The Sydney Cricket Ground is a grand old dame that’s been tarted up in recent times so that you can sit in the Bradman Stand and order fish and chips from your phone and then go get it. How about that? The future, it’s now.
The Members and Ladies Stands are largely the same, however, they’re heritage buildings, listed among war memorials and churches. Change these stands and old people would riot like the start of The Meaning of Life when the accountants become pirates and make off with the building.
We’re here for day one of the fourth and final Border-Gavaskar Trophy Series Test match. And Chris Rogers and David Warner - the odd couple with a nice little yin and yang thing going on - are fairly owning the impotent bowling attack of the nation of India. It’s a bone-white wicket and Rohit Sharma has just grassed Rogers at second slip, a dolly. India will chase leather all day, ever more poorly, with shades of list.
India - and I think India know it - are bit-part players in this narrative, in the “story” of the Australian summer. India are this season’s visitors, the summer’s road-kill. And I reckon they resent it, as one might. They’re princes in their homeland, rich people, famous. Deities, some of ‘em. In Australia they’re the Washington Generals.
And they play like shit. All series, really, they’ve been largely shit, for all their group hugs and snarling ‘tood. They’ve played the “tough guy” and swapped insults with these chippy Australians. And they’ve been belted. And it would have been 4-0 had a rookie captain had slightly bigger balls and Mitchell Johnson played in Sydney.
So it’s been emotional. Yet this Test match has a slightly muted atmosphere about it. The morning was all about Phillip Hughes, the dear departed buccaneer, the 25-year-old bush boy and Good Bloke to whom so many of these cricketers were so close. Authorities have stuck up a plaque, put out 63 bats. The man’s been lionised like Les Darcy. And for some it’s been too much.
Couple of old boys I play golf with, diggers nudging 80, great old blokes who like golf and beer and laughing while swearing, reckon all the plaques, bats, all that, is over the top.
Rick, who as a young man tutored Kerry Packer about television, reckons: “Mate, all this stuff … all you do is go to the funeral, get on the piss at the wake, remember the bastard and have a laugh. And then you bloody get on with it.” Seems when you reach a certain age, you acknowledge the sadness. But you know death is just part of life.
Yet that’s not as easily done when you haven’t reached 30 and have never known loss. When you haven’t known pain like it, the first time, it’s the worst day of your life. Not a throwaway line. It is the worst day. Grief mixed with shock. Most of these cricketers wouldn’t have cried since they were kids. Standing there in their line, heads bowed, you can see it. They’re cut up.
But life, the series, the Test match, the old boys at golf, all of it moves on. What else you going to do?
Warner reaches 63 and kisses the ground like the Pope. He’s acknowledged by the people for it. Warm applause. Sky-gazing. Sixty-three is the new 87, but more talismanic, more solemn. Warner moves to 87. At the peak of his powers. He on-drives powerfully, boom, the ball scurries fast along the ground, four runs. Then boom - pull shot, that fierce, short-armed jab of a shot, whack … flat and hard, denting the fence. He is a dangerous man.
“What odds he hits a six to get his ton?” asks my mate Walshy.
“Skinny,” I reply.
“Like Michael Jackson?”
“Yeah, I suppose so mate,” I reply, and we cackle like fiends into our plastic cups of beer. Women may never understand this, but gibbering while drinking beer at the cricket is some of the best man-fun a boy-man can have. Silly, perhaps. But there it is.
The crowd is appreciative of the opening pair’s stroke play. Yet it’s muted, almost genteel, here in the Members among people who have to wear collared shirts and a certain sort of pants. Regardless a message on the big screen advises people that they can report anti-social behaviour by text messaging a certain number. Walshy takes out his phone and texts: “You can fuck off”. He chooses not to send it. Authorities have no sense of humour in these frightened, alert-heightened times.
It didn’t use to be like this. Indeed some years ago on the old Hill region, Walshy was escorted out of the ground by two policeman, high-kicking in can-can style, and roared on by 10,000 “beery, cheery mates”, according to the caption underneath a photo of him on page 3 of The Daily Mirror. People will laugh about it at his wake.
Today, upon the seats that make up the old Hill region, the closest thing to larrikins bounce beach balls about, security men on high alert. Code red. Puncture those balls lest they explode. Forty years before there was an edict outside the ground that read: “Only 24 stubbies per person”. People whinged about that.
By the ‘90s you couldn’t take anything in. Mates and I got around this by taking an Esky full of ice and the contents of a bottle of vodka, the effect like ice slurry. We’d place a couple of sandwiches and a four-litre flagon of orange juice on top. And it worked a treat. One year, though, an undercover agent fellow approached us, a bloke dressed like a yobbo: thongs, acid-wash jeans, goatee beard, flannie shirt. The Yobbo Cam had seen us mixing our drinks, and sent out old mate. He fronted us, showed us a badge, said we were under suspicion of drinking contraband alcohol. Fair enough. We were three-parts maggot. Yet old mate took a cup, had a sniff, had a sip … shook his head, and said, on your way then. Couldn’t tell there was upwards of 30 per cent vodka in the OJ. The silly moo.
Bang, Warner pulls hard, four more. That’s his hundred. And we’re all up for the pugnacious slugger, the bantam belter, the Matraville Mauler. He leaps, takes of his helmet, puts it and his bat into the air, looks at the skies, acknowledging his little mate. Acknowledges team-mates, the People. How good is he going, David Warner? Can bat.
Then he’s out - just after he and Rogers bring up 200 partnership.
But hark? Can you hear that low rumbling? Yes you can, for now cometh the time, cometh the man. Cometh: The Watto - Shane Watson, the blonde batting god-man, the latter day Chesty Bond. And there are people who don’t like him for it. Haters gonna hate, as they say.
But it’s because people are jealous of Watson, it’s the only explanation. He’s classically proportioned, has a classical looking batting technique. And he hits the ball hard. And then he gets out. And people feel ripped off. Like he’s personally ripped them off. If he looked like Chris Rogers (Test average 39.35), a Bluey, a digger, a doughty blood nut no-one would mistake for Matthew McConaughey, Watson (average 35.74) could tough it out top of the order, and people would be sweet with how he was travelling particularly given he’s a true all-rounder.
Bang, Rogers belts a four down the ground, lovely on-drive. He tries it again and is bowled, out for 95. They check for a no-ball, hopes briefly raised … but no, he’s cactus.
And so are India. Because Steve Smith comes in. He’s owned India this series, owned it like Gandhi, say, or Nehru, that guy in the hat like Private Pike. Smith’s has been brilliant batting. Incredible, dominant batting. He’s averaging a ton in three Tests, more runs than Bradman in a series against India. Shades of the gremlin about him, funky sort of batting style. You need something different, something a bit odd, unorthodox that bowling coaches can’t cop to. But you do also need the dead eye of a cobra, dancing feet, and fast hands. And Smith has these things in spades. Form of his life. Twenty-five years old, captain of Australia. How’s he going?
The score goes to 2 for 222 and a mongoose runs up Richie Benaud’s spine. We talk about the “golden era” of cricket. Walshy reckons it was ’75 when you could run on the field when a batsman scored a ton. “And when you got home from school and Ian Chappell was batting, you’d refuse to do your homework until he’d reached his century. It was like the moon landing or the first flight of the Concorde.”
“The moon landing,” repeats Walshy’s brother Walshy. “Maybe not the moon landing. But you felt like the country stopped.”
Every boundary, Commonwealth Bank announces another $100 donation for the McGrath Foundation. How many boundaries would there be in the series? Couple of hundred? Three? Thirty grand. From a mob whose financial planners ripped millions from pensioners’ super. Why aren’t these people in jail?
And so Watson and Smith chip away, easily, grinding India into the Bulli black clay. They both reach 50. And Australia go to stumps 2-350, or something, don’t know the exact score because an hour from stumps me and the Walsh brothers are in the Captain Cook drinking schooners, and laughing like it’s Walshy’s wake.
