Tag Archives: soundtrack

waca 5 retURN

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thats the nature of our enterprise cant stop to sympathise now youve been tantalised

cricket slept for just over twelve months it has barely arisen and the ashes are already back in the right place. yesterday cricket woke up with a fervour for revenge. today is all sunsets over the indian ocean.

in exacting his vengeance the count of monte cristo often feels a tear in his eye. toward the end of the book he returns to the chateau d’if to remind himself what his enterprise has all been about. i imagine matthew hayden at this very moment is on a flight to the oval. the revenge does not stop here.

day 7 poem

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since david fine’s been writing poems to the tune of various little well known ditties i thought id take a liberty

to the tune of the unguarded moment (the church) and the character array of mean girls

see him disseminating information

i knew youd find him drinking

down those bars with carbs for dust

yeah the gags dont make me laugh

they only make me feel like catching

practice

(key : the first person (lohan) is KP the 3rd is el warno the 2nd is ponting & buchanan )

adelaide oval forever – day 1

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after seemingly endless sleepless nights anticipating the return of test match cricket to the tv screen the adelaide test commenced amidst a discourse on tradition and scoreboards that never change the 3 old stands at the oval are the exact same stands as when richie benaud first played there in 1650 though he conceeds they may have a few spots of new paint on them. this kind of talk always steeps that adelaide oval test in tones of sentimentality. upon the traditional cricket ground a traditional test match is being played. england are off to a sedate start. in delightful contrast (benaud) to the unchanging stands are the subtle and infinite variations of warne and stuart clark.

the decider

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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.

music review (singles) : incomplete

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The selection comittee has met and decided that Australia must retain the same batting line up that has appeared in the previous 4 tests. Hayden must play. It would be cheating the narrative of the series if changes were to be made. Those that have dug their burrows must be the ones given the chance to dig themselves out. The responsibility must be borne squarely on these shoulders. They will be the desperate ones.

The desperation is very clear in the passion with which the Australian top 5 deliver their latest single ‘incomplete’ – the most powerful song to hit the charts since Robbie Williams’ heyday. While the lyrics of the song contain a certain sense of having given up hope, a resignation that now, with Steve Waugh long gone, the Ashes too are lost, the delivery of the song contains a searing emotion, a searing heart, that can only be built out of pure hope or even exact knowledge that it is within them to fill the empty spaces that are filling them up with holes – there is little room to doubt, in this impassioned and rawly honest self appraisal of where the Australian batting line up finds itself, that they will finally deliver that final telling blow. On the back of this song, the backstreet boys reaffirm their position as one of the greatest boybands in the world.

The second track on the ‘incompleete’ single contains the line – ‘lets not talk about a possible ending’.

still waiting

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It really is opposite world when Clarkey, far from freeing himself from the burden of restraint, takes this taut passivity upon himself to a degree hitherto unheard of. Watching him bat was wrecking my guts. The tension was massive. The wait continues. The Waugh–hole is beginning to show. These binary flickerings of faith are threatening to enter into a tedium of zeroes. But It is the very tension of the wait that provides me (yet) with the conviction that all is not lost. The wait must come to fruition at some point, and there really aren’t too many points left to go. The Oval must be immense for Australia. They have to play like they have been on the 3 last days of the last 3 tests for each and every day of what is going to be the ultimate test.

cold out played

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During the 2003/4 summer’s tests in Australia, the entrance of the players to the field was greeted with the sounds of the coldplay song clocks. This at first seemed an incredibly dull and obscure choice to greet the commencement of a session of fine test cricket. By the end of the summer it had come to seem appropriate. I guess (I thought) more through sheer force of repetition than any symbolic or analogical relation. For this ashes series bloody coldplay are working their way into my experience of the tour in another way. They release this song just before the tour begins that, well, the first time I hear it I almost die from boredom right there on the spot. I hope I never have to hear the song again. As things get underway a thread begins to run through my blog of a movement from beneath the ground to more astral positions. A launching forth from out of a secret underground dwelling – a base. I do hear that damn coldplay song again & again, of course. I realise its a frikkin theme tune. Lights, birds (remember Dizzy is a bird and he’s been wrestling with mountains), bursting, flying from underground – there’s lots of noise and unbelievably spectacular goings on – If you could see it then you’d understand. Now I’m driven to go and buy the single and I feel I am betraying everything I could ever be.

03/04 – coldplay have a song turned into a cricket anthem by the official dj to Cricket Australia.

(Even before that, I remember now, that tiresome sickly yellow tune used to be Warney’s theme for the one-dayers.)

Ashes 05 – now they’ve gone and written a song that is making itself into a cricket anthem.

Maybe coldplay deserve more credit, maybe there really is something fundamentally cricket-like in the tedium their music induces and the patterns they work with. This is not a research project I want to take on so I am giving it away to whoever wants it – it’s all yours.