Ashes Poetry

Will there be any play tomorrow? It’s rained all day as the pic on Platform 3b at Derby makes plain. Yet the sun starts to shine as soon as the Cardiff train pulls out. We go past Burton, home of Bass, brewers of IPA, the classic British beer, brewed to bottled for shipment to the empire – Indian Pale Ale. The neon sign reads Coors, which is shorthand for piss in a tin. Decent beer and cricket should go hand in hand, something corporate America fails to understand. ‘Beer is living proof that life is good and God loves us all,’ Benjamin Franklin, nobel-prize quality chemist and US President (he was quaffing with God by the time Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.) The Metro does a two-pager by Chloe Scott “The Finer Pints of Cricket” which runs out 4-3 to the poms. The beers are all bottled, so if you fancy a cricketing draught, Marston’s ‘Hoggie’s Nightwatchman’ is good but Slater’s ‘Howzat!’ is a belter. Back home in the Peak District, we’ve a welter of micro-breweries, and at The Lathkil Hotel of an evening watching swallows and swifts dip and dart flying by wire to catch the midges before dusk. I’ve met my Nemesis, faced Oblivion, not to mention half a Black Hole. Is this England’s cricketers’ fate, or Australia?

With Michael Vaughan’s retirement officially made official at Edgbaston on the final day of June, 5-0 Strinewash memories make it too easy to forget just what a triumph it was to win back the Ashes in 2005. To be world class you need at least three world class players in your team, shoe-ins for a World XI – think England 1966, and Banks, Moore, Charlton R. The Aussies had at least four – Ponting, Gilchrist, Warne, McGrath, with Hayden and Langer there or thereabouts. At the start of the series England had maybe one, Flintoff, or two, Harmison. To win, after an initial and comprehensive thrashing at Lords, is arguably the best England Test series performance ever?

There doesn’t seem the aura of anticipation, still less hype, as with the last two series. No stunts like the sixty foot Warnie in Trafalgar Square. No Warnie either, which seems odd in Ashes series. Ever since he bowled Fat Gatt with the cheese roll of the century in 92, he’s been an ever present. No Warne S K is like walking into a pub not just without beer, but no beer taps, bar, tables, glasses, mirrors, in fact an empty room. Greatness remains appreciated after its gone.

Though English batsman facing a Warneless Australia must think they’ve gone back to the pre-speed camera Fatso Gatso times where they could drive to their hearts’ content (the dip Warne put on the ball made driving hazardous, unless like Indian batsmen you could use your wrists to hold the shot if it wasn’t quite there to be driven.) In those days, the Aussies relied on Lillian Thompson and Thommo’s still doing his best. His considered opinion of Ponting’s captaincy is that it’s ‘crap.’ Odd that Punter’s captained them through thick and thin, while England have had four, three still in the team – Vaughan, Strauss, Flintoff, Vaughan, Pietersen and Strauss again. It says something about the management of English cricket that it takes so long to make the right choice of skipper – Close, Brearley, Illlingworth should have led England onto the field many more times than they did. Strauss is a quiet man, which might be taken for diffidence and lack of strength, neither of which is the case. I like him as a captain more than a batsman – too much bottom-hand, so he requires luck, which ran out in Australia, to make big scores. Put it this way: suppose England get stuffed at Cardiff, just as they did at Lords’ in 2005, who would you want as skipper. Pietersen? Flintoff? Strauss.

Down-under everyone’s predicting a close series. No Glenn McGrath 5-0 promises, the truth being that the best test side today is perhaps India. Of course with friends like Thommo, the Aussies don’t need enemies. Not that they seem to have any. It all seems very polite, business-like, gentlemanly almost, a job of work rather than a matter of passion. Perhaps it’ll warm up at Cardiff where seats are still for sale – recession is hitting, the suits aren’t buying into corporate hospitality either, and unlike 2005 with Channel 4 brilliant free-view coverage, as a sports junkie if you can afford £60 a ticket you’re already a Sky subscriber so why bother to go to the real thing?

Even the teams seem diminished. Will we see the epic battle between Flintoff and Ponting on the first day of the first test at Brisbane?

Brisbane Test End of  Day One Australia 346 for 3 A Flintoff 2 for 42 R T Ponting 137no

The Blacksmith and The Dancer

Down they come, twenty-four hammering blows
Run up against the anvil, crease to crease;
England’s finest, leader of tall strong men
Pounds a flat pitch to make something from nothing.

Thor’s great maul hurls down from the north
Red-hot ingots which bounce and spit
Off the anvil to thud pain and fury
Even into the cuffed gloves of his keeper
Three pitches distant from the beginning.

Those in the middle dodge hurtling force,
The smell of singed leather beneath noses
Sears their minds long after danger passes
Till an opener edges heat and is gone.

The dancer comes. Small, slick-quick tip-toe feet
A ballet pump or conductor’s baton
In his hands against Thor’s redoubled thunder
Strong enough to break his own braw bones
In full pursuit of forging victory.

The dancer banishes other tradesmen.
No interest but the blacksmith’s anvil,
Each hammerblow a pirouette, paso
Doble, cock a snook at the once red-hot ingot

Dulled with dancer’s taps as worn floors
For clubbing once clubbing has been done.
Sore feet and hours from Hobart unto Accrington
The dancer and the blacksmith each know the score;
One or the other of them will be broken, that’s for sure.

The dancer needs the smith to play
As the smith the dancer’s touch
To end the dancer’s day

Either of the 2005 editions would thrash the 2009 numbers  – unless fresh heroes arise.

Anderson, Hughes, Swan, Johnson, maybe Broad and North are my guesses. But it’s not likely to be 2005 gloves-off bare-knuckled prize fighting – remember Harmison leaving Ponting needing plastic surgery from a lifter on the first morning of the first test at Lords’? More likely Queensbury rules three minute rounds points victory to one side or another, attritional cricket, domination through endurance rather than risk. Could be wrong, and I hope I am.

Most pundits reckon it’ll be decided by how each side’s top order copes with the other’s opening attack. If the batters batter the bowlers, then they’ll win or at least draw; if the bowlers best the batters, they’ll win because bowlers win matches though/because it’s a batsman’s game. This being the case, and all things being equal over the series, it may well come down to how the middle and lower order bat – contributions from Flintoff, Broad, Swann, Hadin, Johnson, not forgetting Jimmy Anderson duckless test record (Botham had ten against the Aussies alone) could be worth more than their weight in gold, or Slater’s ‘Howzat’

Three draws, two results, all hope for a Trafalgar Square open-topped victory parade, all experience against.