everyball is so important. it seems exhilirating to begin with like processed cheese slices it soon becomes diffcult to care

There is a quite amusing, if very English, wrap up of the year’s cricket online here. The highlight is undoubtedly letter E:

E is for Eggs
The year’s most shocking revelation came when Glenn McGrath admitted that he likes his fried eggs positioned bang in the middle of his toast, which must be white. There must be no overhanging egg white and the toast must be cut into quarters. Leading Australian psychiatrists described this level of precision as “perfectly normal”, while their British equivalents called it “barmy as a can of peas and no mistake”. More comforting for British fans, though, was the knowledge that there were now two such people in the world. Previously we had thought there was only one, a notorious wicketkeeper who wore the same floppy cap every day for 20 years, ate Weetabix only if it had been soaked in milk for 12 minutes and blindfolded people who wanted to visit his house. Are there many others still at large?

It is a dream of mine to see cricket sides made up of mercenary players from all corners of the globe roaming the world and taking on entire nations in first class cricket matches. Preferably these teams should be lead by Shane Warne. Yesterday’s match has spawned offspring already – like beach balls from the crowd along the concourse of the Great Southern Stand, so the buccaneer cricket matches come.

The event at the MCG yesterday was undeniably great – it was loaded with wonderful heart and goodwill. But the cricket match was disappointing. I think the reason it was disappointing is to do with the way the teams were demarcated. Rather than being Asia v The rest of the world it should really have been The world v The rest of the world. The teams should have been selected 10 minutes prior to the start of the game by the two captains. All the players should have gathered together at the centre of the ground, a bat thrown in the air and Ganguly should have called ‘hills’ or ‘valleys‘, the landing of the bat determining who would choose first. For instance:

GANGULY: Brian.
PONTING: Then, Gilly.
GANGULY: Ok, Kumar.
PONTING: Murali!
GANGULY: Then I’ll take Warnie.
PONTING: Virender, you’re with us.
GANGULY: Rahul. You are my god, you must be on my team.
PONTING: Cairnsie.
GANGULY: Zaheer.
PONTING: Anil Kumble.
GANGULY: Daniel.
PONTING: Sanath, with us.
GANGULY: Matty Hayden.
PONTING: Next one… um, Yousuf, cool.
GANGULY: Mr Gayle, you are on my team.
PONTING: Flemo.
GANGULY: Razza.
PONTING: Chaminda.
GANGULY: Sorry Rick, McGrath’s all yours – Goughie.

Having a world team competing in a cricket match is also good for the cricket writers who get to pen sentences that include grand fragments such as this- ‘the world was breathing more comfortably when Sourav Ganguly, the captain, drove to Gough at mid-off.’

At one point hundreds of small beach balls burst out of one section of the crowd and spread quickly throughout the Great Southern Stand.

Earlier a naked lady spent an extended period flying and zooming over the heads of the same spectators, dipping into the mass here and there only to launch immediately back into the lower stratas of the atmosphere once more, swooping & dipping in graceful arcs.

How could I forget the streakers??????

I thought this was a forgotten practice. I think the fact that there were two in one day signifies the fine health of test cricket.

Have you thought that the streaker that Chappell is whacking looks suspiciously like Billy Bowden?

Shaoib has been a spectacular dissappointment this test match. Every Australian batsmen has played him like it was me who was bowling at them. There was a great line in the paper yesterday saying that the Rawalpindi Express has borne more resemblance to City Rail.

KW

Appendix: Shoaib is a superstar.

I was there yesterday (day 3). It was a repeat performance of Melbourne in terms of the weather. It was hardly raining. Not even drizzling. You could sit out in it and not get wet. But the occassional errant drop meant that play could not start. The covers came off and then went straight back on. But play finally got under way.

Gilchrist cut loose. Someone forgot to tell him that he was playing in a
test match. We were on square at the Paddington end. On the pull shot for the left hander. I feared for my safety everytime Gilchrist was on strike. I doubted my ability to catch the ball. Given the way it was hit it would likely have caused serious burns on my hands – requiring skin grafts – given the energy that was transferred into that ball on contact with Gilly’s bat. Warney had already almost killed a child by slamming the ball on a low trajectory into the crowd while warming up.

The other highlight of the day, I think surpassing Pontings 200, was McGrath’s promotion to 10, his beautiful batsmanesque push through the leg side for 4 due to the incomprehensible Pakistani off side field setting, and then his beautiful, perfect, inevitable failure – he is after all and must be number 11. I had left by this time to go to work.

Day 2 was warm and sleepy and flawless. Ponting and Marto didn’t hit a single ball in the air. They just pushed and placed and timed through their entire partnership. They just accumulated. No one noticed them scoring runs, they just did. I was expecting Ponting to unleash his shots at any moment. But he was batting far too perfectly to do that. The sleepiness showed on the crowd, who managed to tie a string of the 3-mobile thundersticks together that stretched almost the entire length of the ground, from the Dally Messenger to the Brewongle stands.

Day 1 seems so long ago that all that I remember is Salman’s 100. MacGill must have bowled well, but from our seats, it was impossible to detect the nuances of his performance. The scorecard was amusing – all the wickets credited to Macs and Mcs.

KW

There was a cover drive played by Justin Langer during Australia’s little second innings that made me think of Le Corbusier. Well, that is, it brought to mind a small article I’d read in an old Vogue Living magazine about the Swiss architect (that’s the extent of my architecture & design research so far) and the compact little hut that he built across the bay from Monte Carlo – Le Cabanon (The Shed). This shed is remarkable for its functional simplicity, an extreme example of Le Corbusier’s vision of a house as a ‘machine for living’. VOGUE LIVING – “Le Corbusier called his creation a ‘tiny cell on a human scale’ in which ‘not a single centimetre was wasted’ … the genius of functionalism sweeping aside insurmountable space restrictions to create an extraordinarily compact dwelling”.

Justin is of course a machine for batting but this particular shot had all that simplicity about it, not a single millimetre of movement was wasted or in excess. It was all perfect balance and angles. Justin has stripped back batting to its essentials, the functional minimalism is extraordinarily attractive. Justin often holds a shot after he has played it for some time. He retains the structure that he has produced, his shed, for as long as the game allows – he will just stand there with his front foot stretched forward, his elbow high and his bat held aloft, his head in perfect alignment. He is austere. Kind of monkish.

The dwelling of the batsman, or perhaps it is the foundation of the batsman as a dwelling, is the crease. The crease becomes the basic element in modern architecture. See Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. It is a series of creases. Look at any architectural plans and it’s all only creases in various articulations.

Adam Gilchrist spends his days floating about creases.

There is something in this photo of Pinting that suggests a similar stern and impassioned joy as that of one of Hayao’s heroes upon the successful completion of an epic quest.

With anime so much of the character is displayed in the hair and the angles that it makes with its support structure. Watson has something good going on here. There’s only a little lock or two visible but it is very expressive.

The other thing I would have liked to have seen today was the by all accounts terrible decision of the third umpire when Watson played a clear catch back to the bowler. I saw one quick replay on the news and it was pretty obvious to me that it was out. I’m told that doubt only came to exist as the technology blew the image of the ball hitting the bat up and up and up until the distortion was such that it was perhaps possible that the ball was touching the ground after the it had left the bat. The difference between umpires and technology is that technology can be stupid. An umpire is never stupid, sometimes he makes a poor decision, just as the batsmen sometimes plays a poor shot, or the bowler sends down a pie. The umpire’s failing is only an athlete’s lapse. Technology’s failing is that it is able to be moronically stupid. It is so slow of wit. As Kerry O’Keefe was wisely saying in the abc box, give me a pair of black slacks and a white shirt and I’ll save us all a lot of time.

I was at work all day today so I didn’t get to see any of Gilchrist’s magnificence, but I was assured of the intensity of this magnificence by the fact that a friend called me at work to tell me about it, twice. It was an innnings that needed to be shared, possibly the most attractively vicious innings in the history of world cricket. A vicious production of a pure gift to the earth. Apparently Ponting made a double century.

An innings that needed to be shared, that demanded friendship, that created an atmosphere of camaraderie throughout the world. The bonds of attraction formed and exploited today at the scg, those bonds between the bowlers and Gilchrist – it is likely that Danish found bowling to Gilchrist irresistible – the bonds between Ronting what’s his name and Gilchrist, the crowd in bondage, all these bonds whose power reverberated from an intensive point at the scg and dispersed globally to touch the population, these are the bonds of community, of love and joy that cricket exists to produce. When the Gilchist part is functioning like this the dirigible is so shiny & efficent.