a billboard cracking my fourth tinny for the day. The billboard boys, who as it turns out I’d met at a mate’s in London, were extremely sociable and quick to offer a beer. I heard later they went through about four cartons each for the week, a truly heroic achievement in pursuit of advertising fame.

It says something about the way Australians feel about the Ashes that my best memory of them comes from sitting outside the ground, listening to it on a tiny radio.

The current series is unlikely to produce anything as good as That Ball.

Yet because of it, and the thousands of other memories every Australian or English cricket fan has – be it Steve Waugh’s heroic ton in Sydney on the last ball of the day to save his captaincy, or Andrew Flintoff consoling Brett Lee after England won the Second Test in 2005 – The Ashes will hold a place in our sport-stupid hearts.