The men in the picture

As the new season begins, Adelaide cricketer, journalist and author Andrew Faulkner reflects on the cycle of life for a cricket club and its players

Cricket Et Al is excited to bring you this fantastic piece by our former teammate from The Australian’s cricket team. Faulkner has played the game all his life and was a cherished colleague when the newspaper’s cricket section was firing on all cylinders. This, as Gideon observes, is like getting the band back together. Faulkner apologises for not filing earlier, but his days post-season are taken up tending to the family’s cherry orchard in the Adelaide hills.

By Andrew Faulkner

Let this ending mark the beginning.

As a new season dawns, this picture – one of the last of the past season -- represents what we’re all striving for this summer. It’s why we play.

For this moment: in whites, bearing medals and hanging with your mates in the hours after a premiership.

It’s cricket’s Never-Never Land, the magical hours after a flag. A time that trumps even the cricketer’s grail of the washout. (When the club player is granted an extra several hours of life. Like 100 free spins on the pokies.)

We are all equal before cricket and never more so than on the eve of the season; there’s no such thing as defending a premiership – we all start from the same mark.

(Yes, yes, I know the season’s underway in parts of the land. But cricket’s always being played somewhere: Darwin Cricket Club, for instance, is still celebrating last week’s triumph over Southern Districts in a gripping grand final at Marrara Cricket Ground.)

And so let this picture remind us of the prize as we retrieve kitbags from car boots, rummage through laundry cupboards for ancient bottles of semi-congealed linseed oil, and sneak an early minute from work to ogle the celestial rows of bats at Cricket Warehouse.

The picture was taken last March, after a grand final. It was taken in my club, but it might be any club. The players are A Grade players, but they might be D Graders. They might even be Australian players celebrating a Test win.