Nothing happens, but you can’t look away
Image: Alessandro Bogliari from Unsplash
In a world of shortening attention spans, productivity hacks and immediate gratification, red ball cricket is an anachronism, tying us back to locality, patience and endless summers.
Most mornings this year, Peter and I have begun our workday at Red Pony talking about sport. Invariably, the sport in question is cricket.
For most of my life cricket has been synonymous with summer – long days with no work or school, where the only place to be is underneath an air conditioner in front of the TV.
Yet, in our winter, the Australian men’s team toured India, played a World Test Championship final and an Ashes series in England, before returning to India to win the ODI World Cup. The Australian women’s team took out host nation South Africa to win the T20 World Cup, before defending the women’s Ashes in England.
This meant nights in bed with the iPad (headphones in, of course), waking in the middle of the night to check a score and watching a highlights video on a cold tram on the way into the office.
As summer rolls around, so too will the inevitable ads cashing in on our nostalgia for backyard cricket with all the clichés of broken windows, balls over fences, rubbish bin stumps, and shy-yet-determined children facing up to adults and tonking them onto the roof.
It’s no surprise that Bluey, a popular cartoon show about a cricket-loving family of blue heelers has this year managed to express something profound and beautiful about a pastime that seems to be edging towards oversaturation.
It’s often said that cricket is an individual sport masquerading as a team sport. The backyard Christmas game is engrossing when you’re the one batting or bowling but, as everyone knows, if you leave your cousin in the field for too long in a backyard game on Christmas, they’ll lose interest and wander back to the food table.
A bucket list item for me, this year will mark my first Boxing Day test. While I’m anticipating feats of brilliance, I’m also tempering my expectations – it’s cricket after all. Paul Kelly said it best in his song ‘Behind the Bowler’s Arm’:
if we’re lucky we might see
someone make a ton or slashing fifty
yeah if we’re lucky there might be
a bowling spell of sheer wizardry
but probably nothing much will happen at all.
My hope for all the non-cricket fans is that you find as much joy in nothing happening this summer as I do.
