I don't like Cricket

Gabba Gabba Hey

Or Reasons to be Cheerful – Part I

Sporting dread… Everyone’s familiar with it. I used to get it on various occasions at school… When contemplating being forced to do “The Chellinge”, as our swimming teacher used to call it, in a sort of Edwardian sergeant-major styley – swimming through underwater hoops in pyjamas, that kind of thing, then getting back to the changing room and finding someone had put a giant dead cockroach in your pants. Or gymnastics, where we were supposed to risk breaking our necks by doing some kind of handspring somersault over a vaulting horse, before having Mr Xxxxx, a notorious stickler for male adolescent hygiene, wander into the showers to “make sure we were washing ourselves properly”. Or indoor hockey with some mixed ability group of psychopaths: it says everything about the “sport” and everything about the psychopaths that this was their favourite lesson.

You know the feeling. The suppressed horror as the calendar rolls round to the appointed day, the queasiness in the stomach. Then the moment itself, when you can’t put it off but you still try your best, by turning yourself into a zombie and mentally drifting off to somewhere else, somewhere safer…

Thus it has been for the last three times an England team went to Brisbane. (I don’t count 1990 – we hadn’t had the hope ground out of us then.) Never mind the fans, this was the team. Nasser Hussein suffered a particularly bad case of it last time round. Having won the toss (practically the first time an England captain had actually won the toss in any match since Graham Gooch’s tenure), he was so scared of being skittled out by tea he put the Aussies in. Fate then rewarded him for his defeatism by breaking Super Simon Jones’s leg. Like Anthony Eden will always be remembered for Suez, Nasser Hussein will always be remembered for Brisbane.

No such worries this time round. Freddie Flintoff doesn’t know the meaning of the word defeatism. (In truth, Marcus Trescothick probably doesn’t, literally. But I shouldn’t kick him when he’s down. We love you, Tres.) Whatever happens, this team will compete.

posted by M. Reynard @ 10:08 am