Down under, the new season is just getting going. Over the next few months, Sam Perry of The Grade Cricketer will be reporting from Australia’s fabled fields of misery.
It’s October in Australia. The goalposts have come down, the winter codes have ceased and there’s no valid reason to wear skins under training shorts anymore. Thousands of men unzip their cricket kits to reunite with their dried sweat-laden gear, and take to sun-drenched suburban outposts to participate in the macho performance art they call Australian club cricket. They do so to chase cricketing dreams comfortably beyond them, or, perhaps more accurately, to avoid family and other healthy social rituals on offer, like barbeques and time at the beach.
But before the first Kookaburra is bowled in anger (that term is used advisedly), players must wade through the murky underworld of pre-season, where any strategic misstep is fatal to achieving one’s selection dreams. Because of this, the vast majority commence their pre-season a number of months before they actually need to, coerced by club officials with nebulous titles to exhibit their commitment in exchange for said dreams.
Later, many will discover that a season in England actually means consuming multiple pints in the pleasant dappled light of an English summer’s night between Tuesday and Friday, failing on Saturday against decent opposition, before hitting ‘sixty-odd’ in a village game on Sunday against a church congregation of truly gentle, elderly men.
Of course, news of that 60-odd will reach home at record speed, just like all the feats managed on Sunday in the villages of England, with outfields only slightly larger than a backyard in Melbourne’s western suburbs.
And so with the English season complete, the player returns to Australia, arriving at training mere days before round one. He is selected in a grade or two above his station via a WhatsApp exchange with the chairman of selectors – a nondescript white man who’s had a successful career in textiles, or something no one at the club understands. This man has received five messages throughout the summer, each regaling him with news of another fifty or fivefa*, context-free.
This is because, conveniently, context doesn’t really matter in Australian cricket: only numbers do. Our hero swaggers back into training, his arrival a novelty for the existing pre-season group, who are already bored of the teammates they’ve endured hill sprints with for the best part of three months. He tells people he hit “a-thousand-runs-at-40-at-a-pound-a-run”, even though it was 800 runs in 32 games at 25. It is precisely three standard deviations above anything he’s achieved at home, but nobody questions it. He also mentions that the standard “actually isn’t that bad”, a point he makes to counter Australian cricketing exceptionalism, which still somehow exists even though England has bested them at international level more often than not for well over a decade.
This article first featured in issue 13 of Wisden Cricket Monthly. Subscribe here
