Ashes Poetry

Not even rain can save Australia now. Wake up in Newport under a bright Simpsons’ sky, man of the match award adjudicator Waylon Smithers dithering between giving it to Monty Burns or Montgomery Burns. Maybe Pietersen will catch Smithers’ eye if he reprises Oval 2005.

Finished packing and lo, it rains. Reach the station and it stops again. Nothing can save Australia now from her destiny except the last eight English batsmen. Since Oval 2005 we’ve not a good record at batting out draws. One in Pakistan and that’s about it. The players we need are either in the press box or consorting with Connie Huk to greater exortations – Boycott, Atherton and Thorpe . The latter hit a match-winning century without a boundary in Pakistan and I saw him in 2004 Old Trafford hold England together with two big fifties against the Windies with a bust finger – KP ousted Thorpe next season, but I know who I’d like coming at four to bat and bat and bat. To win close test series you need to draw matches you’ve no chance of winning. England seem to have lost sight of this simple self-evident truth. Prior goes, five down, half an hour to lunch, enter Fred as Collingwood must remember Adelaide second knock left stranded on twenty-four not out. I feel a Parfitt moment coming on. Peter Parfitt was a good Middlesex batting all-rounder who never quite cemented his England place. When up against it, he’d be recalled at six or seven in the order. Listening to the radio England facing defeat “Parfitt comes to the crease.’ He’s worth a few, I’d think, we’ll be alright. Then I’d remember thinking the same at the same junction in the previous test. No disrespect to Peter, who was a very fine and honest cricketer, at the age of nine I’d experienced my first Parfitt moment: an English cricket supporter’s psychosis where unverified hope surpresses realistic expectations. Dickens is right. Great Expectations; The England Twelfth Man Wall of Support cobwebs into Miss Faversham’s bed-chamber. We must love being jilted, hooked on disappointment.

The lads down the row have itching powder in their Calvin Kleins – they keep disappearing for beer. ‘Why not one of you buy for you all?’ I ask. ‘Fags,’ they reply. Just before lunch another of them stands above me rat-arsed before one o’clock. They all have that perpetually-pissed look seasoned binge drinkers develop inside a season of binge drinking. One of them proudly bemoans he’s not eaten for forty-eight hours. A diet of booze and fags. Block 25 Row J’s the cancer and corony ward next door thirty years down the line. At least going at it at that rate they won’t become part of an aging population. If you want a steady career become an undertaker.

I say this because yesterday’s paper was The Irish Post, for the Irish not in Ireland, and I want to feel celtic. It’s fun to read six pages on hurley and handba’ without a word of cricket in sight. Eire the also-ran tiger economy of Europe faces one in six on the sausage (sausage roll= dole) while England denies sending the drum majors to recruit south of the border for the war in Afghanistan. ‘They come over anyway’ explains the MOD official. A few years back the British Army was doing anything but recruiting from Ireland.

The Celts are a pround people. Occasionally Welsh hwyl, a bit like Jewish chutzpah, goes over the top, gets out of hand, as with http://www.ashespoetry.net/2009/07/11/girls-write-poetry/, which Max Boyce more gently satorizes in “I was There.” As a lapsed atheist, Englishman with no English blood, an uncircumcised jew at birth, I feel with the Celts on the edge of Europe yet at times the centre of the Christian civilisation. Certainly that pride helps them to work well, be proud of their work. As well as a dearth of grafitti in Cardiff, I’ve not noticed the English avoid all eye-contact-with-the-customer-disease. ‘Well, I was saying, “Dwayne,” I was saying, only the other day to Dwayne, I was saying.’  The hand holds out the change as though you don’t exist. I walk away – see how long it takes to twig. If you take pride in what you do, you’re more likely to enjoy it. I get this feeling throughout Cardiff, not just the ground. Only Adelaide matches it in friendliness. Cardiff’s set a benchmark for the other four grounds to emulate or exceed. It’s been that good. The first test at Brisbane 2006 was its diametrical nadir, the Gabba’s security staff and coppers might as well have worn jack-boots, to match their state-trouper no-eye-contact Raybans. Not one steward or police-officer wore them in Cardiff. Such little things make an immense difference. A drunken chorus of Bread of Heaven lurches here and there in the grandstand, da-da-daa; da-da-da-da-daaa-da, they’ve lost the words, English, never mind Welsh. Here’s some lyrics I picked up queuing for the loos.

 I am pissed, and you are sober,
Guide me with thy gentle hand,
Brains has addled my brains completely
Till I can but hardly stand.
Safety Steward, Safety Steward,
My heart can’t bear watching Engerland – Engerland
My heart can’t bear to watch Engerland.

It’s lunch. Maybe Freddie and Colly can do it; Broad can bat, Swanny’s worth a few…. it’s that Parfitt moment again. Uncross fingers, grab a sarnie to cross them again. ….. We do it. God knows how, but we do it. You expect grit from Collie-Collie-Collingwood, Anderson maybe but Panesar? You little beauties.

Just before catching the train home I still can’t quite believe it. I want to go back to the ground, stare at the scoreboard to check it’s true, it wasn’t just a dream. All the Aussies in South Wales – old and new – don’t believe either, but they won’t want to go back to the ground to check. Instead while we rattle up the west side of the Severn, draw past Gloucester Cathedral in the setting sun, I try to capture the day as though you weren’t there:-