Ten Things #10

Gideon Haigh on the IPL, a lost link to the past, and an amazing recreation of it.

1/ The IPL is still going, if not for much longer.

2/ Is there a theory about why fielding in the IPL is so hit and miss? In the Eliminator, Rovman Powell brilliantly ran into and dived forward at cow corner to collect a flat hit from Faf du Plessis, and took three more catches almost as good. He has absolute buckets. Dhruv Jurel, meanwhile, dropped an absolute soda from Rajat Patidar, then was run out thanks to some brilliant work from Virat that Cameron Green nearly bollocksed up. Worst of all was the catch Maxy dropped from the bat of Tom Kohler-Cadmore, even if it’s of a piece with his woeful tournament. I’m sure that the franchises practice their fielding religiously, but if so they’re not enjoying many benefits. Which is strange considering that the quest for advantage is otherwise so....well, expensive.

3/ Here’s a few ideas: a/ there are many matches under lights, soaking balls with dew; b/ these balls then being hit extremely hard, imparting excess rotations that make even seemingly straightforward catches awkward to judge; c/ there are lots of Indian domestic players who have maybe not worked so hard on their auxiliary skills; d/ the relentless pressure, which makes simple tasks difficult; e/ the relentless action, which tends to swallow up fielding mistakes so that they do not impress on memory; or f/ fielding not being thought as fundamental in a game on small grounds that accents long hitting, and a lot of the time involves simply retrieving the ball from the crowd. Still, I can’t help feeling that a franchise that improved the reliability of its fielding even ten per cent would get an edge worth emulating.

4/ The name Esther Trichter will not mean much to many, but when her daughter rang to advise me of Esther’s death last week at the age of ninety I was very much moved. Esther was the daughter of Max and Pesa Chester, whose seven-year-old nephew Maxie drowned in a council ditch in Hollywood Avenue, Waverley on 14 August 1937. The claim by Maxie’s mother for damages based on her ‘nervous shock’ went all the way to the High Court, where she lost, but provoked from Evatt J a legendary 12,000-word dissent - the subject of my 2021 book The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Dissent

5/ I went to interview Esther, still spry, still articulate, while researching the book five years ago. Yes, she had been among the crowd of onlookers that day; yes, she remembered the family’s grief, and the way it cascaded down the generations. We had a wonderful conversation in which she helpfully traversed the Chesters’ genealogy. Esther was the first Australian-born member of a family come to this country from the Pale of Settlement; it included, inevitably, many Holocaust victims; it spread, usefully, through this city. She knew the story up and down, front and back. But what I was touched to learn was that after I visited, Esther, probably the last surviving eyewitness of that dread day, began lighting a candle for long-dead Maxie at shabbat. ‘We haven’t forgotten you, Maxie,’ she would say. I’ll never forget Esther either. 

6/ The New York Times is looking for a new Australian correspondent who will hopefully write about Australia rather than himself, unlike the role's previous incumbent. 

7/ For an example of journalism about actual people, I strongly recommend Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, which I recently finished. It concerns the twelve children of the Galvin family - outwardly all-American, inwardly devoured by schizophrenia, to the extent of becoming a case study whose DNA led to important breakthroughs in our understanding of the disease. Kolker’s journalism is painstakingly immersive, his writing unfailingly acute. The elegance of his description of schizophrenia is unimprovable: ‘It is about walling yourself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.’ Deeply humane, free of sensationalism. Five stars.

8/ Ditto Kolker’s book Lost Girls, which I read a few years ago, and which is now becoming a Netflix series. Hopefully without the Baby Reindeer antlers…..

9/ I tripped over these the other day. They’re unsold copies of the last two publications of the Archives Liberation Front. There’s The Girl in Cabin 350, which tells the story of the eerie disappearance of a nineteen-year-old nurse, Gwenda McCallum, from the ocean liner Orcades in 1949, and its murky and traumatic consequences. There’s The One Indiscretion of His Life, which is a biography of the Australian wicketkeeper and Richmond footballer Barlow Carkeek, who led a richly unruly life in unruly times. They’re both $45 including postage and packing (in Australia anyway).

10/ Drop me a line at my website, gideonhaigh.com, for further details. Not that I'm fussy about my kitchen, but if I drape any more washing on them they'll become a permanent installation. 

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