Monday, August 24, 2009

The Ashes débâcle

Right now I’m furious with the Australian cricket team – and, if that term does not already include everyone associated with making the decisions that led to this miserable result, anyone else involved in anything that led to this abysmal piece-of-crap performance in England.

But I’m also annoyed with pretty much the entire sports journalism industry.

Why? Because of the idiotic way in which, after Australia’s win in the fourth test, it was announced the result of the fifth was a foregone conclusion with the prediction that the Aussies would continue the form they showed in the fourth and demolish the Poms without breaking a sweat.

It bugged me enough at the time, but – now that it turned out they were all so horribly, horribly wrong – I’m even more shitty.

At no point in the series, other than the couple of sessions in the fourth test, was Australia truly dominant. We struggled to bowl England out almost every time they batted, and our batsmen – on paper some of the best players in the world – never really took to the English bowlers as often as players of their talent should have.

In the first test we managed to bat well but couldn’t bowl out the English tail – Anderson and Monty fucking Panesar, for crying out loud – to win.

The second test had us once again struggling to finish them off, and the runs the tailenders made – and the time they spent at the crease, keeping us from it – had an impact. We then did a complete about-face from the impressive efforts of the first test and the innings collapsed to the point where we were facing a follow-on. The English batsmen went on a run-a-thon before we got back in and were let down by our top- and middle- order.

A drawn third test due to the weather – not a big shock; it’s England, after all.

The fourth test we won by a good margin: an innings and 80 runs. But, considering the position we had them in – 5/82 at the end of the second day; had we got them out then we’d have won by an innings and 261 runs – that they managed to hang on as long as they did (included flogging our bowlers out of the park and achieving the second-fastest century partnership in test history) was perhaps an indicator that we’d gotten lucky, rather than because of superior skill.

But somehow this piece of good fortune got interpreted as Australia’s obvious superiority and a precursor to the inevitable demise of England in the fifth and final test.

Which, of course, wasn’t how it turned out. We bowled okay, but still couldn’t manage to bring them down before they’d put together a decent total. And while we started out well, the sudden collapse to be all out for 160 wasn’t just a little less than was expected of a team who’d hadn’t out a shellacking the match before. If we’d managed to bowl them out for a low second inning score – as, once again, you’d expect we’d have been able to do if we really were the team they’d praised so highly only a week or so before – we might have had a chance. But once again their batsmen were almost entirely unthreatened by us, and put together what would have been a nigh-on impossible score to chase even if all our batsmen had been performing at their absolute best.

Which they weren’t; therefore, we fell way short. Game over. England take back the Ashes 2-1. A nation sits in shock, mostly because - prior to the toss - they’d read at least one of the approximately 17,000 articles about how Australia were going to romp it in because they’d showed their true form in the fourth test.

Wrong. So fucking wrong. Which matches had they been watching?

At no point except for day 2 and 3 of the first test, and the first session of the fourth test, did I feel we were playing at anything near well enough to win the series. And much of the good we did achieve was because we were playing against an understrength England team.

The problem was the bowling; we only truly dominated England with the ball in one innings of one test: the first of the fourth, when we took the ten for 102. Every other time they were at the crease we struggled to get them all out – the next lowest was 263, also in the fourth – and that was after we had them, as I noted before, 5/82. Every other completed innings was over 300.

Batting was better, at least in comparison – but, apart from the first test, never when it really counted. The first innings of the second test, third and fifth tests were all poor – 215, 263 and 160 respectively. With those poor starts we weren’t able to give our inexperienced and underperforming bowlers anything to try and defend.

I think it’s fair to say that, even if we’d won the last test and retained the poxy little trophy, we wouldn’t have had much right to say we’d done so in a decisive fashion.

But we didn’t win; we lost, and lost by a significant margin. And it pains me to say that, while England didn’t really deserve to win, they were – to put it bluntly - better at not losing than we were.

What to do now? Well, we really have to work on putting together a better, more consistent bowling lineup. Brett Lee, if he stays fit, is the key; if Mitchell Johnson and Stuart Clark can get back the consistency that served them so well in previous series then we should be able to put pressure on a batting side.

I don’t know what to do about a spinner. Perhaps between now and the firs test against the West Indies later this year one of the several options will present himself as the obvious choice for the turning pitches.

Actually, if what’s being reported in the media is anything to go by, the selecting may well be done by several people not currently holding the position of selector. While Cricket Australia is not quite as ready to let heads roll as, say, an English Premier League soccer club, they are now under a lot of pressure to answer the question of exactly whose fault it was our better-than-average team was bested by a bunch of very ordinary Englishmen.

And I’m not very happy about that, and am wondering if a new selection panel would do a better job. I guess we just wait and see.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Super-short fiction #5

Ted opened the fridge. The light came on, but instead of the usual clear, bright, illuminating light, there was a sickly green luminescence, much like the glowing of some kind of deep cave fungus. It looked as if something ghastly had crawled in there, died a particularly unpleasant death, and then exploded.

---

His parents were doing it again. It was the same thing, every time. He wondered why they kept persisting in this way; on occasions he suppose that they were quietly hoping that he would crumble and give them what they wanted.

‘But you’ve had dozens of girlfriends. Surely one of them was good enough?’

His mother was pleading with him, and it was only years of experience that kept him from arguing with her. It would be futile to point out that the reason he’d had as many girlfriends as that was that they’d gotten sick of him and dumped him like the proverbial hot potato. Unless he found a way to bring a set of asbestos gloves (metaphorical of course) to the relationship, he’d be in the bin again. The problem was he had no idea what exactly it was that kept on making his once-infatuated harem of women turn cold.

He didn’t have any trouble meeting women, or even picking them up; on the contrary, they seemed to throw themselves at him. He’d gotten names, phone numbers, invitations, and more from places as innocent as the post office, library, and once even on one of his infrequent visits to church (it was Easter and his mother had insisted).

They just didn’t hang around. He’d racked his brain, mentally retracing his steps, and he still could not work it out. One time he’d even set up a number of voice-activated microphones and recording devices so he could replay as many of his conversations as he could, and spent hours listening to them and trying to spot when it was that he screwed up. It didn’t help. Either he didn’t have the ability to recognise a faux pas when he heard it, or it just wasn’t in the actual words.

He listened to his words to see if he said anything noticeably stupid or off-putting, and also to theirs, to try and pick up any obvious pre-emptive coldness or negativity on their part. Nothing. They were cheerful, positive and affectionate up to the moment they ended it. Most of them were so upset about the whole affair that they became so distraught he wound up consoling them and telling them that it was alright, he’d get over it, and not to worry about him. It was a strange role reversal indeed.

One time, for a few fleeting moments, he thought about setting up a camera to see if there was anything physical he could spot, but decided against it.

His mother wouldn’t understand any of this, of course. She’d shake her head, roll her eyes and mutter to herself. His father would bark in his gruff voice, ‘you know your mother’s right, son. Can’t be a playboy all your life.’

He just couldn't win.

---

Gordon had enjoyed a brief period in the Sixties as a hippy; he'd gone all the way — long hair, beads, tie-dye — even a dilapidated Volkswagen Kombi with flowers and peace signs painted on it. It got dull after a while (the life, not the Kombi) even with all the drugs and the music and free love. Not that he’d participated in too much free love, since the girls he met hadn’t found him very interesting.

The drugs? Well, he’d smoked a lot of pot, but stayed away from any of the harder stuff after he’d had a bad acid trip. He shuddered when he thought about it, nearly forty years later. He’d hallucinated for several days. It got very frightening when the neighbours’ chickens started telling him about their plot to take over the world. They were going after Colonel Sanders first — crimes against chickenkind. He’d told them he was a vegetarian; they’d clucked their approval and stalked off to hunt for subversive caterpillars hiding in the tomato patch.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

The Birthday Party

Birthdays aren’t something I hold particularly significant, at least not compared to some other people. For many it’s a good excuse to have a party – or at least a celebration of some kind, even if it’s a small one. But I’m not really into doing that each year.

I am, at best, a reluctant host – as the vast majority of my friends who’ve never seen the inside (and many not even the outside) of the home I’ve lived in for just over two years can testify – because the idea of ‘entertaining’ scares the crap out of me. Admittedly, some of that is due to the fact it’s a small two-bedroom unit which would struggle to fit as many as ten in the dining/lounge area - and that’s if I moved stuff around; there’s also the fact that it’s a bit shabby; and, finally, I just find that having people in my place makes me really uncomfortable.

Don’t ask me to explain why; I’ve got no idea. Just add it to the (long) list of things listed under the heading ‘things Jamie is weird about’.

Thinking about it, I don’t believe that, even when I lived in a share house of reasonable size (and I’ve lived in several) that would suit a party – at two houses in particular, Norwood and Payneham, we had plenty – I ever had people over for birthday drinks. The last time I can distinctly remember a party at my own place was at about age 15.

18

Anyway, there have been a few significant birthday hootenannies over the years. First was my 18th; I was still living in Bowen, so I went on a pub crawl with a few friends to celebrate. But it would be a few years before I did anything of significance to mark the passing of the year.

21

My 21st, typically a big event these days, was anything but for me. After I’d finished school we’d moved from Bowen to the Sunshine Coast where I didn’t know anyone and, because I was going to uni in Townsville, didn’t have any way of meeting anyone. As a result, my 21st was a How To Host A Murder dinner with my family. Yeah, it was okay – but not exactly spectacular.

22

My friends decided that, because I didn’t get a proper 21st, we’d have to do something special for my 22nd. I ended up staying in Townsville for the holidays, rather than going back to Maroochydore, and we had a huge bash at the house five of them shared.

It was a very big night indeed, at least for me. I got very drunk – we played ‘goon lotto’, aka ‘goon of fortune’ where the bladder from a wine cask is taped to a Hills Hoist clothesline and everyone stands in a circle and spins the cask. Whoever it stops in front of has to drink. I got unusually lucky and ‘won’ a disproportionate number of times.

What I didn’t realise, in my drunken naïvety, was that it was rigged – and by ‘rigged’ I mean someone out of my line of sight was grabbing it and making it stop in front of me. But hey, I was getting drunk so it’s not like I minded. Back to the action.

I also got very stoned, since the first of the gifts I got was marijuana. Unfortunately, as I learned later, getting drunk and stoned at the same time isn’t necessarily a good idea. But more on that later.

So, quite stoned. This is when it seemed like a good idea to bring out my big present – what I thought was a cake. And no, I wasn’t so stoned I’d lost the ability to tell cake from not-cake; it was big, covered in icing and adorned with 22 (I assume) candles.

‘Blow out the candles!’ was the cry. I complied, and blew them out. They lit back up again – since they were the relighting kind. I blew them out again, laughing. They lit back up again. I laughed some more – remember, I was quite stoned at this point – and blew them out again. I didn’t want to stop. I was having far too much fun with the candles to actually bother cutting the ‘cake’. It took someone to yell something helpful at me – ‘just cut the fucking cake!’ – before I did.

Let this be a lesson to you all – as funny as relighting candles are, they aren’t suitable for stoned people.

Anyway, I cut into the ‘cake’, which – despite being covered in icing and topped with candles – turned out to be a box. A very special kind of box from Ireland, St. James Gate in Dublin, to be precise; home of the Guinness brewery. Aware of my (at the time) fondness for the blackest of the black, had bought me a carton of draught stubbies.

I was very happy. They did make me chug one, which – if you’ve ever drunk Guinness you’ll know – not an easy feat. But I got it down and held it down. Well, for a few minutes at least. I did have a fairly spectacular power hurl not long afterwards. But I didn’t let that stop me.

I don’t remember much else, though there is one incident that stuck in my head; my friend and future flatmate Kristy waving a cigarette lighter around chanting ‘We want Chilly Willy’ a la Barney Gumble in that episode of The Simpsons where Moe is trying to convince the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play at his bar. There’s even a photo of this. I’m lying on the ground and my face is purple – literally, purple – from laughing so much.

Drugs are bad, kids. Trust me. Sometime later I passed out - in a beanbag. I think everyone else continued on and had a good night. I know I did.

30

It would be another eight years – and a move interstate - before I’d attempt another big birthday celebration.

But, six years later, I can’t remember what exactly prompted me to do it. I suspect it might have had something to do with the significance of the age I was turning – 30 seems to be getting more popular as a ‘landmark’ age to reach – and perhaps some pressure from people around me as well.

Anyway, I chose the Brecknock hotel in the city – possibly because they have Guinness on tap; I was still drinking it back then – and told everyone to show up at 8pm.

Now, one of the more interesting things that differentiate South Australians (at least the ones I’ve met) from Queenslanders (at least the ones I was raised around) is that the latter will generally arrive at a function close to the time it’s supposed to begin. South Australians, on the other hand, don’t tend to be as punctual. So, when no-one had shown up at 8.45, I was getting quite annoyed – I was there by my bloody self. But eventually people showed up, so it was okay.

Quite a lot of people, actually – certainly more than I’d expected. But there wasn’t anything especially notable about the night, other than the fact I had an excellent time – oh, and I got some cool stuff, including a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and (continuing along the same them) an awesome Harry Potter pencil case.

36

Last year it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a birthday party in a while – for starters, the last few years my birthday had always coincided with a theatre production - so I was just getting my head around the idea when my friends Dan and Amy decided they’d get engaged and announced they’d be having the engagement party on the closest weekend to my birthday. And that was enough for me to decide not to do anything.

This year I had no such excuse. It was time for a party.

And party we did, at the Maylands hotel – the nearest pub to my place - at which I’d booked a room a couple of months back. I went to dinner with some people from work first and then we moved into the function room I’d hired to await everyone else – I’d learned my lesson from my thirtieth and made sure I wasn’t waiting on my own – and had a few glasses of the complimentary champagne.

People showed up, which was good. A few people (who shall remain nameless) didn’t for a range of reasons, which was a bit disappointing, but that’s the way it goes, I guess.

Over the course of the evening I got very drunk. So drunk that there are sizable segments of the night I don’t remember at all, and others that I only recall only vaguely. It may well be better for all involved if those gaps remain; I have little doubt they contain things that I’m better off not knowing.

Because, while I don’t change much from my sober self when I’ve only had a bit to drink, when I’ve had a lot to drink I get a little, um, silly – for want of a better word. Silly in a sentimental, blabbering kind of way. Which can come as a bit of shock for people who’ve never seen me in that state before – since it’s a far cry from what I’m like the rest of the time.

But, from all accounts, I had a good time. And so did everyone else. The party wasn’t the end of the night for me, though; I went to another pub for a while and then into town for some bad drunk dancing. I was still in a good mood when I got home so I sent a (surprisingly coherent) Facebook message before dragging myself to bed; the timestamp indicates that was at 3.30 Sunday morning.

Next morning I wasn’t so great, which was a problem ‘cause I had the first rehearsal, the read-through, of a show (Arsenic and Old Lace) later that afternoon. But a couple of mugs of strong tea, some Vegemite on toast got me on the road to recovery, and a trip to Hungry Jack’s for some medicinally greasy fast food took me a step further toward normality.

I had a good time, and - despite my asking people not to bother - some cool gifts. We didn’t trash the place and, as far as I can tell, I didn’t manage to insult or offend anyone. I call that a success.

40?

I imagine that, since 40 is one of those ‘big’ numbers I’ll be doing something big for that, too. No idea what, exactly – but at least I’ve got a few years to plan.