Martin Johnson
‘Let’s all laugh at Australia’
We Brits are a resilient lot. No sooner has the midwife dispensed with the tongs than stiff upper lips are already beginning to form. However, there are times when even the stoutest of John Bulls are unable to fight off an attack of quivering from that self same lip, and the latest news from the colonies is so distressing that I fear a complete recovery may well be out of the question.
Please join me, if you would, in a minute’s silence for the Australian cricket team. A kinder, gentler sporting nation there has never been, and how better to express our sorrow than to pass on an old tip for getting through the grieving process. Namely, set fire to something iconic – the Don’s old batting gloves, perhaps, or Merv Hughes’ moustache – and put the ashes inside an urn. After which they can be placed on permanent display behind a glass cabinet in the Melbourne Cricket Club, available for mourners to file past and pay their last respects.
It’s hard to know precisely what’s behind their recent run of collapses, although appointing Graeme Hick as batting coach would be fairly high up the list of suspects. A nicer man the game has never seen, which doesn’t quite fit with the hard-nosed Australian psyche, and images of Hughes standing right in front of Hick’s helmet grille, with softly spoken words of encouragement pouring forth from the small koala bear attached to his top lip (eg: “eff off yer Pommie bastard!”) are still uncomfortably fresh in the memory of most.
I’ve not seen all the footage from their last five consecutive Test defeats, as they are only available on prescription, and not to be viewed before the 9pm watershed. As Channel Nine has doubtless been prefacing its highlights programmes: “We should warn you that some viewers might find certain scenes distressing.”
What occasional snippets I have seen, however, suggests that whatever input Hicky might have had into the team’s batting techniques has been overridden by the Australian top order being subjected to regular CCTV footage from a Birmingham nightclub in 2013.
It surely can’t be any co-incidence that their bats are coming down even further across the line than David Warner’s attempt to land a left hook on Joe Root’s chin, which, apparently fuelled by large quanties of Jager-bomber cocktail, was close enough to a fresh air shot for it to have barely registered on Snicko.
Forgive me if I pause for a moment to wipe away a tear, but old memories are starting to come back of the time when the Australian media – in response to decades of incompetence from their English opponents – would put a kindly arm around a crestfallen Pommy shoulder and whisper words of sympathy and encouragement.
My mind goes back to a day at the MCG in 1994 when something close to a contest took place, and the Melbourne Age headline the following morning read:
It’s hard to know what is behind their recent run of collapses, although appointing Graeme Hick as batting coach would be one of the suspects
“A Strange Day At The Cricket. England Fails To Collapse.” And the same paper, on the day before the Test, informed its readers: “England trained and grass grew at the MCG yesterday. Two activities virtually indistinguishable from each other.”
No wonder, therefore, that the current plight of the Australian cricket team should attract such a deep well of sympathy here in the mother country, and all mention of re-acquainting their batsmen with mementos of the first ever trip from England to Australia – a ball and chain – should be fiercely resisted.
Instead, they should take a leaf from England’s book when it comes to rediscovering the formula for discovering new batting talent. It took the England and Wales Cricket Board decades to stumble upon the secret, during which time they wasted vast amounts of money on batting coaches until the moment a passer-by in a dark corridor at Lord’s was startled by a cry of “Eureka” coming from the other side of the door.
The exclamation came moments after Haseeb Hameed raised his bat in Rajkot to acknowledge a half-century on his first Test match appearance, a debut suggesting that here was a talent the like of which had not been since Root. And reminding us that when Root first came along, we marvelled at a talent the like of which had not been seen since Alastair Cook.
And bingo. There’s the link. Great English batsmen can in future be immediately indentified by the fact that they look as though they can’t be out there batting too long after six o’clock in the evening without running the risk of having their mothers appear on the boundary reminding them that it’s time they were home for tea. And for whom day-night cricket is a non-starter, as evenings are reserved for maths homework, brushing your teeth, and getting into bed by half past nine.
Cook, at 31, is only distinguishable from the choirboy he was at the age of 12 by the fact that, in recent years, he appears to have mislaid his electric razor. Root has the kind of face that makes women look down at prams and coo: “ooh, isn’t he lovely… just like his dad…”, and now we have Hameed, who, on the occasions when he fancies going to the cinema, only has to hold hands with, say, Moeen Ali, to get in for half price.
Look at David Gower. He likes a glass of wine does David, but only until recently did he work out that the only way to stop getting asked for proof that he was over 18 when inside a licensed premises, was to thin out his hair a bit and dip it in white flour before going out.
It works both ways, this theory. In that the England coaching staff can also save themselves years of time, money and investment by immediately rejecting anyone who looks older than 10 years old when they leave school, or who looks like Desperate Dan and shaves with a blow torch. Although, come to think of it, there is one small flaw in that theory. Graham Gooch would never have got a game.