Free Cricket XXXX Cricket by Frances Edmonds Page A

situ, and locals fear that there could be even heavier losses if the Americans do not make it through to the finals. Nevertheless, there is no underestimating the groundswell of nationalism, even chauvinism, generated by winning at sport, be it never so exotic a sport as twelve-metre racing. Stickers, posters, advertisements, jingles, lapel badges, T-shirts, you name it, everything here in Perth proclaims, ‘G’day from WA’. Eileen, the wife of entrepreneur Alan Bond (who has probably done as much as any one man to put Western Australia on the map), is playing a protagonist’s role in this state promotion. It is tragic, however, that so few Eastern Australians, because of the vast distances involved, and the exorbitant price of internal flights compared to cheap, bucket shop international fares, ever even visit the place. It is such a pity! After Sydney, Perth must surely rate as the most beautiful of Australia’s state capitals. The Second Test in Perth stands out like a beacon in a rather gloomy early itinerary. If nothing else it means another trip to Freo, which is presently so full of sailors. And I am a nice girl.
    It has become irritatingly necessary to go to WACA and watch some cricket. Being a Roman Catholic (although ever so slightly lapsed, due to theological difficulties in swallowing the encyclical
De Humanae Vitae
hook, line and
ex cathedra
sinker), I always feel obliged to do some penance after having some fun. Penance! Torquemada in the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition would never have inflicted this on the worst religious deviant. The cricket was worse than grotesquely bad, which can often prove acceptably amusing. It was just inadequately shambolic, which at best is intensely embarrassing. The Australian press corps was feeling mightily chuffed, and offering generous odds on England’s patently inexorable annihilation at the First Test in Brisbane. In Western Australia’s second innings England dropped at least seven dolly catches. I say ‘at least’ because there could have been plenty more and I may have missed some. My eye-surgeon brother, Brendan, currently devoting himself to being a little bannister on the stairway of life, researching into sickle-cell anaemia in Jamaica, discovered when I was out there, on England’s last disastrous tour, that I could hardly see. Not that there is anything I want to do to rectify this highly satisfactory state of affairs. I do not want to end up with vision so perfect that I am given incontrovertibly empirical evidence of something which I have vaguely suspected for some time now: that I have spent the last four or five years sleeping with a big, bald, fat man.
    On the evidence of that day’s cricket, at least, Johnson of the
Independent
was perfectly right. England could not bat, they could not bowl and they could not field.
    Watching as they dropped the seventh easy catch, people wondered seriously whether the England team was capable of catching the next morning’s plane to Brisbane.

4 / Brisbane: some cricket, at last
    The flight from Perth to Brisbane, traversing the entire continent of Australia, involved about seven hours’ travelling, a three-hour time difference, and a stopover to change planes in Sydney. It was perhaps not entirely fortunate that those of our merry band who need their regular fix of tabloid twaddle raced off to buy the local evening paper. Oh, dear! It was the same phenomenon that reared its ugly head in Trinidad last year and caused so much trouble. Old guard British correspondents often erroneously assume that the copy they file back home to London will be read at breakfast time, forgotten by lunchtime, and consigned to the immortality it deserves, as people’s fish and chip wrappings, by teatime. How they underestimate the wonders of modern technology! Nowadays a piece written in Australia and filed to London may well be winging its way back within hours, boomerang style, to knock its originator on the head. In