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Any Australian sporting enthusiast would love to go on an Ashes tour, but it remains impossible for most. So we decided to do it on their behalf.
Introduction
We know it’s hard to find two months off work in the middle of the year, not to mention tickets to five days of five matches across England, and food and board for the duration.
So the coming weeks, me and cameraman Cam Fink will be following the tour ourselves, and sending you our updates.
We know the Ashes are about more than five matches. It’s the breadth of a historical context dating back to the first cricket Test in 1877.
Our Ashes Diary will be written and filmed. It’s not just about cricket, it’s about the whole experience of following this tour.
Where the grounds have just been names on the telly, we’ll show you the locations we find ourselves in. We’ll introduce you to the people we meet along the way. We won’t be looking for trouble but I suspect we’ll find a bit.
For this reason we’ll be avoiding the blandness of hotels, and looking to stay with ordinary Englishmen and women. If you know anyone who’d like to host a couple of itinerant Australian journalists, get in touch by email or Twitter. We’re also up for a pint, or meeting anyone with an interesting story.
We also need you to guide our coverage. Suggest segments for the videos, or topics you’d like the Diary to cover. Tell us what questions you want asked, and of whom. Follow us from day to day to see where we end up next.
You can contact us through the comments section of any article, or by Twitter using @GeoffLemonSport or the hashtag #AshesDiary. If you’re at the Ashes yourself, use #AshesDiary to share your own experiences.
A 21-gun salute goes to British Airways for bringing us here, and Superdry for a camera-appropriate wardrobe that will allow me to blend in with Cambridge cool kids while avoiding being punched by Ian Botham.
We hope you can join us over the coming weeks, with the first Test starting in Nottingham this Wednesday. And remember: whatever happens on the field, it’s the Ashes tour that really counts.
Ashes Diary Part 1
There is a strange magic to aeroplanes.
I’m not just talking about the mechanics of flight, explained in the same terms of bilateral air pressure variance that apply to a cricket ball’s swing.
People love complaining about long-haul flights, enumerating the hours they’ve endured in the air as though they were strokes of a shipboard lash. I have never understood the mentality.
The physics are remarkable enough; that confluence of lift, drag, weight and thrust that allows three hundred tons of metal to glide across air like a skimmed stone. Every take-off, I watch the ground drop away, the world recompose itself into aerial maps, with a reverence akin to the religious.
But more extraordinary even than this is the concept itself: the fact that you can enter a cabin, wait 20-odd hours, then walk out to find yourself on the other side of the world. You’ve traversed the planet in a day by sitting in an armchair.
Once, these journeys would once have involved six months on a ship, or years by foot, and involved very real danger. Accordingly, Ashes tours were far more comprehensive, teams playing in every town they passed through to keep the shillings rolling in.
Today’s players mostly live on aeroplanes, presumably reclining on skybeds made of money while an ever-expanding retinue feeds Michael Clarke grapes and shaves David Warner’s back.
Tonight, we are floating high above the Java Sea. We have left the country the aforementioned players represent, to see them continue a contest that has crossed the world back and forth for 136 years.
Cam and I travelled to the airport in winter sunshine, a day away from changing seasons and hemispheres. I hugged my girlfriend goodbye, and realised it is a privilege to have someone prepared to cry for you.
Of the seven hours to Singapore, the first five and more are over Australia, reminding you once again of the almost comical vastness of our homeland. For those who’ve come across the sea, we’ve boundless plains to share, goes our barely remembered national anthem. Unless it’s an election year and you’re no good at cricket.
Under you, all that red dirt and spinifex, the cops and rocks and Max Max mythology, slide by, until you hit the north coast somewhere between Darwin and Derby, and suddenly you’re off the continental shelf. To your right is East Timor, occasional participant in our own national history, reminder of the times when we aimed to help others, and the times when we didn’t.
Singapore arrives, passes in a blur of nasi lemak, then falls behind, hundreds of queuing cargo ships dotting its coastline in patient islands of light. It feels strange: up to now, this part of the world has been a destination point, the end of flights and the beginning of adventures. This is my first time beyond.
The Malaysian peninsula stretches away, its velvet black hung with the same glowing blue and orange strings that enthralled me on my first real trip overseas, almost a decade ago, fizzing with nerves on the descent to Kuala Lumpur.
But, like the years in which I lived there, Malaysia soon recedes from view. There is nothing for it but to face forward, crossing new frontiers that the night conceals.
Off beyond that darkness, Michael Clarke is blazing a century at Worcestershire while Phil Hughes keeps pace beside. Australia has four openers with runs behind them, and another promised a clean slate.
Now we are over the Bay of Bengal; now Georgia, now the stretches of Ukraine. We cross countries I know only from the wars that crawled their surface. Somewhere below us in the night, the Himalayas whisper by while we doze, casually exceeding the heights so many climbers have died for.
Germany proves impossible to see from the air without imagining the perspective of a WWII bombardier. Then comes England, its coastline emerging from the dawn against the Channel’s muted blue, the land taking form in the fields and hedgerows and woods of your most clichéd imagination.
It is strange to finally be going to England. This is a place that has so strongly formed my cultural understanding, yet one I’ve never even seen.
Australia has both a preoccupation with race and an immense blind spot. If you’re anything but white, you will consistently be asked about your background. If you’re white, you probably won’t know what yours is.
White is still treated as the Australian default. Even the Greeks, Italians and Lebanese who reclaimed the word ‘wog’ for themselves will use ‘Aussie’ as its antonym. The variants of English, Irish, Scotch or Welsh are seen as facets of a British whole barely worth distinguishing.
I certainly don’t feel a kinship with any Anglo ancestors, not the way recent migrants are supposed to continue identifying with their own. But the connection of culture can’t be denied.
England is the source of my sense of humour, my enjoyment of language, and the greater part of the books that have mattered to me. Its music, history, architecture and political system all play big roles in my life.
And most importantly in the context of this Diary, England created the game of cricket, one of the abiding fascinations of my life and so many others.
Considering that, it seems only reasonable to make at least one visit to say thank-you.