Ten Things #11
Gideon Haigh on the T20 World Cup, The Southpaw Project and a lost cricket ground.
1/ The T20 World Cup is on.
2/ It’s one of those tournaments where you can probably tune in at the mid-point, or however long it takes you to work out it’s on Amazon Prime, because forty games have been budgeted to reduce the field from twenty teams to eight. Baggy finals to maximise broadcast values have long been a besetting weakness of ICC schedules. Why not two groups of ten, with the top two in each becoming semi-finalists? You’d get more cutthroat matches anyway. Trouble is, I guess, that everything would get a little chancier and India might then miss out, and we couldn’t have that, could we?
3/ Still, not even Super Eights are foolproof: when the Caribbean hosted the 2007 World Cup, neither India nor Pakistan featured in the last month, with the result that it became necessary to devise a tournament with Indian participation guaranteed throughout. Thus the Indian Premier League, where Indian always wins.
4/ Anyway, so far so good. It rained American sixes in Dallas, and West Indies pushed past PNG on a moribund pitch in Georgetown. Australia start their campaign on Wednesday night against Oman, who have a bit a retro feel, what with two forty-one-year-olds in their squad, and seventy-one-year-old Duleep Mendis as coach. But more eyes will be on Sri Lanka v South Africa tomorrow morning and India v Pakistan on Sunday ‘in New York’.
5/ While people keep talking about cricket being ‘in New York’, the venue is actually in Nassau County, an hour and a half’s drive from the Empire State Building. It’s like saying a game is at the MCG when it’s actually at Archies Creek. Still, it’s pleasing that the modular ground should have descended like a flying saucer on a location named for the only American president to watch a day’s Test cricket, where 104 runs were scored for five wickets. What used to take a day in cricket now takes about forty-five minutes.
6/ Last pre-season, the Yarras’ Thirds skipper Jordie turned up with a brainstorm. Having always had some trouble playing off the legs, he had concluded that it was because he was batting the wrong way round. This season, he announced, he would be batting left-handed. It lasted approximately one net session, but maybe you have entertained at least the fantasy of what it would be like to bat or bowl the other way; maybe, too, you’ve looked at mirror images, to see what David Gower would have looked like right-handed or Steve Smith left.
7/ It’s just over ten years since Jono Dean’s younger brother Blake, a right-handed leg-spinning all-rounder from Queenbeyean, was chosen for Sydney Thunder, only for his playing career to last one hapless night against the Sixers: he went for 29 off two overs, including four wides and two no balls. That was it for Blake - and, if you could not get a game for the Thunder in those days, you really were bottom of the pile. Out of his dark night of the soul, however, came the idea of a 180-degree turn, which piqued the interest of filmmaker Lachlan Ross. Good things take time, and I notice it’s five years since Lachlan interviewed me about Blake for The Southpaw Project, but I’m delighted to report that it will be screened at the Seattle Film Festival later this month, and the trailer gives a hint of both Blake’s pluck and ambition. Also of Lachlan’s perseverance.
8/ Edmund Herring Oval was one of Melbourne’s most picturesque: a postage stamp of a ground on the Domain, with a bluestone retaining wall, rambling clubrooms and an excellent turf square. I made some runs here, broke my finger, played against and for the Hearters - Shoey hit me for an enormous six. Anyway, as I found while navigating the Domain last week, the never-ending Big Build have reduced it to a pile of rocks - part of the legacy of those Dan Andrews hard hat photo opps for which my daughter and her descendants will be paying for decades to come. [see above]
9/ Speaking of C, she is enjoying the hot mess of Google’s latest AI foray. Who can the four taller European politicians be? [see above]
10/ I referred last week to the propensity of the New York Times’ Australian correspondent to turn his despatches into studies not of the country but of his own reactions to it and on cue he has come good with a genre classic. It’s not about the Sydney Opera House - oh no, that would be too simple. It’s about why he loves the Sydney Opera House, because, of course, what Australians crave desperately is American affirmation. Also a contender in the lazy journalism stakes is this Guardian T20 World Cup explainer which starts with the cricket is about tea and sandwiches cliche, and proceeds via Test cricket as unlamented colonialist relic to India v Pakistan as Yankees v Red Sox ‘with added geopolitical tensions’. Must have taken the author five minutes, and he was wasting his time even then.
I played numerous games of house footy at Edmund Herring, but it's claim to fame (in my memory, at least) is that in 1976 I snuck over for a post prandial dart behind the clubhouse with Henry Bray while there was a concert on at The Bowl, and in the dark tripped over a couple having a root. Typical of Dan to butcher posterity.
So very sad to read about the demise of the beautiful Edmund Herring Oval on the Domain.
I live in QLD now but have so many memories playing there for MHSOB Thirds in the VJCA in the late 70’s/early 80s under Al Grant - a funny guy. I was in my mid-late teens. Here are some of my faves: ………
1. One innings I came in with 2 balls to go before tea. First ball from a fast medium bowler in the slot was driven straight back for six smashing a window in the pavilion. 2nd ball I square cut for a four.
Oppo guys saying to me walking off - geez - you must make a lot of runs here. Me - not really. I was out - clean bowled first ball I faced after tea.
2. Hitting a a 6 into a tram on it’s way to South Yarra and Toorak.
3. Taking 3 of the best outfield catches in succession at mid off that anyone who witnessed the feat had ever seen. The description of each would take too long.
4. Rocking up late to play with a friend after we’d both been up all night on LSD and us both looking “worse for wear” shall we say. The skip Al takes one look at us - I’ve one the toss and we are batting - and you idiots are opening. So began a lot of blocking and leaving an not much scoring apart from edges ….. for a long time.
5. Playing in a games when Paul McCartney and Wings were doing a soundcheck at the Myer Music Bowl for a concert that night. They played “Whiter Shade of Pale’ and the game just stopped for a minute …..
There are many more but these spring to mind. Great times and a beautiful oval now sadly gone it seems.