poor form of the Australians, indifferent form of the umpires, and now the weather’s form has sunk to all time low. It could be a sad end to the most magnificent series.
But Flintoff! His promise just grows and grows toward true immensity.
“I promise all readers that every drop of sweat we have in our bodies will be left at The Oval. We will give everything we have and more to win back the Ashes.”
Before the test commenced, after the sepia toned slow motion replays of agonised cricketers’ faces and cricketers’ faces laden joy, Dean Jones called it the grand final of all test matches in the last 100 years. Last night as Hayden (if that’s who it was out there, playing with all the patient care in the world) and Langer worked so diligently away at giving Australia the platform they have not had all series, it was fitting cricket for the occassion. Time stretches so frikkin thin. Every moment is filled with a massive expectation that something, dreadful or wonderful, will occur. Yet the ball by ball commentary goes on like this:
x.1 nothing happens
x.2 nothing happens
x.3 nothing happens
x.4 nothing happens
x.5 nothing happens
x.6 nothing happens
y.1 nothing happnes
y.2 nothing much happens
y.3 nothing happens
y.4 nothing happens
y.5 nothing happens
y.6 nothing happens
z.1 nothing happens
z.2 Langer sends the ball deep into the vast skies
z.3 Langer sends the ball deep into the vast skies
z.4 nothing happens
z.5 nothing happens
z.6 nothing happens
The crowd is silent or bubbles away or is singing tunes from all across time; hymns, yellow submarine, or original compositions whose repetition is wonderfully appropriate to cricket, birds or pop music with their incessant refrains:
barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army barmy army …
There is the occasional beat of leather on willow. Strangled shouts and shouts.
Over it the commentators riff, each with their own particular phrasing of popular cliches. Jazz interpreters. Benaud is a traditionalist, his phrases are well metered, clean and delivered with a calm conventional purity. Grieg on the other hand stutters away, repeats bars, gets stuck on the end of a sentence, halts, and goes again – he’s like Sonny Rollins trying to work his way from one phrase to the next or if he’s getting excited perhaps he sounds more like Coltrane cracking his phrases into pieces. Mark Nicholas delivers slogans. His air time is sparsely populated but with epigrammatic gems, short crystals of sound delivered with a powerful confidence. Each is a pefectly formulated hook that you may expect to enter into a sequence of repetitions and variations but is then followed only by air time. Until the next crystal forms.
Concurrent with the cricket, on channel 10, there was a football final being played. Football is one huge event compacted into 100 or so minutes. There is little demarcation within this event. It rarely ceases happening. Time is one great mass. The crowd is wild noise, the commenators don’t even breathe. The test match is also a singular event. But it is stretched out over 5 days. Time is stretched so frikkin thin. And it is heavily, distinctly divided. Ball by ball. Non event after non event, from time to time there is a minor happening or even a drama – the game turns on all of these. Flintoff comes on to bowl and my organs are so widely distributed that I can feel a small patch of sweet residual Russian Autumn sunlight on the left side of my heart. Living a test match like this the involved cricket viewer is thinly dispersed. Perhaps never to recover – how am I to recollect myself after the Ashes? I am no phoenix.
ah the frustration! Wating waiting waiting for some Australian player to lead a true and spirited fightback. Waiting for someone to launch themselves (in this topsy turvy world it is Flintoff who keeps launching himself deep into the spheres, taking his comrades with him) out of the hole that the Australians just keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into. They remind me of the creature in Kafka’s story ‘The Burrow’. It begins with a line something like, ‘I have just completed my burrow and I believe it to be perfect’. The rest of the story has the creature becoming more and more desperately paranoid about the noises of the small fry that he can hear tunneling in the earth around his burrow – he becomes convinced that the sounds he hears are being made by one massive predator against which his burrow will be no safeguard, slowly getting closer and closer. Despite this the creature is enamoured of his construction and will leave it only for the shortest snatches and only to watch over its entrance like a guard. Though it is clearly inadequate, he is unable to launch forth from his underground dwelling and the burrow becomes a trap. But of course there is still hope. In Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of ‘The Burrow’ the creature’s description of the dwelling is a ruse to trick the enemy. It is the enemy that will be trapped by the perfectly functioning machine that the burrow in fact is. The burrow is not a defensive trench, the creature fears nothing. Australia have forced England to make Australia follow on. Michael Clarke will never be in a better position to realise his full potential and free himself from the burden of restraint.
The bloody epic came but the hero was cast differently. Flintoff is undoubtedly a demigod. His is a terrible divinty – there is nothing more fearsome in the world than watching him take a wkt. He derives no joy from the experience, it is pure beastial passion that overcomes him. It is as though an Australian batsman, when Flintoff was only a child, commited horrendous acts of atrocity against his family as he was forced to watch. The way he looks skyward with ferocious eyes and roars to the heavens, thrusts out his chest, stands and receives the bitter rewards of revenge from his wronged cosmos. Physically, he heals quickly – mentally the damage seems irreparable, it appears this is a revenge that will never find resolution, he is surely the most dangerous thing Australia have come up against for a very long time.