Not An Endless Summer

by williamschack

All summer I have looked towards this upcoming football season with a sense of dread. 2013 was an awful year for football. The Essendon drugs scandal tainted the whole season and in the end moved beyond being a blight on the game and just became annoying. It was endlessly called a “sorry saga”, but, selfishly, I couldn’t really empathise with anyone. I didn’t feel sorry for the players who were simply just doing what the club said they should do. I didn’t feel sorry for James Hird who helped facilitate a program to try and strengthen his players and it would appear Stephen Dank hi-jacked. I didn’t feel sorry for Stephen Dank who has shown no remorse or shame for his actions. I didn’t feel sorry for Dean Robinson who Essendon seemed to treat most harshly when compared with other senior figures. I didn’t feel sorry for Andrew Demetriou whose legacy will now be tainted with the way the league handled, and it would seem, interfered, with the investigation. I didn’t feel sorry for anyone; I just wanted my football season back.

In the end, I did feel sorry for Richmond who had their best home and away season since 2001 only to have their arch nemesis, Carlton, who the Tigers had beaten only once in 6 years, parachuted into the finals and then have the most heartbreaking defeat inflicted on them. Despite not being a Collingwood loss, I count that day as one of the darkest in my football life. I have never seen a Collingwood versus Carlton final and I hope I never do. After the game a group of macho Blues fans were jumping up and down as they walked down the Southern Stand ramp yelling the Carlton theme song repeatedly, that painful image has been burned into my memory forever.

The Richmond loss capped off an awful weekend after Collingwood was outplayed by Port Power in their Elimination Final making 2013 their worst season since they last didn’t make the finals in 2006. That following week, Collingwood then cut some premiership players that made me hate the nature of competitive sport. (I like to live in a dreamland when all my favourite players keep playing until they don’t want to anymore and we keep winning).
And then on top of all of that Dale Thomas left Collingwood for Carlton. There have been many bad seasons for Collingwood in my life time, but 2013 has to be one of the worst.

So it was with great relief that I could throw myself into the Australian summer of cricket in an attempt to forget the painful memories of football in 2013. The English were on our shores, intent on inflicting pain on us for the fourth series in a row, but Michael Clarke and his men had had enough and they had a plan to return the urn to its rightful owners. Except for day 1 of the first Test, and day 2 of the fourth, Australia brutally assaulted England and dominated the series. Mitchell Johnson’s renaissance produced a thing of beauty that was the fast bowling equivalent of the Sistine Chapel, with his Ashes series statistics placing him in the upper echelon of all time bowling performances. Before The Ashes, Graeme Swann referred to David Warner as a “prickly” fellow and just recently he said he is an “average individual” and someone who he would not want to have a beer with. David Warner, clearly, doesn’t care what opponents think of him. He wants to score runs and he wants Australia to win, and this summer he smacked both opponents around and finished the season with the astounding statistics of 1066 runs at an average of 71.06 in 8 Tests. Swann, before and after retirement, forgot that his role was to stop Warner making runs, not talk about whether or not he was a nice guy.

I didn’t write as much about The Ashes as I probably should have, but I did write something about the collective enjoyment that can be had from watching a team win when it is the whole country cheering for them, rather than, for example, a small section of the football fan base. The experience this summer for cricket fans was such a relief after the torment of the past five or so years, and Cricket Australia would be very happy with its performance in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Australian public, as we all were capitavted by the teams performance in The Ashes and the equally captivated by its stellar performance in South Africa. Ryan Harris’ two brilliant yorkers to win us the game in Cape Town was the icing on the cake of a perfect summer to wash away the misery of football.

And I have been dreaming of an endless summer in which the weather stayed warm, Australia kept winning, and the football season never started. But all things must pass, and now that the cricket season is over, we must turn our minds to the impending football season. I never wanted the 2010/11 summer to end, but they were for completely different reasons, and now, like then, football is once again upon us.

I was feeling really bad about it until on the Friday night before the last South African Test I was at home with nothing to do and no sport on TV. I checked my IQ recordings to see if there was anything of note to watch, and there happened to be an episode of 30 minute thrillers and the game was the 2011 Preliminary Final. As I got goose bumps at every major moment – Cloke’s pack mark and subsequent goal, Swanny’s brilliant roving and goal, Buddy’s goal which I put up there with Peter Daicos’ goal in 1990, Ball’s winning goal, and finally Dale’s tackle – I was reminded why I love the game so much. I remembered how when the siren went, me, my friends, and about 50,000 other people all jumped up to celebrate. I remembered how on that night everything just felt perfect. And I realised that I shouldn’t be dreading the season but looking to forward to it, and I guess that is what I am doing now.

Lost in Translation

by williamschack

I was having dinner with some friends last Wednesday night, whilst Australia was beginning their attempt to bowl South Africa out on the final day of the third Test in South Africa. My friends, Joran and Genna, have been living in Berlin for the past 3 years so I had not seen them together for some time, and not wanting to be rude and checking my phone every two minutes I had organised for my housemate to message me whenever wickets fell. As the dinner progressed and my mouth became numbed from chilli, the lack of vibration in my pocket had me worried. As we got the bill a text finally came through, “Faf’s in, Abbott out. I’m worried.”

Joran is into sports but as he is from Germany he is not into cricket. Given his Australian connection (Genna is a Melbournian), he has taken an interest in Australia Rules over the last few years, so once I learned of his impending visit to Australia I decided it was my job to introduce him to the wonderful world of Test cricket.  I kept emailing him with updates as the dramatic and dominant summer unfolded. I showed him a clip of Mitchell Johnson bowling out Alistair Cook at Adelaide, but realised afterwards if you’ve never watched cricket before that ball probably doesn’t look so remarkable, rather it just looks like what should happen every ball. I  had emailed him after stumps on day 3 explaining that Australia had put itself in the prime position to beat South Africa for the first time in 5 years, and that this unbelievable summer of success could now reach heights we never thought possible. When we were leaving the restaurant the question arose if we would all like another drink?
Of course, I said, and can we drink somewhere that is playing the cricket?
And so with cricket on our minds, we moved up Bourke St to the Imperial, thirsty for beer and hungry for wickets.

We arrived at the pub during lunch, and shortly after the break Harris moved the ball slightly away from the best batsmen in the world, who duly edged it to Haddin. It was a brilliant ball and one that I thought might promise an avalanche of wickets, but South Africa had other ideas.
“Why aren’t they trying to make runs?” Joran asked.
I explained how in cricket there are four possible results and that the only possible positive result remaining for South Africa was a draw and so they’re playing for that and they don’t care if they don’t make runs. I tried to use the comparison of a tie in cricket being the same as a draw in soccer, and a draw in cricket being more like a game of soccer where they ran out of time and neither team had been able to outscore the other. I realised about half way through that I was just explaining a tie in a different way so I gave up on finding a suitable comparison. We kept on watching and South Africa kept on leaving.

“What is happening when they show that line on the pitch, and the ball bounces outside of it or sometimes on it?” Joran asked.
“That is when they are reviewing something called LBW, leg before wicket, if it lands on a particular side of that line then the batsmen can’t be out”
“Which side?”
“Leg side, and which side leg side is depends on whether the batsman is left or right handed”
I was struggling to explain this complex rule and its even more complex review system. We kept on watching and South Africa kept on leaving.

“So how did this game get in this position?” Joran asked.
I explained that there are 10 wickets per innings and two innings in total for each team. I began pointing to four different spots on the table to signify innings.
“Australia won the toss, they batted first, and they made something like 495 runs. Then –”
“So, South Africa got them out 10 times?”
“Um, well no. Not to confuse you even more but Australia declared after stumps on day 2 because it rained and they lost too much time…” And so before I could explain how we had arrived at the remarkable position the match was in on day 5, I digressed into a long winded explanation of declaration tactics in cricket and innings victories and why they rarely happened these days. I was failing to clearly explain every aspect of the game, my explanations were being lost in translation as I struggled to find a comparison to other sports that he would understand, because cricket truly is a sport like no other.

There is no other sport in the world where competitors run out of time to win and both teams leave the field with the game essentially unfinished, but it is still considered a result. There is no other sport in the world where a single game last for five days. There is no other sport in the world where the attacking team decides they have attacked enough and will give the other team a go. There is no other sport in the world where one team decides they will no longer try and beat its opponent’s score. After a while Joran just said, “I don’t think I am going to get it”.

We parted ways at about 11:00 and since De Villiers went out things hadn’t changed a lot in the hour we’d been watching. Once I was home I stayed up most of the night hoping to see an historic Australian victory, but still managed to see no other wickets. I wasn’t watching when Smith got Du Plessis LBW – luckily I was listening on the radio and was able to hear the Australians bark at him as he left the field after he called them “a pack of dogs” in a press conference days earlier – and I wasn’t watching when Duminy was caught by Lyon in the unconventional field placing of leg slip. If Joran was still with me, I would have no doubt struggled to explain why I felt no disappointment at having watched the game for so long, only to miss out on seeing those two crucial moments. I would have struggled to explain how in cricket it is often the moments leading up to the pivotal moment that make the game interesting, rather than the moment itself. I would have struggled because I realised that night there is so much about cricket’s appeal to me that I can’t really explain. All I know it that through nothing other than the circumstance of playing cricket one lunch time in grade 2, it has seeped into my life and I can’t explain why it makes me feel the way it does. In Australia, cricket just is.

I stayed up a while longer, hoping that the final two wickets would fall. They didn’t. Then one did, but it was overturned. Clarke was angry and so was I. It was too much for me, with 7 overs to go and less than four hours to get up for work, I decided I would call it a night because South Africa looked too set for us to get them out. It was depressing Adelaide all over again.

I slept through my alarm and when I awoke my initial thought was not of work, but cricket. I checked my phone for the results.
Australia won by 245 runs.
It took a second to compute. I re-checked my phone.
Harris brings Australia home.
Australia – we – had won! I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I quickly had a shower and then went to the recording on my IQ box and watched the last over. It was the perfect ending to the most perfect summer of cricket, the best summer of cricket that I can remember.

I was given The Definitive Guide to Cricket as a present for Christmas. Mark Nicholas wrote the foreword and in it he explained how he fell in love with Cricket when he was watching a Test that in the last over all 4 results were possible. If you were going to choose a Test in which someone would be most likely to fall in love with it, then you would choose that one. But not everyone has such an exciting Test that they can point to as the moment  Test cricket won them over. For me, it was an unremarkable series in the 1995/96 summer that for some reason I became captivated with as Australia dominated the poor Sri Lankans. And there are billions of other stories, some exciting, some dull, but all apart of the larger narrative that is Test cricket. There is a mysteriousness to it that avoids succinct definition, an intangible quality that is not apparent on the surface. To get into Test cricket, you have to watch it and either let it seep into your being like I did one summer when I had nothing else to do, or wait for a magical moment like the one Nicholas enjoyed as a child to enlighten you. And as the adrenalin of the victory began to settle down on Thursday morning, I started to wish that Joran was still watching it with me when Ryan Harris was running in to bowl to Morne Morkel with his knee barely holding together, in the fading light of Cape Town, for the the last time this summer. For if he was, the magic of Test cricket would have revealed itself to him, and no amount of my hysterical carrying on or incoherent rambling about cricket’s rules or tactics  would have been able to obstruct it beauty, and he would have been hooked.