Cricket XXXX Cricket (15 page)

Rhodes scholar Prime Minister Bob Hawke, no mean cricketer himself in his days up at Oxford, was much in evidence around the ground. There he was in the press box. There he was in the Channel 9 television commentary box. And there he was in the England and Australian dressing rooms. Quite as ubiquitous as John Paul, really, but without the range of languages or the popular support.

Mr Hawke has organised a prime minister’s XI versus an England XI one-day fixture in Canberra for 23 December, and patently did not see his selectorial remit confined to choosing his own team alone, and was making no secrets about the personalities he wanted to see gracing the opposition. No doubt apprised of superstars’ sudden inexplicable attacks of non-specific back pain or unheralded hamstring trouble when similar fixtures occur so close to Christmas he was at great pains to mark the England line-up card. Meaningfully, he congratulated David Gower on his magnificent innings, and expressed a strong desire to see a similar performance in the Australian capital. ‘And if
you
don’t appear,’ he explained, only half-jovially, to Ian Botham, ‘you might have serious difficulty in getting a work permit for Queensland next year.’

Neither Ian Botham, however, nor, for that matter, the disturbingly out-of-form Allan Lamb had managed to trouble the scorers in England’s first innings that day. As penance, the pair of them shared a present Lamb’s wife Lindsay had donated to England’s Ashes effort. The gift caused great hilarity amongst the Perth crowd; to be worn affixed to the nose at all times by prime offenders, it was a bright orange/yellow duck’s bill.

Meanwhile the greatest PR man on earth was entertaining a capacity crowd at the racecourse. Over 105,000 were in attendance, about one-tenth of the entire population of the Western Australian capital. People had queued all day just to catch a glimpse of the peripatetic pontiff and, as happened in the USA, many appeared more interested in the package than in the product. Wild cheers, applause and acclaim greeted an extremely hard-line traditionalist sermon on the joy of vocations; on the ultimate gift to God of a priest or a nun in the family; on the evils of the materialistic consumer society. Swilling their tinnies and their stubbies in the bright sunshine, the crowd nodded their evil materialistic consumer approval.

This was the Pope’s forty-second homily in six days, each one carefully prepared by the pontiff himself during his annual holiday retreat in Castel Gandolfo. There has been something for everyone. His strong appeal on Aboriginal land rights in Alice Springs constituted the emotional and political apogee of the tour, and ruffled not a few federal feathers. To give him due credit, this first non-Italian pope for 450 years does not seem to care whether his message is popular or not. His stern moral views and traditionalism, his reactionary thinking on birth control and contraception, and his unassailable belief that the little woman is better off minding hearth and home, have alienated many Roman Catholics. After a decade’s education in an Ursuline Convent, I for example now find myself more or less lapsed. There is probably quite a large group of like-minded lapsers, who ought now to be constituting the bedrock of a modern, youthful Roman Catholic church, and who find themselves instead thus alienated. In retrospect, I fear that my particular form of education imbues adolescents with all the right principles, but then thrusts them, without relevant support structures, into a secular society where such principles, particularly on sex, are virtually impossible to abide by. What is even worse for a lapsed Catholic is that it is almost impossible to indulge in a good secular time without the subsequent remorse of a well-inculcated sense of guilt. ‘
Le sens du peche
,’ Baudelaire used to call it. You do exactly the same things as other less profoundly morally aware people, but unlike them, you end up feeling very, very bad about it. It is a terrible thing, a Roman Catholic-framed conscience. I am sure such consciences inhabit some of the most deeply miserable creatures on earth.

There has been no shortage of more-than-gentle ironies to this papal visit. There has been much pontificating, for instance, on abject consumerism and soul-destroying materialism. Perhaps the message would have percolated through with greater spiritual purity if one of the visit’s major sponsors had not been a South Australian beer company epitomising both. And do not imagine for a moment that said brewery has not been getting its full PR mileage out of the fact! West End Export cans of beer are currently doing the rounds brightly decorated with a golden papal mitre. The marketing man’s road to heaven is patently paved with empty tinnies.

There have also been quite a few benevolent pronouncements on the importance of a multicultural society, which, coming from the leader of a church that has left no theological stone unturned in its rationale for wiping out entire, not-sufficiently-God-fearing cultures and societies in the past, have a tendency to sound somewhat risible. There have been cameos of the Pope kissing children, blessing old folk, hugging koala bears, wearing tin hats, going ‘bush’ and saying ‘mate’. And there have been unholy seas of tasteless plastic souvenirs, fortunately the sort of thing for which the materialistic consumers do not mind shelling out a sponsoring bob or two. The sight of them brought back my childhood with a rush of melancholic nostalgia. In my early years, before I graduated to big time materialistic consumerism, my most cherished possession had been a luminous glass bottle, cast in the presumed image and likeness of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and filled with holy water from the shrine at Lourdes by my favourite doting aunt, Margaret. Frankly, it beat rosary beads and pictures of stigmata-ridden saints hands down in entertainment value. From its centre-stage position on my dressing-table, it used to glow with an unearthly luminescence in those twilight hours before I went to sleep. Like St Bernadette before me, I slumbered peacefully, dreaming of celestial visitations and waiting for the angels’ voices which would come in useful during Mother Vianney’s mental arithmetic tests.

Bored one day during the summer holidays with a replay of the entire Olympic Games against my three brothers (originally, as second eldest, I used to win the silver medal, but now the inexorable physical superiority of sex had superseded seniority, and I was edged off the medal list), I wandered around our light and airy house looking for some suitably Stygian darkness in which to gaze at my incandescent Virgin. In my mother’s dressing room I remembered a large free-standing wardrobe ideal for the purpose. I pushed my way in between the tightly packed dresses, skirts and blouses, and found myself in a deliciously tactile position smooched up against the mater’s fur coat. I can still remember the sickening click as the wardrobe door closed shut behind me. The noxious smell of mothballs was overwhelming, and the stifling proximity of fur equally so. Our Lady of Lourdes shone beatifically in my frightened, clammy hand, but resolutely refused to perform any miracles.

I was hysterical. I banged on the door. The fur coat seemed to metamorphose into its original owner, and became decidedly aggressive. I fought it off. Empty wire coat hangers reproduced parthenogenetically, and conspired in clinking droves to enmesh me. Even at the tender age of seven, I could see that this would be a fairly ignominious way to go – smothered in a fur coat, strangled by a coat hanger.

The wardrobe eventually toppled over, presumably sending shockwaves down the stair bannisters, across the hall, and into the kitchen, where dear old mum was imperturbably cooking dinner for twelve, anointing one brother with Dettol, strapping another up with Elastoplast, and keeping the third from pulverising himself in the Magi-Mix. She raced upstairs, risking the distinct possibility of all three of them immediately sticking their heads in the gas oven. Rolling around in the dressing room she found a large mahogany wardrobe, temporarily inhabited by a petrified poltergeist, which she forthwith released, and exorcised with a swift clip across the ear.

To this day I remain frightened of the dark. When I think about it, I am sure that the only reason I married the dreaded PHE was so that I need never be alone in the dark again. I had not counted on his becoming an international cricketer.

As a demonstration of the strengths of the human psyche, however, I am proud to relate that I
did
manage to overcome my paranoia of fur coats. And I still keep that bottle of Lourdes water.

The celebratory mass at the Belmont Park Racecourse was nothing if not triumphalist. The assembled crowd was treated, whilst waiting, to a repertoire of music conducted by former Professor of Music at the University of Western Australia, Sir Frank Calloway. The high note, if you will forgive the pun, was a fanfare, written by the late Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Arthur Bliss, and dedicated to Sir Frank on the occasion of Australia’s last Commonwealth Games.

Unfortunately, the music for the Mass proper fell outside the mandate of the good professor, and we were served up something modern, complicated, contrapuntal and syncopated, the sort of thing that passes for trendy nowadays. It is odd, in a Church where the message is getting more reactionary by the minute, that the trammelling has become so do-or-die contemporary. Rather give me Brompton Oratory and some good Gregorian plain chant any day of the week, and keep this cacophonic, atonal, arrhythmic aural offensive for the pop-mongers.

In the sacristy after the Mass, skippers and crew of challengers and defenders in the America’s Cup lined up to meet the Pope. Perth entrepreneur Alan Bond, who embraced the faith when he married his wife Eileen, kissed the papal ring, the correct act of obeisance on such occasions, and was afterwards granted a special audience with John Paul. The roads were thronged with waving, excited people, perhaps half the population of Perth as the Popemobile wended its way to the next and final Australian fixture, a nursing home run by nuns. ‘G’day Pope’ proclaimed the quickly assembled placards. No insult intended, just the usual Aussie amalgam of good-natured, affectionate iconoclasm.

‘And
whom
have you come to see?’ I asked a six-or seven-year-old boy sporting a ‘We love you, Pope’ T-shirt, and a bright red be-mitred balloon. ‘The Pope,’ he answered correctly; ‘he’s come all the way from Italy, where my dad comes from.’

‘And
why
has he come?’ I continued, putting the poor youngster through an up-to-date catechism mill. ‘He’s come to make sure we keep the America’s Cup, and to help us win the cricket,’ he replied innocently, patently not a product of a Jesuit establishment. It makes you wonder, at the end of this brilliantly organised media-orientated campaign, how much of the proverbial seed has actually fallen on good ground.

Back at the WACA, Australia were in deep trouble. Obdurately defensive captaincy from Mike Gatting, however, in failing to declare England’s second innings at least an hour before the end of play on the fourth day, ensured a dogged draw.

A political scandal is currently causing the government some little embarrassment. It’s been a great year for political scandals and little embarrassments. First there was Oliver North and Iran-gate, then Peter Wright and MI5, and now Paul Keating and the invisible tax returns. For a treasurer, the poor man’s memory would appear to contain more holes than a pair of tart’s fishnet tights. Having initiated a national campaign to encourage, cajole and threaten the Australian taxpayer into filing his tax returns on time, a mysteriously mislaid Inland Revenue letter, which somehow found its way into the possession of the Leader of the Opposition, showed that the good treasurer himself had not filed any tax returns for the previous two years. In the United Kingdom I am convinced the man would have been forced to resign; but Keating demonstrates a melange of pained affront over his mail being tampered with, and a degree of political chutzpah which appears to have side-stepped the issue entirely. Australian politicians certainly seem better at brazening incidents out than most. Anyway, I merely mention this incident because Australia’s pace hopes in this Test had rested fairly heavily on the veteran shoulders of injury-fraught Geoff Lawson. Lawson, sad to say, did not live up to expectation.

‘Come on, Lawson,’ remonstrated one less-than-sympathetic larrikin in the crowd, pyramid of empty Swan lagers at his side, nose glistening greasily from under the crushed raspberry-coloured zinc cream. ‘Come on, Lawson, you look about as fast as Keating’s tax returns!’

The Australians were not the only cricketers copping flak, however. In the Channel 9 television commentary box, ex-England captain and erstwhile incomparable strategic genius Bob Willis was drawling away in his own inimitably soporific fashion. I am sure that PBL marketing, who package and sell cricket here in Australia on behalf of the less commercially minded Australian Cricket Board, could do a lot for Bob. If nothing else, they could market his dreary monologue laced with relentless inaccuracy as non-proprietary alternative to Mogadon. In the England dressing room, where everybody knows that Willis is in more danger of saying something original than of saying anything positive about Phil, the team was in fits. Left-arm spinner Edmonds had picked up 2–50 while off-spinner Emburey had figures of about1–100.

‘But forget the figures,’ droned Willis; ‘you can see that Emburey has been by far the better bowler today.’ On that particular day, frankly, informed opinion could not. Let us forget for a moment his totally incorrect assertions that the entire England team has sent me to Coventry over
Another Bloody Tour
, although they are conceivably actionable, causing me as they do such terrible mental distress. I just hope by now that any listeners automatically assume that anything Bob says about
la famille
Edmonds borders on being highly economical with the truth. Why on earth the Channel has not hired the mellifluous Welsh tones of the far more perceptive ex-England captain Tony Lewis instead is something I for one cannot fathom. I do believe I am not alone.

It was an eminently forgettable Test match, just the sort of game which reinforces the belief expressed by Western Australian and Australian left-arm pace-man, Chris Matthews. He went on record as saying that he found cricket a boring game to watch. If the players themselves find it boring, what hope is there for the rest of us?