It’s fine. It’s going to be fine. Absolutely fine. Of course it will. It’s just not cricket if one doesn’t cling to a positive attitude even in the midst of the clearest inclemency.
See that brooding, billowing, roiling bank of the blackest, most malignant-looking cloud marshalling its forces just over the member’s pavilion? Nothing more than a passing sprinkle, don’t you know.
A run chase of 400 and some with the Duke ball swinging both ways and keeping low? Ah well, records were meant to be broken.
This is the way of cricket – and why not. There’s a charm in Pollyanna-ish sanguineness that suits cricket, in the way Pimms and strawberries is the perfect garnish to lawn tennis.
But is anyone else – and I hesitate even to utter the words – getting that creeping feeling of déjà vu?
You know what I mean, the one where a week ago we felt like we didn’t even really have to watch the first session of the first Test because, hell, the State of Origin was on, and the Aussies would paste them anyway.
And is it really the Ashes again already, haven’t these poor Poms had enough? And then we lost Ryan Harris. And then we lost the toss. And then we lost the plot. And then we lost the game.
Somewhere in there among all our positive talk and confident swagger – the quiet barbs at the English ‘holiday’ in Spain, and the same old sound-trite soundbites of ‘if we play our best cricket’ and ‘he’s hitting them well in the nets’ and ‘no we really do respect the England team’ – we seem to have forgotten that we haven’t won an Ashes series over here in our last three cracks.
Anyone remember the 2005 series? I appreciate if you don’t immediately feel like recalling it to mind – I still suffer the occasional night tremor. But there again did we feel like the series would be little more than a procession. (In fairness, the previous eight series did encourage a quiet confidence.)
And of course, this was a side packed with stars, even though the word doesn’t quite do the likes of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden and Michael Clarke justice. And it was just dear old England.
We won the first Test as per programme. Then McGrath trod on a ball in the warm-up before the second, and let’s just say from there the scriptwriters started getting creative. And we lost the series.
Fling your mind forward to 2009 briefly if you can, and remember the way our now almost-starless side – still with all the confidence in the world, mark you – strode onto Sophia Gardens full of Aussie spirit and braggadocio and poorly concealed contempt for our opponents.
And while you’re there, remember too the way they trudged off five days later, having managed to pluck a draw from the jaws of victory by failing to induce Jimmy Anderson or Monty Panesar into a single mistake in about three and a half hours.
Then of course it was over to Lord’s – the position we currently find ourselves in – and the reading didn’t get any better. Andrew Flintoff inspired himself by retiring, Nathan Hauritz ensured whatever modicum of spin he might theoretically have been able to impart was sent the way of the Tassie Tiger when he dislocated his finger, and we were rolled at the home of cricket for the first time since 1934.
And I am dead set certain that Ponting was still telling us how we’d come back from here, no problem. And we all believed him. We wanted to believe him, of course. We wanted to believe that we could suddenly play swing bowling. That we’d ‘done the work in the nets’ to know what on earth Graeme Swann was all about. That there was plenty of time, and there was a full three Tests to play…
But alas.
I won’t make you relive 2013. Suffice it to say that our top scorer in the first innings of the first Test was our number eleven. Quite clearly we still hadn’t a clue about swing bowling, and despite our, I’m sure, countless hours in the nets, we’d only become more clueless about Swann.
And so it is that today, despite the most emphatic of whitewashes in Australia just 18 months ago, we find ourselves one down after one here in England. And I just can’t help but feel like we haven’t learnt anything.
One thinks of the old adage about insanity being the repetition of the same thing while expecting different results. Well hubris is much the same. I think the definition of that is belting all comers on flat pitches and expecting to do the same on seamers, despite it not having worked the time before and the time before that and the time before that.
Is it the same for you? That feeling like you’re about 20 minutes into a movie, and realise you’ve already seen it. I feel like I know what Michael Clarke is going to say in the pre-match press conference.
I know that it’s going to include the phrase ‘if we play our best cricket…’. It’s going to involve something to do with how much hard work they’ve been doing in the nets, and that he feels total confidence that Cardiff was nothing more than an aberration, and they’re cherry ripe to take ’em apart in this one.
But perhaps someone could ask him what it is they’ve actually done to play the swinging ball any better than they did in 2013, 2009 and 2005. What’s changed, because the results haven’t.
What is it about the surely seamer-friendly, 30-degree-angled pitch that fills him with confidence? What does he make of Mitchell Johnson being rendered as hostile as belly-button fluff? And what impact does he think the loss of Brad Haddin (to be replaced with a debutant), and, potentially at time of writing, Mitchell Starc (the only quick who looked likely in the first Test) might have on our chances at Lord’s?
I think we all know what the answers will be. But do we still believe them like we once did? Because confidence it still may be. But it’s much more likely, if history is anything to go by, to be a confidence trick.
If you refuse to learn from the past, you are fated to meet the same results in the future. And when one looks at the way our top order are trying to play Anderson with a Duke like he’s a net bowler with a compo, you can’t help but feel nothing’s changed.
Do we not remember Flintoff? Have we forgotten Stephen Harmison? Have we blocked out Simon Jones? Do we think everywhere is the Gabba? Do we refuse to believe that the conditions over here are as different from home as Wimbledon is to Melbourne Park?
Perhaps some of it is down to short memories. But personally, I think it’s a case of choosing not to see what doesn’t suit you.
Does David Warner really want to think that playing Twenty20-style won’t be as effective as channelling Geoffrey Boycott? Does Shane (WTF) Watson really want to think that it’s not enough to just thrust out the front foot whatever comes down?
Does anyone want to admit to themselves that Australia is a team of flat-track bullies who can’t play the moving ball, and are flat out getting it to move off the straight themselves? And that if we keep curating roads in the Sheffield Shield, and choose to warm up for the Ashes by playing in the Caribbean, that of course we’ll be a bit short on the finer skills.
It’s… yeah. It’s fine. It’s going to be fine. Absolutely fine. Of course it will.
Everyone’s been working really hard in the nets, and it’s great to have fresh blood in the side, and we love playing at such a historic ground, and if we play our best cricket…
Just nobody step on a ball.
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