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As a rugby writer, cricket season is my hiatus for the year, because (as I revealed guiltily to Vinay Verma in vino veritas at The Roar Christmas drinks), “I love cricket but I know nothing about it”. Having admitted such a lack of expertise, I feel hardly qualified to write a column on the game.
But I promised Vinay that I wouldn’t let a little thing like a lack of understanding stop me.
Fortunately expertise and experience aren’t the same thing. It is possible to have experience without really understanding how or why the experience occurred. Luckily, I did manage to play some cricket when I was younger, even though I clearly didn’t know what I was doing.
Playing at high school in the late 1980s, I once batted four times in a season for three ducks and a two. Average? A half.
I told myself I was a bowler and so wasn’t really expected to get runs. Certainly after that year, I was off the hook and no-one ever expected me to get runs again.
That’s not to say that the bowling all went the right way.
One day I had a Mitchell-Johnson-like moment where I bowled a wide. That wasn’t so bad, until I bowled another one. My confidence took a hit and before I knew it I’d added a couple more wides and a no ball or two for good measure.
The concrete pitch eventually looked about as wide as a shoelace stretching off into the distance – the final count was 12 balls altogether. A tough day at the office, but I’m over it now.
I don’t even think about it at all some days.
But I wasn’t a complete hoax on the cricket field. I managed to win a few lower grade bowling awards, opened the bowling occasionally in country pub cricket and one day when a mate of mine bet me $50 that I couldn’t get a fifty and six wickets, I managed to slog my way to fifty four and follow it up with five scalps.
Missed out on that $50 by one wicket, but got shouted a schooner at Kelly’s Hotel for the effort.
I’m no Peter Roebuck, but those few seasons of lower grade cricket instilled in me a sort of thrilling ignorance of the game – a working knowledge of the basics, but a wondrous lack of understanding of the subtleties.
What exactly is a green-top? Why do you need a nightwatchman? What is reverse-swing and how do you manage to consciously achieve same? Who was Duckworth? And what about Lewis? And why does your best batsman bat at first drop instead of opening?
Despite the mystifying effect of cricket nomenclature, Test cricket has a seductive combination of tradition, violence and beauty. When Clive James once said that “the secret of popularity was starting something and letting people think you were doing them a favour by letting them in on it”, he might have been talking about the popularity of cricket.
After all, there is little reward for the casual observer in a cricket match.
During the third Ashes Test, I imagined for a moment that I was an American tourist watching the game on TV. Immediately I sensed the confusion that draws a barrier between the initiated and the ignorant. Imagine the questions you’d be asking yourself during the first three minutes of your cricket spectatorship. What is a left-arm finger spinner actually spinning? Will that guy who just hooked the other one get suspended?
And why is the hussy wearing a slip under the covers? Or something.
Luckily, I was slightly more initiated than ignorant and so could appreciate the effect of the Australians’ new attitude, if not the actual science which was applied to achieve it.
Certainly, when asked to name my top 5 sporting moments of 2010 the other day for Sky Sports, I had no hesitation in naming Mike Hussey’s form as a highlight of the year.
Watching Hussey in this Ashes series has been a pleasure the like of which you don’t often achieve in sport.
Mostly, I find, when watching cricket, there is always the feeling that a wicket will fall. Even the most confident batsman has a crack in the armour, a notch of vulnerability which is just waiting to be found.
But Hussey this year has looked so assured, so certain, so secure, that after a while you could just settle back and watch happily as he worked his way to a series of massive scores, in the same inevitable way that a lava flow engulfs a mountain village.
Speaking as someone who was basically incapable with the bat, Hussey’s five or six pull shots en route to his hundred in Perth were perfect enough to bring tears.
One in particular sounded like a starting pistol as it cracked off the face of the timber, and in the aftermath you could see the brave shoulders of Chris Tremlett slump a small fraction.
Of the bowlers, Mitchell Johnson inspired similar awe. Several years ago, a mate of mine and I cranked a bowling machine up to full belt (around 140kph) and then took turns standing behind the nets just to see what a one-forty-kay ball looked like coming at you. Fortunately, neither of us were stupid enough to get in there with a bat.
I can say that when you are facing a one-four-zero delivery from a bowling machine, there is a momentary flash of colour as the ball leaves the slot.
Next, you see nothing, but there is an awful faint whistle as the air is displaced from in front of the rapidly approaching projectile, which, for all intents and purposes, may as well have been delivered by a tank cannon.
Finally, while your lizard brain is still computing the threat posed by the initial flash of white, the ball slams into the chicken wire just inches from your idiotic face with impossible force.
If it had been filmed in super slow motion, I feel certain that a chicken-wire shaped shockwave would have briefly been imprinted upon my horrified phiz. It was like being a target on a live human firing range.
Now, if you will, imagine all that happening in front of a crowd of thousands of Aussies just begging for you to cop one, when impossibly, the ball starts to curl wickedly and any chance you had of laying the bat on one, just plummeted into single figures….and you have some idea of what the English batsmen were facing in the first innings.
Trott, Pietersen and Collingwood particularly must have felt like the head pin at a bowling alley, with obliteration inevitable.
This is the joy of Test cricket even if you know nothing. The beauty is obvious. The violence is explicit.
And the mathematics are omnipotent.
Perhaps no other game lends itself to the endless analysis and reverse-reading of statistics like cricket. Case in point, Kevin Pietersen, the hero of Adelaide with 227, scores 0 and 3 in Perth. Is Pietersen a dud? Overrated? Unlucky? There are as many answers as there are opinions.
However you look at it though, the Perth Ashes Test had it all, for the informed and ignorant alike.
Before a ball had even been bowled, the country was abuzz with selection debate. Why would we pick the spinner Beer and then not not take him into the match?
By contrast, grizzled veterans looked fearfully at the news shots of the bright green WACA pitch then closed their eyes as though they were dying. Actually they were replaying eyelid horror-movies of Thompson and Lillee clanging Kookaburras off English skulls in the glory days.
Next, redemption. Johnson’s baseball curve balls destroyed the previously formidable English fortress and finished with 6-for, to go with his first innings top score of 62. At some point, Strauss redeemed himself as captain with a fighting 52, but then Pietersen failed.
And in the next innings, failed again.
Smith and Hussey both survived hostile appeals by challenging the third umpire in the Australian second innings, but Watson was wiped out by the same process . The previously underrated Tremlett later took five as the WACA wicket flattened out and the English challenge faded.
Back-from-injury Queensland quick Ryan Harris finally completed the Aussie rout with another 6 wicket haul. Ponting broke a finger, and finally the young gun Smith took a cracking catch to end the whole affair with time on the clock.
Drama? Tick. Redemption? In spades. Disappointment? Plenty of it. And ultimate triumph? Just ask Mitchell Johnson.
And the best part of all? The uneducated got just as much pleasure as the experts.
(This piece was written in reply to Vinay Verma’s rugby column “Rugby and the Religion of the Playing Fields” after the authors agreed to write a column on each other’s chosen sport).