As I write this I am almost quivering in anticipation of a 50-over international cricket match.
Yes, that’s right. I’m excited about a one-dayer. What’s happened to me?
This is the mystical transformative effect on the human psyche that Mitchell Johnson has had this summer. He’s our cricketing version of Princess Elsa from Disney’s Frozen, except where Elsa, in a moment of high emotion, covered her kingdom with an eternal winter, Johnson has covered his kingdom with the blood of innocent, wide-eyed Englishmen.
A placid, peace-loving nation has been transformed into a pack of howling bucketheaded lycanthropes, screaming to see yet another shuddering tourist smacked in the head by a small, hard projectile.
The end of the Test series was awful for us. It was like the detox sequence in Trainspotting: at one point I distinctly saw Joe Root crawling on my ceiling.
And then the selectors tortured us exquisitely by leaving Mitch out of the first one-dayer! Man, they’ve got us jonesing bad.
Hopefully, for the Gabba ODI, they’ll relax the playing conditions and let Johnson bowl 20 or 30 overs instead of the usual ten. Also hoping Channel Nine will offer cash prizes for hitting certain areas of English bodies.
All this excitement and bloodlust and speed addiction only proves one thing about the Australian cricketing public: we get a lot more into it when there’s a moustache involved.
Mitch Johnson has taken bags of wickets before. He’s even broken bones before. But he’s never had a moustache before, and that’s what moves him out of the prosaic saga of Australian fast bowling history, and into the mythic realms of Australian fast bowling legend.
The first moustachioed batsman’s nightmare this nation produced was Fred Spofforth. He wasn’t particularly fast – from all accounts he was a sort of fast-medium offspinner, lauded for his “break-back”, the weapon of choice for pacemen in the days before swing, and his devious changes of pace.
But he didn’t need speed to become a terrifying presence in Englishmen’s lives, his visage floating before them as they tossed and turned in the night. In the match that made the Ashes in 1882 he took fourteen wickets and turned certain defeat into victory, turning the entire English population hollow-eyed.
He was known as “the Demon”, and his grip over opponents’ psyches was legendary, and even in an era when a cricket match meant 22 moustaches on the field at once, his face-fur was of such a bristling, Mephistophelean nature that brave men quailed before it as it leapt high in the air, shone devilishly in the sun, and spat the ball at their stumps.
A little later came Ernie Jones, a giant steamroller of a man who once bowled a ball through WG Grace’s beard and enjoyed nude wrestling in the dressing room.
No wonder he gained a reputation for bruising the flesh of his tender adversaries: how can one pick up the hurtling sphere of doom heading for your throat when there’s such a gorgeous brute of a lip-cosy glaring down the wicket from beneath the bowler’s nose?
Sadly, after the First World War, moustaches seemed to go out of vogue, and something of the fire went out of our Test cricketers.
Oh yes, Don Bradman dominated oppositions, but he did it in such a cold, clinical way, and batsmen of the era were being flummoxed by the tweedy, cerebral googlies of naked-lippers like O’Reilly and Grimmett.
Bodyline came to Oz in 1932, but the Australians found themselves unable to retaliate – they had no moustaches.
It went on for decades, clean-shaven fast bowlers struggling to intimidate as moustaches were restricted to Clark Gablesque dandies like Chuck Fleetwood-Smith.
Oh sure, Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller put the wind up a few, but they were no demons. Miller once deliberately let himself be bowled for a duck because he felt sorry for the opposition: he was not the man to bring back the mo.
Although he hit a few in his time, you couldn’t escape the feeling that given the option, he probably didn’t want to kill anyone.
And so when Frank Tyson terrorised us in 54-55, again we had no answer. We could not fight fire with fire, because the moustache, Australian cricket’s firelighter, was absent.
And then came Lillee.
It was like Australian cricket had been defibrillated. It was the early 70s, and finally there was an Australian fast bowler willing to stand up and terrify the enemy with the force of his facial hair.
It sparked a craze for enormous scary moustaches in Test cricket – Max Walker couldn’t bowl fast, but the combination of his moustache and the epileptic seizure he suffered at the bowling crease was frightening enough.
Rod Marsh and Ian Chappell likewise were not fast bowlers, but their moustaches made it clear to any lonely batsman that no matter which way he turned he would be confronted by the fuzzy face of hatred.
And it was clear then, that Australian cricket is more exciting when there’s a mo around. It became even clearer when Merv Hughes barrelled into the test team, with a moustache that weighed more than most of his teammates.
Oh sure, during his career it might have been Terry Alderman or Craig McDermott or Shane Warne dominating the wickets column, but it was that great spiky follicular anaconda that was dominating the opposition’s headspace – how many wickets would the others have taken if it weren’t for the petrifying power of Merv’s moustache?
Same story with the glory years of Steve Waugh’s team – McGrath was clean-shaven, but Gillespie had a goatee, and you can’t have a goatee without a moustache. Unless you want to look like an Amish farmer, obviously. Which few Australian fast bowlers do.
And so it is to be hoped that Mitch never shaves his moustache again.
It’s vital. It’s the missing ingredient in Australia’s cricketing pie. It’s what we’ve been crying out for. It’s what makes the game come alive for us all.
Before he grew it, cricket was a drag. Now, it’s full of possibilities and fun and savage, primal sadism. If Peter Siddle grew one it could only help. It might even offset that vegan thing.
And Aussie selectors, learn your lesson: never again let Australia go into battle without at least one moustachioed fast bowler.
It’s the Australian way. Long may it continue.
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