Are you ready? I mean really ready? Brewski ready. Boonie ready. Battle ready. Summer is coming.
The first morning of the first Ashes Test is almost upon us, and you wouldn’t be a loyal servant of the game if your fingers weren’t getting just a bit twitchy, seeking out the reassuring heft of the remote.
If you hadn’t made at least one trip to the wardrobe to check your battle garb – that lucky pair of stubbies, or faded yellow one-day shirt.
If you hadn’t marked out the Test schedule on the calendar, and advised your loved ones of your absence for the next six weeks.
The English are here, and the time for battle is nigh.
With thoughts of empire and a fourth straight series win, this haughty horde have strolled into Brisbane, and taken up residence like they own the place – raiding our tofu stores, and draining the place of sunscreen and aloe vera.
Leaving to one side that they technically do own the place – which makes it sting all the more – these Poms must be dispelled at all costs.
And it is up to you and me, and our couches and our beer cosies and our expert commentary to no-one, to make them feel unwelcome.
Yes, the theatre of war will be a 22-yard strip of turf the other side of a roped-off boundary, and there’s probably no longer a place for our right-arm dribbly dobblies or deceptively slow straight-breaks there on the front line.
But I’m talking about the home front – and I’m asking you if you’re ready to join the war effort.
Rarely have we had it harder.
And it was only August when we last tasted English steel – losing the war, losing our way, and losing in the fray good men like Ed Cowan, Phil Hughes and Usman Khawaja; not to mention our general, Mickey Arthur, in friendly fire before the fact.
And while we’ve made gains – with Boof heading things, and two Tasmanians brought in to fortify the middle order – we’ve spent peacetime losing 50-over Twenty20 games on the best roads in India.
The English are too strong.
This is a fighting unit that has remained largely unchanged, barring the odd retirement, since 2009.
They are polished, professional and perennial pains in the arse – and they’re none too used to losing.
Three Ashes in a row they’ve won – three! – and you get the sickening sense from the current boarding party that they expect a similar lack of resistance.
Well I say sod that! I say it’s time to stand as one, and defend our island.
Now, now is the time to unleash those beer snakes, to send beach balls distractingly high in the air, to make Mexican waves so big they threaten the local townships.
This is the time for smelly thongs, C’mon Aussie, C’mon, terry towelling hats, backyard cricket matches between two versions of the Aussie team cos we’ll be stuffed playing for England.
It’s a time for espies full of beer, ‘just one more over, Mum’, throwing things at the TV, and showing the players how they should have played that cut shot!
This series needs kids hitting a ball in a stocking hanging from the clothes line.
It needs the whole family getting down to the ground on Day Four.
It needs zinc cream, and Gray-Nicolls scoops, tennis balls half covered in tape, it needs net sessions in fading light, and confidence-killing chants aimed at the enemy’s best, like ‘Stuart is a Broad’.
Summer is coming.
And all good men and women are asked to put the lawn mowing on hold, leave the vacuuming until close of play, and get behind our heroes.
We must be as committed as they. Yes, there will be great challenges – running out of crisps midway through the second session, having to get a day’s work done in the hour provided by the lunch and tea breaks, and somehow maintaining civility with any Englishman who dares mention the war.
But all these and more must be suffered, and overcome, if we’d have our men come through victorious.
It was, after all, a fan who created the Ashes urn – in mockery of English cricket.
And it rests with us to to show similar conviction. To revive the spirit of Australian cricket. To set a united front in thought, word and deed. And to love every last minute of taking back that smallest, but most important trophy in world sport.
Summer is coming. Are you ready?
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