The game at The Gabba was bad enough, the team clearly underprepared, but they’d batted well from the second innings at Brisbane till the last morning at Adelaide where they threw all their hard work away. Perth will be a challenge to say the least.

What of the cities themselves? For players, supporters and I guess journalists there’s a tendency on tour just to see the games and then do a swift bit of sight-seeing. I’m the exception. I’ve not really gone sight-seeing. This is me. For years I was a field and landscape archaeologist so spent my time wandering around England and Europe digging up things. Consequently I tend to like to get a feel for a place and some sense of belonging. Doing that tourist thing doesn’t do it for me.

You may have noticed in the poems and talks that I tend to focus on people and place – how else does The Gabba cricket ground become the Strineship Enterprise, “to boldly be more Australian where no Australian has been before?” Consequently Bradelaide is an ironic concatenation of two very different cities. Indeed more different than most cities in one country, apart from the USA.

Superficially all cities in a country are more or less the same since the road-signs, chain-stores, ways of speaking tend to be shared. I feel that for many England cricket players, supporters and possibly journalists, especially first-timers, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney aren’t going to feel very much different because they’ll travel together, go to the same sort of bars, not to mention spend most of the time watching or playing cricket – twentyfive days out forty, including Christmas and New Year. I feel the same – here to watch the cricket, not discover Australia.

Certainly I feel underprepared to talk about Australia since I’ve researched the cricket, not the country. Curiously I’ve done this half-deliberately. Learnt enough to understand how the different states established themselves, how the country grew from settlements to colony, territories to nation.

How the landscape and ecology is some of the most ancient on the planet, imperceptibly altered from Aborigine times which start up to 70,000 years ago (Whatever you read, add 5,000 years for the earliest settlement. Archaeologists keep pushing the dates back – when I studied it in the 1970s, it was around 20,000 years ago, and seemed to go back ten millennia every time I opened a periodical in the university stacks – by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil, humankind will have originated in Australia before the Big Bang. You heard it here first, folks.) How the Europeanisation of Australia has devasted the landscape, ecology, never mind the indiginous cultures. How Australia isn’t one country but six states and the northern territory. How big it is. And how all the cities, apart from Canberra, (which was built like Washington as a capital to stop any of the other city-states from getting too uppity) are on the coast.

Australia in one para: ping-culture for your microwave. The UK is easier. An enormous bus-stop full of history and people sheltering from the rain. Fair enough?

This might sound perverse but having read Bill Bryson’s Down Under before coming here (about six years ago when I was crook) you start to realise it’s quite superficial too. The differences between people’s attitudes in different states and cities doesn’t come across. Bill picks up on the sameness, the giant inflatables and big sheep, prawn…. obvious targets…. newness of the country… ditto… aboriginal ancestry and future… no real answers….

Strange because Notes From A Small Country hits the money regarding contemporary English social class, mores and nuance. It may be something to do with Bill himself, who, by how he writes is rude about people who he thinks are rude to him. He lauds the Brits for being fair, taking it on the chin, but isn’t that fair himself in dishing it out on said chin. It’s witty but also cheeky because it doesn’t give them the chance to say what they think of him. (Not that much, I suspect.)

This tactic doesn’t work in Australia because no one is rude in the first place. Everyone I’ve met is interested in what you do and have to say. They make eye-contact, listen to you carefully and chose how to reply with thought and feeling. You never get the left-hand of change from the check-out clerk whose head is 180 degrees in the opposite direction talking to her colleague ‘I don’t know, he’s alright, isn’t he, but I don’t know, he’s alright, isn’t he, but I…’

She wouldn’t last two minutes here. The average time it takes to gain a waiter’s attention in Oz is measured in seconds, not hours in England. Walking into an empty high street shop from Southampton to Sunderland and the dozens of staff behind the counter immediately avoid eye-contact so you’re forced to ask ‘Sorry to trouble you, could you help me? I’m looking for a book on positive body language and communication’ In Brisbane and Adelaide at least, they look at you and each other to vie who’ll say ‘G’day. How can we help?’

Brisbane

God’s own country for restaurant and shop service, what else is Brisbane like? Very American. It reminds me of Pittsburgh, downtown squeezed into the bend of a river. Also American with skyscrapers vying with each other like those three dimension bar-charts grey-suits love to display with powerpoint – ‘and here we can see that the predicted sales-returns percentages across the global market-share demographically almost match our competitors.’ In other words we’re lagging behind.

Brisbane isn’t. It’s a boom town. Mining for the far east economies is the back-bone of the city. It and Perth are fastest growing in Australia. From being the newest of the cities – originally part of NSW, it didn’t start to grow till after WWI – it also has a different climate, sub-tropical all year round. Thus Queensland is big on fruit, especially bananas which is taking a hammering due to droughts. It’s also a genuinely outdoor city. Walk through the fabulous park in the evening into the city and the sound of cicidas is replaced by buzz of conversation outside all the pubs, bars, restaurants. People sit on benches and talk – don’t see that in Britain these days.

Brisbane is best viewed from its river. The architecture works well then. Close up, it’s downtown USAville, and the remains of the old Brisbane – verandas, colonial style details – is pretty well gone, vestigial. They tell me that it’s due to wood and termites, which is probably true, because you get two-legged insects in cities throughout the world. How come the old wooden houses have survived on the river edge, where you’ve damp as well as termites…..

If you like the anonymity and ease of American cities, Brisbane is for you. A 7-11 at every corner (which is confusing if you’re jet-lagged and assume like I did there is only one) and never more than two minutes from a MacDonalds, KFC or your favourite fast-sludge outlet of choice. There doesn’t seem to be a distinct chinatown or specific districts. I guess what sums it up for me is that the City Treasury, clearly a building based on financial probitity is now the biggest and most expensive casino in town.

All the same I liked Brisbane. It’s efficient and the people are friendly – except for the Gabba security staff where I and pretty well everyone else at the Test Match felt like suspects. The police and the cricket authorities had to run a press conference afterwards to state that they were really happy with how the security went. What else would they say? If it went that well you wouldn’t need to have a press conference, would you, because there wouldn’t be a story, would there? The last time I recall a major press conference around the security of a sporting event was 1988, after the Hillsborough disaster.

People also seem to be looking over their shoulders. Couldn’t figure out why till someone mentioned Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, State Premier 1968 to 1987. ‘What was he like?’ I asked someone in the safety of the Adelaide Oval. ‘Oh, George W Bush, but dimmer. A lot dimmer. A real red-neck.’ Apparently he ran a police state where hippies were beaten up for wearing too many beads, namely two. In the end the regime was exposed by Phil Dickie on an ABC tv programme, Four Corners – similar to BBC’s Panorama – which demonstrated inconvertably Bjelke-Petersen was as corrupt as he was vicious -never mind bungs, or brown envelopes of notes being exchanged in shady soccer transfers in UK motorway service stations, this was supermarket trolleysof dodgy money, which Petersen swore blind had nothing to do with him.

The junior cops at the end of that regime are Queensland’s top security officials today. People don’t jay-walk. They don’t look right, no car for about half-a-mile, then left, no car for about half-a-mile, and walk across. They wait for b-b-b-b-b-b-b buzzer and the green go sign. Struck me as nuts. Everyone takes lunch in Bradelaide – a good thing because the UK habit of grab a sandwich between e-mails leads to neither enjoying the sandwich nor e-mails. More seriously it leads to the notion that the busier you are the more productive you are, which is lamentable tosh – if a fly buzzes about twice as fast another fly, is it a better fly for all that buzzing?
Back to Brisbane, everyone heads out of their offices for their God-given Australian lunchhour – the chinese quick-foods are good -and spend most of their sixty minutes waiting for the b-b-b-b-b-b-b and the green go sign.

‘Why don’t you jay-walk?’ I ask.
‘You’ll get fined.’
Not seen any notices saying this.
‘How much is it?’ I continue, figuring out whether it’s worth it.
‘Dunno, mate.’
‘Do you know anyone who has been fined.’
‘Oh no, mate. You don’t want to get fined, do you?’
 
This might be the final vestiges of Bjelke-Petersen’s police state. Let’s hope so. All the difference between a $20 dollar fine, and $2000 medicare bill for helping the police with their enquiries. There was a mixture of awe, fear not to mention a tinge of envy in other pedestrians as I walked across empty streets without the green. The next time I go back to Brisbane I shall wear a t-shirt which reads:-
 

 Ned Kelly jay-walked

As well as the Strineship Gabba, although it has theatres, museums, cinemas, concert halls, Brisbane isn’t a work of art. There are isolated pieces of art in the city rather than a grand design. Before moving onto Adelaide, here’s a one which caught my eye.

It’s Analdo Pomordoro’s Forms of Myth about Agammenon. When I visited the dead remains of Mycenae, one of the first cities, and Agammenon’s home, I struck by how much had been lost, yet by being lost, still remained to be discovered…. 

MYCENAE

up a hill, and down again column a trail of ants
pincers focus cameras at the Lion’s Gate entranced

an entomology of the Gods

my antennae twitch at a tired american’s call

Just a pile of rock

Is that it? Is nothing else left? Is that all?

why did he come here? why do we?
a once anonymous hill now named Mycenae
unearths our philosophy of archaeology

that

night
backfills
with shadows
and cricket song.

trowels click,
the tourist hoards
guides and excavators
each leg it
insects
in time

and a
ghost

with golden helmet, and golden crest,
golden grieves, golden chest,
untouchéd gold,
drops

his ghostly sword and shield
a-gleam
in time’s dew
beside me

Agamennon still awaits a geezer
from the roofless houses below
to repair a chariot wheel
driven one too many over the eight
through the Lion’s Gate

a domestic with Clytaemnestra
something and nothing, words were said
as nuptials go a disaster

third-party, fire and theft
nor fully comp
would assuage the scars left
in the stone posts and stoney silence
of their marriage

her indoors will be the death of him

you should have had it widened
i whisper to myself
to let us pass a little more easily

dust settles between us

simply done. one word from you
and people jump
i tell him
petrified to the spot

(with ghosts seeing is believing)

one eye the moon, the other the sea
through the gate of his mask
Agamennon spits out time
to swear at the Gods and i

Just a pile of rock

 

 

Adelaide

In years to follow Brisbane might become just a pile of rock, but Adelaide will always be Adelaide.

It embodies Plato’s remark that the city is a work of art. These days this is taken as meaning art in the sense of the arts, but it’s better to stick with the ancient greek where art is counterposed with nature – it is the work of people to build from natural resources. For Plato if not the art review sections of broadsheets, the arts had to include artisans.

Adelaide was planned from the word go. It was largely the work of one man, Colonel Light, who decided the layout of the city and its location, up-river from its port. South Australia is distinct from New South Wales and Victoria, being a place for settlers to pay to come out, the original ten-pound poms (people of means) and buy land and property – even if the scheme was thought up by a debtor in Newgate jail pretending to be in Sydney.

Here is Light’s view of his endeavour:-

Extract from Colonel Light’s Journal 1839

“The reasons that led me to fix Adelaide where it is I do not expect to be generally understood or calmly judged at present by my enemies, however, by disputing their validity in every particular, have done me the good service of fixing the whole of the responsibility upon me. I am perfectly willing to bear it, and I leave it to posterity and not them, to decide whether I am entitled to praise or blame.”

In other words, sod off.

My sort of guy. Has vision, prepared to negotiate, listen, work towards it, and take responsibility. A trillion light years from Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, who denied the shopping trolley-fulls of bent dosh right under his and Four Corners cameras’ noses.

My sort of city. I think it is the best planned city in the world. The original design of 1839 still works today without ring-roads, underpasses, massive urban renewal programmes. Posterity, always a hard marker, gives ten out of ten to Colonel Light, as recognised by the people of Adelaide who put this journal entry on their statue to him.

It’s the sort of city that developers find difficult to develop. There are high-risers, bits that are lost which shouldn’t be lost and forces trying to go for commercial rather than civic gain. Overall, though, it’s a city which still works pretty much as Light – and Plato – would’ve intended, and they would have given the city elders pretty good marks too. It’s no accident that the Adelaide Oval is one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in the world – hell, the universe – only the Betelgeuse Gardens with its twin suns is said to compare.

I’d happy spend a week or so in Brisbane, and then start to get bored. Adelaide is different. You’ll find something fresh every day walking down its main streets, not least its market, which is everything a fresh produce market should be. Despite Queensland being a fruit centre for Australia, fresh produce is hard to find in Brisbane. Come to Adelaide, and it’s as though all the fruit, veg, meat, nuts, cheese has rolled around the coast to end up piled high in its market – everything fresh, nothing unnecessarily wrapped. The acme of provision.

In the same way its arts, writers and ideas festivals are fresh, open and sincere. For a city so cultured there is surprisingly little pretence – or is this me with jaded European eyes?

Adelaide has its problems. Elderly population – kids go to the big and growing cities, which is all of them, not just in Australia but in the far east. In some sense the tiger-beijing economy has passed Adelaide by. A sense of not being a destination, not being part of the modern Australia, losing out to the bigness and pull of Melbourne, and especially Sydney.

For me the day started so well, a seat high up and straight behind the bowler’s arm. This is how I like to watch cricket, down the wicket, tracking the slightest deviation of line, length, angle and seam. Truth be told I’m not much of a shouter; when the opposition chant at Coventry ‘You’re not singing anymore,’ it’s true of me at least, because I wasn’t singing in the first place. As a founder member of the Serious Cricket Watchers’ Association the only sound you’ll ever get from me is polite applause, sssshhhh of vacuum flask or tupperwear sandwich box opening or head nodding asleep in the late afternoon.

England’s day starts well too. The Barmy Army, the legendary legion of English fans, so far split up by the ticketing arrangements, are in one cohort, a phalanx of support for their beleagured team. Four days of dispersal, unable to give clarion voice to their desire, is now over. They are one and make the most of it.

“We are the Army, the Barmy Army,
We are mental, and we are mad”

A new song, to the tune of You Are My Sunshine, and it fills every corner of the Gabba. You would think this was England, and England about to win. Had they been able to sit as one throughout the game it would have provided a tremendous psychological advantage. You don’t outdo the home support, do you?

For half-an-hour, never mind some corner of some foreign field being forever England, all Australia seems to be. Instead of being thrown out for standing up for their country, as may well have happened on the previous four days, they fill the replay screen at the ground and doubtless tvs throughout the continent, not to mention back home in England. It’s terrific. The Aussies love it. Even Brett Lee their fastest fast bowler, fielding at the boundary’s edge in front of them, shakes his hips to the rhythm.

It brings to mind Siegfried Sasssoon’s famous poem, of men marching to war and death. Everyone Sang – set by the late lamented jazz composer Neil Ardley a couple of years ago to be sung by the Bakewell Choral Society.

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but EveryoneWas a bird; and
the song was wordless; the singing will never be done

The silence in the Gabba as the Barmy Army drew breath was sepulchral.

On the pitch it was pretty well over before the singing begun. Fourth ball of the day Pietersen hit Lee down Martyn’s throat at midwicket. The Fat Lady might have started to think about singing but she was drowned out by The Barmy Army.

Where do we go from here? The obvious answer is Adelaide, and I leave Brisbane behind hardly feeling I know the place.

Friendly but sharp, I’d call it. For me the contest started last Tuesday at Brisbane International Airport. Feet poised to tread on Australian soil, the customs officer asked

‘Come for the cricket? Packed plenty of tissues?’
‘Why no,’ I replied. ‘Sorry, but didn’t have you lot down as cry-babies.’

I’m lucky. As a poet I can take a dispassionate view, be detached from the hurt of losing that other English supporters inevitably feel beneath the shadow of Mount Gabba, their team falling 277 short of its summit. Of course the Australians lost last year, and maybe the impact of that had been forgotten in the lauding of the English team since then.

The Final Ball

five days hard cricket
pretty well going to plan
every run and every wicket
charts our course set on victory

no thought of commiseration
just a job well done
the emptiness of loss
is all too hard to bear
winning hard enough
but losing’s just begun

Pointing has just made it shorter, by batting on. Conspiracy theorists would have it that the decision not to invite the follow-on wasn’t made by the captain, nor indeed the manager, John ‘Chinese Lessons of War’ Buchanan, but by Cricket Australia itself. “Punter, thrash the bastards, but don’t do it in three days, it’ll cost us millions.”

Maybe not. For some strange reason, possibly due to some obscure interpretation of an obscure Chinese lesson of war, or possibly fear of Indians, Red or Asian, the Punter bats on, running the risk that in burying the Poms so far underground, that they might be able to bat their way through the centre of the earth to safety back to England. Talking of which this could Ponting’s worst decision since inserting England at Edgbaston to lose by two runs four innings later.

Last night the film The Hill came to mind. Sidney Lumet’s great black and white 1965 movie about a British Army punishment camp. Soldiers have to dig up earth from one side of the hill run up and down it carrying what they’ve dug up, to deposit it on the other side. Then reverse the process. The hill never gets bigger or smaller, just moves about a bit as the soldiers wear themselves out. This is what England had done yesterday. They started about six hundred behind and finished about six hundred behind but with one innings less. Mount Gabba intimidates from all angles, camera or otherwise.

Not when Ricky bats on. You sense a different feel in the England team. Hoggard starts with a maiden. They stand more proud. They feel insulted. Being asked to make six hundred odd is bad enough, to see the Australians’ bat on goes against their pride. ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?’ they must be thinking. Yet at the same time, it makes their task half-an-hour easier. And there is rain.

Andy and I met up on the first day. ‘You’re a Coventry City fan,’ I said, clocking the small Coventry elephant on his top. ‘So am I.’ We don’t talk too much soccer, just as City don’t play that much either. I mention the chap who came to sit by me at the hotel computers before breakfast while I was printing out some drafts (I do plan and check this stuff)
‘Oh hell,’ he says.
‘What’s wrong.’
‘QPR lost.’
‘Sorry to hear it. I support Coventry.’

Who beat QPR. Andy and I agree that as omens go this takes some beating. If only we had Iron Man George Curtis going in ahead of the tail. Andy figures it could pour down and his wife knows a rain doctor in Jakata. ‘Text her to tell him to hurry it up. No use on Tuesday, when the game’s finished.’ I text the Klingon battle fleet to holds fire. We’re not putting all our eggs in one basket.

Twenty minutes later Langer has a century and Ponting declares.

Mount Gabba now officially stands at 654 runs or 690 minutes above sea-level If Ponting hadn’t batted on, it’d have been half-an-hour more daunting, possibly the difference between rescue and dying of frost-bite.

England bat well. Alistair Cook looks especially assured. People say he’s not a stylist, but you can see his elbow is always over the ball at point of contact which is a pleasure to watch. Warne gets him bat and pad. He probably does Collingwood with his Chatter. Warne of a thousand deliveries; leg–break, googly, top-spinner, zipper, zooter, flipper and now the Chatter, where he talks himself into a wicket. This time suggesting to Collingwood that he’s just four to his century, and not yet gone down the track to Shane. Collingwood does and is stumped by a country mile. If you’re looking for literary precedents for Warne go to Baccus and the Artful Dodger.

Till then England almost feel like they could do it. They’ve quietened the crowd, far less aggro than yesterday. Their task now becomes similar to crowd volley ball. The aim is to get into the top tier of a stand, where not only is gravity against you, but also that each tier is more raked than the one below. England need to reach the top tier, they are nudging second, but each time a wicket falls, or the blow up ball confiscated by the police, they start again at the bottom. They have ten to begin with and Collingwood’s dismissal leaves Six ‘Balls’ or wickets left.

Pietersen holds back. No trying to smash the ball into the top tiers. My jig

Warnie’s balls turn square, KP hits ’em in the air.
A six or out, there is no doubt.
You get a funny feeling one side’ll be reeling
Ev’ry time Warnie’s balls turn square.

fails to work. Warnie’s balls don’t turn square, and KP doesn’t hit them in the air. Hard to when they’re speared defensively down leg-side. ‘Hey, Warnie, bowl him something he can hit – you’re not Ashley Giles,’ someone should shout out. So I do.

Flintoff disobeys our prayers. Holes out going for the big one against Shane

and smite Warne mightily all your slog-swept sixes
as Warnie smites those who trespass against him.
But heed us when close to temptation
and shield the Ashes from evil:

He hangs his head as soon as it goes up. He should have read the message on the scoreboard from Griffiths University. ‘Get smarter’

With the last two recognised batsmen at the crease, (no disrespect, Ashley) we need rain.

The Lap Of The Gods

Andy’s on the blower to his missus in Jakata
To accelerate the thunder due tomorrow afternoon.
She knows a rain doctor who dries out golf courses
To pilot this bad weather which can’t come too soon.

The Barmy Army take the Gabba with gamps and umbrellas
To make the most of Ricky Ponting batting way past his bedtime.
Queensland and England desperately need precipitation,
State and nation rest all on the imminent arrival of their Cloud Nine.

Yesterday I was on tv twice. Already mentioned the ITN Lords Prayer for Flintoff and England, and by God, how they need it. Just beforehand a steward kindly asked me to move a small bottle of water from the edge of the aisle. It had been caught on security camera, and they’d asked him to ask me to move it. You can’t get away with anything in Australia.

Maybe that’s why they love their Warnie. The mythological larrakin lad following in the line from Ned Kelly onwards. Those who have broken the rules and got away with it. Even the jolly swagman of Waltzing Matilda shot three state troopers. Shane’s different. Not just the sheer range of proscribed behaviours – drugs, infidility, and the ultimate male omerta, baldness. Shane’s still alive. Ned Kelly was a good-for-nothing, ne’er do well, robbing, thieving murdering swine till they shot him. So he didn’t get away with it. Australia recreated him as a means to rebel safely against itself – an essential sub-text to Peter Carey’s novel about Kelly.

Only this time Shane isn’t going to get away with it. ‘He likes this ground,’ an Aussie tells me as Strauss and Clarke come proudly out to bat for the first time. ‘Never taken less than six wickets in a Gabba test.’

Don’t bet on it. Warnie may not be called upon. McGrath 6, Clark 3 and Lee 1, did the necessaries as England undid themselves to reach 157 all out. With Giles ending it all with a distress flare of a skier they’d barely clambered quarter the way up Mount Gabba. Only Ian Bell stood firm, resolute and skilled against the numbing accuracy of Old Glenda.

Glen McGrath
Can’t quite reach ninety miles an hour
No worries. Where he puts it is
Their top order’s nemesis

Ian Bell
What the hell
Has long lost the habit
Of being a baby-faced rabbit

If Aussies can’t get away with it, foreigners certainly can’t. Instead of inviting – such coyly false politeness in the term – “Excuse me, Frederick, old chap, would you mind awfully”- to go back to Mount Gabba 445 runs still to climb, the Punter chooses to bat on. Mount Gabba is about to grow even higher before our eyes.

You can see why.

Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust. This is something else. It grinds the dust into dust till there is nothing left, not even dust. Nothing for England to cling on to. You can’t get away with it in Australia; you can’t break the rules. And rule one is the Ashes are Australia’s. The Green Baggies set about squeezing Freddie’s men back into the 4¼inch high urn. Each additional run doesn’t just screw down the nails already banged in on the coffin lid, but bury it so far underground, deep beneath the mantel of the earth crust. Teams can come back from the dead, but only after banging on the coffin lid and tunnelling their way back through miles of rock to reach the surface.

It could just back-fire. Not through rain – something England and Queensland both pray for, since the State is in one of the worst droughts ever, now up to Level Four water restrictions, the fountains in Brisbane long since dried up and the fruit crops decimated. No, just when the three English lion’s claws have been so worn they couldn’t cling onto anything, hope is in the main. I can reveal exclusively, dear readers, the secret treaty signed between perfidious Albion and the Klingon Nation, that in deep in the stars above where Captain Kirk boldly went to split infinitives where no infinitives had been split before, the Klingon Battlefleet is warp-factor hyperdriving its way to Mount Gabba, the Strineship Enterprise a sacrificial lamb to imperial domination.

Don’t think even that will save this game, if not the Ashes. The cricket becomes, to put it in one word, boring. The lack of contest as Australia set about earth-moving Mount Gabba back to its former height and beyond does not enthrall. There is one moment of competitive interest. England give away four overthrows. Ponting looks at the ball hurtled by English hand to the boundary in a way their bats singularly failed to do earlier, and claps his glove against his bat in harsh public irony. It’s rare a bat sledges a whole nation so eloquently and effectively.

Even the crowd get restless. The Aussies love their inflatables. Perhaps even more than stuffing the Poms, since it’s something everyone can join in on, even the police. We’ve already had the Gatorade reject sperm donator drinks trolley from Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Too Afraid To Ask, today being Saturday, we see the Giant Milo Tin in support of kids’ Kwik Cricket (Milo is a popular milk shake, not Milo Mindbender from Catch-22) and two twenty foot high cricket balls race each other on the outfield during the tea interval, one called Beefy and the other Boony, in support of Victoria Breweries – no one in Australia drinks tea in the tea interval of a cricket match. (Someone is said to have tried it in a more genteel part of Melbourne last century, but it didn’t catch on.)

In response the crowd bounce giant beach balls between themselves – this is also the nation which bought you beach volley ball as an Olympic Sport. The rules of cricket volley ball are simple, keep the ball in the air but if it goes out of the seating area the police get to keep it. Near us a group go too far. Instead of a ball, they have a ball with an inflatable woman. For some reason this is also against the rules, even though Cricket Australia publicised this series with a thirty foot high Giant Warnie they pumped up and took to England just in case anyone in Australia didn’t happen to know the Ashes were back. (Imagine the FA commissioning a Giant Rooney to take to the Reichstag in Berlin ahead of the World Cup with shops selling out of St George flags and you’ve got the picture.) The police move in. They arrest the inflatable woman who by all accounts refused to give her name, address or any other details and kept her integrity intact under intense scrutiny till one prick too many. She may well return tomorrow disguised as a blow-up policeman.

What do you think? Should Inflatable Sheilas be allowed to watch cricket?
have your say on www.blogbw.net

O yes, the cricket. The Aussies missed one chance. To shout ‘Oi, Flintoff, give the inflatable Sheila a bowl. She’d do better than the lot you’ve got on the park.’ It’s worse than the task of Sisyphus, carrying stones up Mount Gabba only to see them hurled back down again, yet through their efforts to reduce the task the hill gets higher, the climb becomes steeper. At the start of their first innings Mount Gabba was 602 high. It now stands at 629, and England have one innings less to reach safety.

Read all about it in the Ascent of Mount Gabba at the end of the game.

In the meantime in homage to the sixty foot Christmas Tree sweltering in the centre of Brisbane (artificial but curiously not yet inflatable)

On The Third Day of Play (to The Twelve Days of Christmas)

On the third day of play the Gabba gave to me
A blow up babe in custody.

On the third day of play the Gabba gave to me
Two big balls
And a blow up babe in custody.

And so on, till

Twelve crowd ejections
Eleven top selections
Tending to win
Nine tired bowlers
Eight ways in
Seven poms out
Six hundred lead
Five for McGrath
Four tall pylons
Three English Ducks
Two big balls
And a blow up babe in custody

Entry into the ground was much easier this time. So easy I did it twice in search of Section 49 where I was due to meet Ian Payne and Paul Herrick to do something for ITV viewers. The guy who took my ticket pointed me in the wrong direction which meant going out of the ground again to get it right. We decided to film at lunch, and missed nothing significant as Australia made England toil

Up Against It Australia 4-407 Hussey bowled Flintoff

Each wicket a point on an English chart
Of hopes on a voyage round Australia.
No reefs, storms, rip-tides, sand-bars and currents,
Just a long lonely barren ocean of sweat
In the sun before the next wicket’s fall.

Cool, below decks, thieves plot their destiny

Come lunch England are without a prayer. Ian and Paul gathered a multitude to film while I lead them in worship….

The Lords’ Prayer

Our Freddie, the heart of our eleven,
willowed be thy name.
Thy Century come, thy will be done,
from Perth unto the Gabba.
Bowl each day your daily jaffas
and smite Warne mightily all your slog-swept sixes
as Warnie smites those who trespass against him.
But heed us when close to temptation
and shield the Ashes from evil:
for thine is the century, the fivefor and the glory
for ever and ever.
Amen

It sort of works. In the next session four wickets go down including the avaricious mephistopheles Ponting, 196, lbw Hoggard, when it looked to all intents and purposes that we’d need the frigate, Diamantina shored up on the Brisbane river, to fire out the blighter, but England eventually face six hundred, each four umpire Bowden signals like a farmer attempting to scythe the final daisy which is not quite within reach. The Grim Reaper.

I can imagine Christopher Martin-Jenkins in the Test Match Special Radio commentary box saying ‘England have a real mountain to climb.’

The Ascent of Mount Gabba

Six hundred and two is far more than a stiff climb.
Inside the poms’ dressing room it’s squidgy bum time;
Advance party leave base-camp, equipment checked
Against endless fury they’ll face beyond tent flaps;
Those inside hope against hope they will be some time.
28
Just out of sight, twenty eight steps taken well in hand,
One falls, hooked off a precipice overhung with risk.
28-1
Rescue party sent, immediate slip to slip
Second to second, rescuers can but observe.
28-2
Elements ancient magnificent accuracy
Of dispatch. Furies howl and yell, scenting more blood
42
Not much further on, base camp abandoned, useless
They hold onto each other, forced alone, a fall.
42-3
In the coldness of heat they find purchase enough
To sleep the night amid dreams of their dead.

To be continued on the second day of the Ascent if not beyond.

Chastened we wend our way home back across the Brisbane River, the frigate Diamantina at the Queensland Maritime Museum surrounded by smugly grinning Australians, including the funnels and ventilators of the HMAS Diamantina, in anticipation of unexpected English visitors on the last two days of the test match, having failed to get half-way up Mount Gabba.

But I strike gold on my way home. Never mind Flintoff blowing Jaffas, none of the cafes and convenience stores sell fruit. Woolworths does, by the bucket load. I stock up for my lunches. And if England were to reach the summit of Mount Gabba, these fine Australian products will taste especially sweet.

No such luck. Waiting to go through the turnstiles, a friendly Aussie who knows more than me about Brisbane poetry says ‘Heard of Ross Clark?’ http://www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au/2003/content/standard_c1.asp?name=Bio_Clark_Ross only to spring from Mark Waugh’s poetic qualities to the prosaic and immutable fact they won’t let me into the ground.

News to me, and thousands of others, since they only changed the rules just ahead of the game. Very carefully back in Blighty I had planned and packed a day bag, to the point of negotiating with Loz, our eleven year old daughter, to take her school bag in exchange for a new one ‘Mine’s too small for all the stuff we have to carry to Lady Manners,’ she says.

Clearly too big for The Gabba, capacity 45,000, and conforming to Cricket Australia The Ashes Down Under Official Travel Guide of Cricket Australia “Coolers, eskies and other belongings must be stored under your seat.” I join another queue to find I have to pay $5 (about two quid) for the privilege of disobeying rules I didn’t know about, or obeying rules I did know about. I wasn’t about to argue; sports fans the world over know you can’t win with sports authorities and there was a queue as long as Brisbane behind me. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a plastic bag I can take my belongings in with.’
‘No, sorry.’

I’m missing something here which Bill Bryson would have nailed into the bleachers. The reason people carry bags is to carry things inside them. If you take away their bags, that still leaves the things they were carrying – like water, sun-block, not to mention a copy of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Man Booker short list from Australia. In other words, the stuff to keep humanity fit and well watching a game. You’d probably probably think ‘Won’t they need a plastic bag to keep those things in, especially as we’re charging them $5 to change the rules without their knowing.’

No, sorry. I look wistfully at the 7-11 across the road with trillions of plastic bags with the queue of Brisbane between them and me. Only connect, as E M Forster said (and Ricky Ponting did.)

Two fans in England shirts decide to get shirty with a whiteshirt bloke with raybans, blue-tooth in one ear, walkie talkie to the other, and The Great Australia Desert in between. ‘It’s in the papers,’ he snarls. True. One line in a copy of The Courier Mail ‘Serving Queensland since 1846’ left in the ground “Spectators also have been warned to arrive at the ground early to clear security and not to take large handbags, backpacks and coolers” Liam Plunkett’s drink-drive incident receives four column inches below another ten about Queensland public servants attending the game, doubtless at the expense of their public.

You can’t win. Sports fans the whole world over are victims, ultimately of themselves. At the end of the day, I retrieved Loz’s old bag and asked how I might complain. ‘Cricket Australia.’ I shall, and advise them to get in touch with The Bakewell Show Committee who are one of the best organisations in the world at running large crowd events over several days.

The Gabba is the future. No pavilion, no ends, an oval with a stretched steel roof, it looks like the Starship Enterprise has landed. ‘It is a cricket ground, Jim, but not as we know it.’ Actually it’s not a cricket ground. It’s a sports arena where they play cricket, football – league and Aussie rules, but not soccer – and what’s more in the middle of the night, when no one’s watching it takes off on stupendous missions throughout the universe…

Stardate 346 for 3. Skipper’s Log Of The StrineShip Enterprise. Our mission? To boldly be more Australian than no Australian’s ever been before.

The real action of the day was before play started. Australia won the toss and Punter Ponting decided to bat, both as a team and for himself.

This is a shirt-front pitch. Not that the first ball of the series hits it. A wide from Harmison which 2nd slip takes. Rueful grins all round.

One ball hits the pads in the first hour, pretty well none for the rest of the day. Still Langer edges just wide so many times, if he were a cat he’d be dead by now.

The swifts swoop down just before each drinks interval, where a gigantic yellow and green plastic monstrosity wheels itself onto the pitch. It’s from America, the Gatorade Carrier. It looks like a cross between a Sino-Soviet Cold War May Day Parade unknown missile device and a prop from Woody Allen’s Every Thing You Want To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask – the scene where Woody plays a reluctant sperm. You don’t get this at Lords, where the members might well have forgotten what sperm were and were for, even if a horde of them (sperm not members) rushed the Long Room and willowed everyone over the heads with Sloghard Thugbusters.

Ponting’s bat is more a magic wand that takes the game from England to Australia.

Just before lunch Ashley Giles comes on for an over.

From Our Parliamentary Correspondent

After a season’s recess
The International House resumed sitting.
Across the dispatch box
Mr A F Giles, member for Warwickshire and England, faced
Captain R T Ponting, Tasmania and Australia,
who immediately lept from his place at the dispatch box
and smote the member for Warwickshire and England’s
very first question high into the opposition’s back benches.
The member for Warwickshire and England
returned to his mark to resume questioning.

Mid session between lunch and tea the game changes. Australia know they shouldn’t lose, and England are looking more at a draw. Ian Bell comes on after tea to bowl in tandem with Giles. Here’s one for the Frindaliser Drive which powers the Strineship Enterprise, and all you cricket stattos. When was the last time two Warwickshire players bowled in tandem for England?

Ponting isn’t about statistics, although his century equals Steve Waugh’s record and tomorrow he might go past 226, the highest score at the Gabba, posted by Don Bradman.

Viewing the game side on just behind square you appreciate the quickness and class of Ponting. Feet move early, bat plays late. Fantastic. Ponting doesn’t get the adulation I think he deserves for style. Australian teams are meant to be efficient more than stylish. Ponting is both. Flintoff does his all to try and get his man.

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

The Blacksmith and The Dancer

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

Red-hot ignots bounce and spit from the anvil
Of Thor from the north to thud pain and fury
Even into the gloves of his own 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 the pursuit of forging victories.

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 ignot

Now dulled with dancers’ taps as the floor
For clubbing when clubbing has been done,
Small feet and hours from Hobart unto Accrington,
The dancer and the blacksmith each know the score.

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

Andy Warhol stated everyone’s famous for fifteen minutes, but this is taking has-beens-who-never-were into an eternity of tv purgatory – for all of us. The ex-husband of Lisa Minelli is scarcely omega list.

Kay and Laurel swear they hardly ever watch it, yet they discuss all the nonentities that do nonsensical things. I share the house with psychics. In my worst nightmares I find Don and Dec encouraging me on a Bushtucker Trial. (What aborigines make of these is anyone’s guess) I bite off everyone’s heads, finishing the ordeal by chewing out Don and Dec in the search for brains. Look on the positive side; at least it would be the end of my and all their tv careers and I’m not a Celebrity, Get me into Here.

It’s probably harder now to get into The Gabba, where the first test starts tomorrow. Sell-out months ago, days after they went on sale.

Pundits reckon England are in for a caning. Maybe not the 5-0 prediction the environmentally aware Glen McGrath’s recycling from last year. A forecast almost as boring as its actuality, but infinity better than “I’m Really Desperate, I’ll Eat My Own Toe-Nail Clippings” in front of Don and Dec, my family and other animals. That’s a point; if Kay and Loz are psychic, why do they need to watch it?

People ask me my view about how the series will go – the real series, the big one, in Brisbane, Queensland not “I’m A Mobile Phone Number In Search Of An Identity”. I play cute, offering no shot to a wide one outside off-stump. “Two-one,” I reply, “Not sure which side.” In the last couple of weeks as tension heightens, I’m told to bring back the Ashes, which may demonstrate the value of poetry, but seems a pretty tall order, especially as I’m a short-arse who hasn’t played cricket seriously for nearly forty years.

Worse, they’re starting to say “Don’t come back without them.” And when I protest, I get “We know who to blame if we lose.” In one breath they tell me it’s their taxes that’s paying for my odyssey, the next make sure we win. Poet’s can’t – either make sure, or win.

England did last summer, which is why I’m in Brisbane writing this. Just remember that, dear Australian readers. If you’d not lost the Ashes last summer, you wouldn’t be blessed with a pom poet in your midst. Every cloud has a silver, or green baggie lining.

Had Old McGrath’s Almanac proved right, 5-0 the Gabba would probably be close to empty, and I don’t think there’d be an iota of interest in an English poet going to Australia to record another pom drubbing.

Cricket Walkabout is a book about the first Australian cricket tour to England in 1867-68 by John Mulvaney and Rex Harcourt. The team were aborigines and sailed instead of flew. The Gabba is an aboriginal name, the back-end of Woolloongabba, the surburb of the ground. “There are two theories about its meaning, some believing it means ‘whirling waters’ while others say it represents ‘fight talk place’” according to Cricket Australia’s The Ashes Down Under – official travel guide of Cricket Australia. Could be a poem in there somewhere – Woolloongabba, not the official travel guide bit – even if only the beer spilled between aboriginal lexicographical disputees.

At the moment the Barmy Army are playing the Fanatics as a pipe-opener for tomorrow’s contest. At the same time players and umpires, ground-staff, hospitality, security, media technicians and reporters (800 press passes according to The Australian – I’m sitting in the stands in case you’re wondering) are all getting ready; ready for the big one. Barmy Army vs Fanatics must be closer to the first tour of 1866-67. Not too many to watch, keen and fairly contested, just one or two people from the media. The strange and lovely thing is that they’re each recognisably the same game. Lose that and the spirit of cricket’s lost too.

We’ll be keen to see what happens:-

First Ball 10.00am local time, The Gabba, Brisbane

The toss, decision to bat or bowl, team selection
and media games, noises off the field.

Set and survey, bat makes mark, bowler back to his

play

admidst the hush, arm comes over, bat into line,
each grooved, almost automatic. Whatever its outcome

wicket, boundary boards, full face or edge, play
and miss, a middled middling dot in the scorebook

the glance between bat and ball as the field resumes
its mark for five more balls and many more
over five five day matches will tell all

they’ll know before sledge or smile
who has won the very first ball

Woolloongabba

Woolloongabba they come from far
they come from far to play to play
Woolloongabba Woolloongabba

Waters whirling winds in our hearts
Wind still whirling whirling waters
Whirling fight talk place noisome boys
Warriors outdo warriors

place to talk fight die and share
drowning placentas whirling waters
Woolloongabba Woolloongabba