Remembrance of things past

PL: A day at the SCG provides updates on Konstas, Cummins, Handscomb, Boland and then some

Boland cleans up Konstas again. Pic courtesy SCG, Phil Hillyard

At 11 am, the players stopped and formed two lines in front of the historic SCG members’ stands, where people, catching on to the occasion, rose to their feet. Sam Konstas broke from the lines and addressed the crowd. There was no microphone, so he read, aided by his phone in his best big boy’s voice:

Ladies and gentlemen,
Today, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we pause to remember.
We honour the courage, service, and sacrifice of all who have served our nation in times of war, conflict, and peace.

We will now observe one minute of silence to remember those who gave their lives for our freedom.

Please stand, if you are able, and join me in reflection.

Konstas at the Armistice Day observance. Photo courtesy SCG, Phil Hillyard.

There’s a home-spun warmth to Sheffield Shield cricket. Here is a space free from auditory assaults and corporate choreography. This is the game at its analogue best, a place with space for contemplation, much the way it would around the time of that first conflagration.

A cartoon in the New Yorker caught my eye this morning. It was familiar in its framing: a man and a woman in a half-lit café, her telling him that she is “ready to take things to the previous level. In time, I think we could be acquaintances – maybe even strangers.”

Earlier, Konstas had kicked the soccer ball while Nathan Lyon and Steve Smith fell into easy conversation with Tony Dodemaide, one of the selectors who’d left the 20-year-old out of the Test squad announced last week.

Not long after the Armistice pause, Konstas was facing his domestic nemesis Scott Boland as NSW began their response to Victoria’s 382-run first innings. That was built primarily on the efforts of one Peter Handscomb, who’d knocked up a hundred on the first day against an attack that included the other three of the four in line to bowl in the first Ashes Test.

Peter Handscomb acknowledges the crowd on scoring his 30th first-class hundred. Pic courtesy SCG Phil Hillyard

Remember Peter? Called up in the summer of 2016-17, he scored centuries in his second and fourth Tests – and halves in his first and third games beneath the baggy green. Hanscomb fell out of form and favour a few years later, but was called back as a specialist player of spin for the 2023 Border-Gavaskar series against India. Made a nice half-century (72no) in that Delhi game, the Australians should have won. Called back to camp as a squad member for last year’s Sydney Test, he was then overlooked for the Sri Lanka series, where one would have thought it suited a man with his skill against spin. Always lean, the shaven head and years in the middle have given him that hard leather look Australian men get when they work in the sun and smoke a ciggie for breakfast. On acquaintance terms these days, you might wonder if Test cricket is making itself a stranger to the 34-year-old Victorian.