Babble & Bluster: The First Ashes Test at Cardiff

The conclusion of the first Ashes test of 2009 has come amidst a touch of English defiance, alleged perfidiousness and Australian complaints about unsportsmanlike time wasting. The ‘whingeing’ Pom has been replaced by the indignant Aussie, that highly respectful specimen of the game that only surfaces when victory has been foiled. Could Monty Panesar and James Anderson be congratulated for blocking their way to English salvation? Hardly. The English team had, according to Australia’s cranky Ricky Ponting, engaged in fairly ‘ordinary’ conduct in allowing physiotherapist Steve McCaig and an acting twelfth man onto the field ostensibly to allow Anderson to change his drink-soaked gloves.

Ponting and his Australian team would naturally have never done anything of the sort. Their metier is the protection of the spirit of the game, however spectral that effort might have been in the past. The English could ‘play whatever way they want to play.’ Australia ‘came to play by the rules and the spirit of the game’. That spirit was notably absent when India toured Australia a few seasons back, but maturity may have entered the game of the pugnacious Tasmanian and his inexperienced team.

The closing of the game also called a merciful halt to some spectacularly bad commentating. A game rich in anecdotes and intellect was visibly depreciated by commentary less developed than school-yard banter. David Lloyd, Ian Botham and company tend to have a soporific effect on the audience at the best of times, a situation that have never alarmed television producers. But worse than that was commentary beamed from the other side of the earth by former spinners Stuart McGill and Greg Matthews, and former batsmen Mark Waugh and Damien Martyn (‘Marto’). At stages, the views of these cricket retirees was nothing but pure, speculative babble worth a vicious, well-tuned edit.

A well-worn theme of Australian commentary on England even since the days when Frederick Spofforth carved the mother country’s batting line-ups has been that of fear. Why was spinner Graeme Swann hiding behind the glasses as he came up to the wicket to bowl? Venturing into pseudo-Freudian insinuation, we were told that the spinner was evidently terrified by the site of these Antipodean supermen, using his glasses to create a rather poor spectacle of concealment. Nor did it stop there. Kevin Pietersen had evidently shown an undue sense of caution in his batting, suggesting that he might have succumbed to the fumes of fear. Woe to those who dare curb aggression in the face of Australian cricketers.

As for the rest of the English team, nerves should never have been shown or expressed. Nor was one entitled to feel nervous at an Ashes opener. ‘I think you really ought to keep it to yourself,’ explained a puzzled Marto.

Such reticence would have been welcome in the face of the clumsy observations by that ‘outspoken’ fast bowling terror of old, Rodney Hogg (‘Hoggie’), who had to honestly admit that he had found watering himself in the cricket bar far more entertaining than digesting the cricket on offer at Cardiff. This did not spare listeners from his under-nourished expertise on the subject of spin.

As the series progresses, we can only hope that the standard of play exceeds that of the commentary. Otherwise television producers will just have to busy themselves with a discerning exercise in editing.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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