Ashes Poetry

Everyone has a routine going to a cricket match. It usually involves double and treble-checking you’ve already treble-checked – your wallet, keys, mobile, ticket, most of all ticket on your person. This morning I went through this rigmarole so many times you’d have thought I was auditioning for a remake of Rain Man. Then it struck me why. As a pom with no English blood watching a test in Wales I’ve a feeling this could be Adelaide 2006, or at least another pom-tonking.

Tonk-a-pom was a dubiously effective ad campaign for a dubious quality Aussie beer, whose name I’ve long since forgotten (crap ad campaign like the beer) Matthew Hayden, well-known Christian, gourment chef and mighty opener of both sledging and batting, told you how to tonk a pom. You just did it. I’m listening to the great and good from Bumble to Boris Johnson via ex-Blue Peter Bimbette Connie Huk exorting that we need to beat the Aussies or in the words of poet Christopher Logue on why you should vote Labour (real Labour in the sixties) since otherwise Engerland’s no longer great and our balls will drop off, even Connie’s. But they don’t tell you how. Tonk a Pom does:-

1. Find a pom.

2. Tonk it.

Who’s heard Germaine Greer or Dame Edna Everage – scions of Australian culture – imploring the green baggies to do their best/worst. Tonk a pom. You don’t need to be told twice.

England have fought back. Three wickets before lunch for around a hundred runs rates B+?+. Half an hour afterwards judging by the serried ranks of empty seats, most of the members by the sports academy have either come in unbelievably effective fancy dress costume as The Invisible Man, or are still scoffing and quaffing a bottomless lunch, which seems moderately obscene, rude and vulgar – would you stay in the RSC bar during the second half of Hamlet? By tea-time, with Clarke and North cruising towards centuries, they’ve just about returned to their seats in readiness to leave them again. Why attend a cricket match and not watch the action? You might as well sit in a strip joint with your back to the stage.

The rain comes ahead of schedule after tea. If that isn’t bad enough (and for the poms it defers tonking time) we’re treated to more cod-opera. Italia 90 killed Nessum Dorma for me. I like music in its place and entirity. Snippets is cricket with only one batsman, kitchens without sinks, foreplay without sex. It’s good to have time to think and talk, we can entertain ourselves, thank you very much. “What is this life if full of care…” No, full of cod-opera snippets. Nessum Dorma, ‘Nobody shall sleep’ Not even at a cricket match because some tenor is giving it some over the p.a. Is nothing sacred?

Because Cliff Richard sang at Wimbledon (Him and Sue Barker, dear oh dear, a marriage made in heaven, if only) we get the Walls Cornetto song. Why not that great sixities R Dean Taylor classic “Windscreen wipers splishing, splashing, driving through the pouring rain, just gotta see Jane.” Something apposite. The Cod Opera Anihilation Society fights back. Here is the Walls Cornetto song, Cardiff Test style:-

Four-five-eight for four at tea
Tired old England sips misery
Their fielders pray for the end of the day
Or better still, rain stops play!

That old standard, everyone buggers off reckoning there’s no further play today, when it lightens, brightens, and play under lights starts quarter an hour after the scheduled close. Never mind they also bugger off after about four overs, with Clarke caught behind, a skimpy hooker at Broad (think about it, but not for too long) and the light seems to get brighter after play’s abandoned for the day, the four stanchions in full glow flick a switch somewhere within the muse….

It’s been a funny old day. The game’s progressed but no further forward since runs scored vs wickets lost pretty well balance each other out. Australia still ahead on points, England still in there fighting, not yet on the ropes. Quite often the way with test cricket. For me the best part of the day was talking to a oldish bloke about poetry. ‘I aspire,’ he said. ‘We all aspire,’ I replied, ‘if you don’t you don’t get any better, at best stay the same which is really just worse.’ I showed him how the tweets worked too before the netbook became flooded. ”This has been the best part of the day,’ he remarked. And so it was for me. Close second were the stewards on Gates 4/5. They want me to write them a poem, and I shall, but those lights. If you hear Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night towards its end, you’re on the right track.
 

Four Lights

four lights, suns beneath clouds between the skies
four lights, south, north, east, west, encompass the world
four lights, countless candles power twenty-four figures
poles apart into a single arena strewn past shores
to land where twenty-two yards is the vital tack

four lights arc to the heavens where forty years ago
the moon landed at our feet    watch closely ball onto bat
bat onto ball across fields beyond    theirs is the future
for light is the promise and prism
as time’s shadows lengthen the season
until all there is light, then the dark

four lights, burning, burning, till all else is empty,
four lights meridian life and memory
no rush to leave this good night under its halo
of four tall lights before time is tolled to us all.

four lights, four lights, four lights, four lights

Oh yes, if they’d played cricket instead of golf on the moon they might have got their ball back.

The day’s play, tweet by tweet:-

1. In the Gods under replay screen espying Mitchell Johnson warm up to throw-down spinners in the nets England expects him in & out prior lunch
2. 1-259 Dear old England kick off with a couple of maidens and a Broad, so Fred will have a new ball to play with – if not a new world order.
3. 1-281 NEW BALL! hooked & driven 4 four in first over by R T Ponting. Flintoff starts with a super quick wide to then leave Katich agrope
4. 1-298 Katich edges Flintoff for 4, Chewbacca Flintoff blatts him on the shoulder. Feel the force, Simon, feel the force. “Aaargh!” Chewbacca
5. 2-299 Anderson and Ponting play French cricket by comparison before little Jimmy tucks up Katich lbw. Beddy-byes, Simon, rest upon your ton
6. Buxton Drinks Break – the coldest spa in Blighty. Last resort on Roman Britain R&R, never quite made it since, a spa town too far
7. 28 – 5 Australia after fifteen overs. At Worcester where the pomettes stuff the Sheilas. Strauss & Co plc please note how it’s done
8. 3-325 Mr Cricket watching immovable object (Ponting) face irrestible force (Flintoff) edges little Jimmy Anderson to Prior Loz, you’re right
9. 4 -331 Monty bowls Ponting backing away on the cut. 150. Poor shot before lunch if an inside edge. Smart bowling change Mr Strauss
10. Super Centaur Fred puts new boy Clarkie through wringer. Can’t have too many overs left in nosebag
11. 4-404 Buxton drinks break. “Wow, it’s cold! Stoke it up, Grommit!” Australia pile it on Strauss thinks about Wallace bowling some Wensleydale
12. 4 – 412 Clarke’s 50 Dances down pitch Swan sees him drops it short Clarke delays shot still four Cat and mouse Who’s Itchy? Who’s Scratchy?
13. Barmy Army sing Bread of Heaven as mighty mighty England seek crumbs of solace before Collingwood runs in with no slip, just hope.
14. 4 – 458 a mexican wave stops as it starts. England hope one will flood the pitch. North reaches fifty. Antipodean tide of progress irreversible Tea.
15. I don’t care what the weather man says you won’t find me complainin I don’t mind if it’s rainin- Jeepers creepers umbrellas on the bleachers
16. 5-474 Play til 7.30 & Corrie Somerset Supporters miss their bus or Clarke gloving Broad on the hook under four lights to compass the world
17. 5-479 murk and drek curtail event horizon umpires Rauf and Doctrove leave last, wedding ushers wrangle just impediment to halt the ceremony.