HOW ROOT CAN JOIN JARDINE ON AUSSIE HATE LIST
Cricket crowds aren’t what they used to be. When Len Hutton was scoring his 364 back in 1938, everyone arrived on the bus, ate their cheese and pickle sandwiches out of an old biscuit tin, and when Yorkshire’s finest went past the Don’s record 334 all the male spectators threw their flat caps and trilbies into the air. Resulting, you have to presume, in half of them arriving home wearing someone else’s hat.
If you examine the old black and white footage, no-one at the Oval on that momentous occasion appears to have been dressed as a Viking or an Archbishop, and the standing ovation for Sir Len – mostly performed with fag still hanging from the mouth – was largely down to the fact that half the punters didn’t have a seat in the first place.
Cricket crowds haven’t really changed much down the years, apart from the fact that they all sit down now, and anyone turning up in a flat cap has presumably hired it for the day. But Joe Root’s recent assessment of Australian crowds suggests that he wouldn’t be entirely certain as to whether the section wearing prison overalls and a ball and chain had stopped off at a fancy dress shop, or escaped from a nearby prison.
“Aggressive”, “personal” and “offensive”, were just three of the adjectives employed by the England captain, and all he needs now to get even further up the home spectators’ noses before this winter’s Ashes tour is to walk out to bat wearing a Harlequin cap.
They didn’t much care for Douglas Jardine over there in 1932-33, and Root has already gone some way down the road to making himself just as popular. “Hey Jardine! Where’s your butler?” some wag is alleged to have yelled out to the man they perceived as a snob. In which case Root, given that he looks more like the team mascot than the captain, can presumably look forward to a shout or two of: “Where’s your babysitter?”
Although you’d have to say that this is unlikely. Australian cricket crowds are as famous for subtle humour as their fast bowlers. Graeme Hick, for instance, used to wait for something clever to emerge from the small koala bear adorning Merv Hughes’ upper lip whenever the Australian stood snarling underneath his visor (which was almost always) but all he ever got was: “Eff off, yer Pommy bastard.”
There is a statue at the Sydney Cricket Ground to the memory of the Thirties spectator known as Yabba, whose bon mots included informing Jardine that the flies he kept waving away were the only friends he had in the country. Yabba must have been an exception, and when Root ended his appraisal of Australian crowd badinage with “I think they see it as humour”, he was not intending the sarcasm to go un-noticed.
Personally, I think that if Australian cricket spectators have the reputation of being aggressive, they deserve a little understanding. Let’s face it, anyone who spent all day at the cricket eating those meat pies would be a little on the grumpy side. I don’t know exactly what’s in them, but I’m guessing that if you took out the eyeballs and innards, there wouldn’t be much left.
And if they get a little, shall we say, boisterous, it’s entirely down to the lager, You have to drink it quickly to stop it getting warm, and when it gets warm, you have the life changing experience of finding out what it tastes like. It’s the same colour as you end up with when the nurse asks you to pop behind a screen with a test tube, and, well, need I go on?
All he needs now to get even further up the home spectators’ noses before the Ashes tour is to walk out wearing a Harlequin hat
International cricket crowds all have their distinct, and unique characteristics, and one of the great experiences of going to a match in India is travelling to the ground. Unlike, say, Perth or Adelaide, where you have a 20-minute stroll through a leafy park, you check that your last will and testament is up to date, and then take to the road to do battle with smoking tuc-tucs, Austin Ambassadors that haven’t seen an MOT since the old Raj, bullock carts, sacred cows, and four generations of one family sharing a single bicycle.
Indian roads are so hairy, you wonder why they get so excited at the comparative tedium of the game. Perhaps it’s to celebrate still being alive. But the explosion of joy when a Tendulkar or a Kohli jogs a single to complete his half century is one of the great sights in sport, never mind cricket.
This summer’s latest visitors have, as we all know, fallen on hard times as a Test match nation, and crowds in the West Indies appear to have given up almost completely on their team. Not that it ever was a team. It’s only cricket that brings all the different islands together, and back in 1992, when the local boy Anderson Cummins was omitted from the Test against South Africa in Barbados in favour of an Antiguan, Kenny Benjamin, they boycotted the game. With one memorable banner outside the ground reading: “No Cummins No Goings.”
It’s remarkable to think back now to the late Sixties, when Test crowds in the West Indies were once so boisterous that Colin Cowdrey’s MCC side was caught up in a riot – tear gas and all – at Sabina Park in Jamaica. It’s hard to get a crowd riot without a crowd, and sadly, this is the case for Test matches everywhere other than in England, and Boxing Day in Australia and South Africa.
The combination of England and Boxing Day this winter will be a rare chance to see Test cricket for once outdoing T20 for crowd involvement. No fewer than 90,000 people crammed into the MCG, and all of them there to watch the cricket, rather than the chance to wave back to themselves on a big screen.
As for Root, he’s already made a decent start in his bid to supplant Jardine as (in the words of the former Australian cricket commentator Alan McGilvray) “the most notorious Englishman since Jack the Ripper”, and although Bodyline is no longer available as a winding-up tactic, my advice to Root is to bring himself on with off spin and run out Steve Smith – without a warning – backing up at the non-striker’s end.
Now there’s a thought to keep you warm this winter.