Ten Things #13
Gideon Haigh on Mother Cricket, a grouse ghost sign and academic malaise.
1/ The T20 World Cup is still on, Bangladesh taking the last place in the Super 8s, leaving West Indies to play Afghanistan in today’s dead rubber. We know not what will eventuate, but are additionally conscious of who is watching over us.'
2/ Who or what is 'Mother Cricket'? All we know about her is that she’s not to be trifled with, as were reminded by Mitchell Starc. ‘You don’t stuff around with Mother Cricket and try to worry about other results,’ averred Starc. ‘We’re here to win games. England are now on the other side of the draw, so it really doesn’t make that much difference for the next three games. That was blown right out of proportion.’ He was repudiating the notion, mischievously raised by Josh Hazelwood, that any Australian team would try to engineer England’s exit from the Cup by manipulating results or scoring rates. The maternal superintendent has first been attributed to Justin Langer, but while he certainly used it freely, I see older South African and English usages, while the most thorough exposition was provided last year by Stephen Fry. In his Spirit of Cricket address, Fry cited ‘the pros’ as his sources in explaining that she ‘punishes cockiness, punishes hubris, rewards pluckiness, imagination, and wit’, and ‘always wins through.’ She would probably have warned him about starring in Treasure.
3/ At first glance, ‘Mother Cricket’ seems like an updating of the ‘cricket gods’, in whose lap sporting fate was once decided, reported variously ‘fickle’, ‘occasionally most generous but often very cruel’. But those mystical deities, at least on my preliminary survey, seem to operated mainly by the apportioning of luck, and favourable and unfavourable conditions when not in a purely observational capacity. Their munificence could be providential.
4/ Mother Cricket seems more jealous and astringent. We don’t talk about her as an abundant provider; she seems more a nag and a scold. Nathan Lyon is said to have relied on her but then been held to her account. I don’t think India would have thanked Mother Cricket had it won the last World Cup; it was defeat that made her influence manifest.
5/ Why has cricket replaced the notion of a deity with that of a mum? Is it a comment on the decline of organised religion and the consecration of the amoral familism? Or is it the sense that cricket, mired in squabbling and petulance, needs not divine intervention but parental discipline? Athletes often exist in states of arrested emotional development; mothers and fathers are probably realer figures for them than distant demiurges. Anyway, if we are to credit JL as chief populariser of the phrase, chalk up a win for the sociologist Dan Adler’s concept of ‘matriduxy’, or subtle maternal dominance, in the Australian household. His own mum was a ripper.
6/ Too many podcasts not enough? Sharda Ugra, my favourite Indian cricket writer, joined me here on PCCI where we were generously hosted by the Adityas. Thanks to Miraj Vora for setting this up.
7/ I just booked to see this bloke next month, which reminds me of my most recent favourite ghost sign, on Queen Street’s gorgeous art deco Australian Catholic Assurance Building. This ‘monument to progress’ was built in thirty-six weeks in 1936, and now ‘exudes timeless allure’. But the nameplate on the side was only revealed again by the demolition of the drab building next door, which involved a wedding cake slice along the edge of the block. Construction is a lot slower these days, so you’ll have this vestige of corporates past to gaze on for some time yet.
8/ Vignettes is a new series of books from University of WA ‘sharing the knowledges that are emerging in the contemporary university and that consider the complexities of modern life’, and how these are being ‘thought through by intellectual practitioners in today’s academy’ - in other (far clearer) words, academics aiming for a lay audience. The first volume, by series editor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, is called Netflicks: Conceptual television in the streaming age, and is reviewed by another academic, Macquarie University historian Clare Monagle, in the latest Australian Book Review. It is unconsciously instructive of Australia’s intellectual torpor.
9/ Monagle praises the idea of ‘short, lucid books’ in ‘accessible prose’ that ‘offer complex and coherent readings of the world we live in now’ as though this is somehow revelatory rather than contemplating why it shouldn’t be the objective all the time. Then she worries that ‘as an academic myself’, she might not be qualified to judge whether the book succeeds in ‘offering an accessible rendition of scholarly ideas.’ The tacit admission that academics now operate at a level so recondite they can no longer tell good prose from bad anyway is beyond dismaying; likewise the solution Monagle offers, which is to ‘read out paragraphs of the book to non-academic friends and family’ to see if they could ‘understand the prose in the short selections they heard (selected randomly).’ Hurrah, they do, although I’m not sure what she would have done had they not.
10/ Anyway, the book sounds like your everyday funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts throwing pseudo-light on non-problems, stressing the epochal shift of streaming services dumping entire series at once rather than portioning them out nightly or weekly - sorry, I should say being ‘governed by a new set of formal rules and refracting the temporalities of the digital age.’ Well, so far, so what - this was an interesting development maybe ten years ago when House of Cards did it. Look, perhaps Hughes-d’Aeth is a more profound ‘intellectual practitioner’ than this, but finding out would involve enrolling in his bachelor of watching Netflix degree, and life is short, y'know. All I feel is the futility of offering readers what Monagle calls ‘an explanation for their own unease as a television viewer in the streaming age’. Because they’re not uneasy. They just want to find something good to watch, and the last person to advise them on this would be an academic.
It was bemusing to read so much stuff about whether Australia would or would not "engineer" the game against Scotland to keep England out of the WC. Is/was Australia so scared of England progressing that every cricket writer in the country felt compelled to at least discuss the possibility of it happening, including our two esteemed scribes at et al? The idea of the old enemy being kicked out of the comp - by nefarious means if necessary - was compelling, but I reckon Starc was right. It was all a media beat-up.
Ah, Mother Cricket and Father Time. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you.’