The untrained eye
This, a very rare appointment with the MCG’s title sport, its supposed paramour. There aren’t proper archives, but day 3 at the Boxing Day test may also have been my third of any real cricket spectatorship at the ground. Definitely, the first time I’ve visited the sanctified test match. They got a record crowd; I guess my attendance reflected the influx.
Friends reverted us to our football vantage beneath the scoreboard, city end. It feels like a secret spot until wandering reminds there aren’t bad seats anywhere below level 4 reaching the arse-end of the alphabet. And it took just a few Mitchell Starc deliveries to appreciate none of the great stadium’s posts afford much of a chance of actually seeing the cricket ball. This isn’t the fault of architects or engineers, but the sport itself. I’d watched the first two days of this test very ably, on the plump couches of relatives, midst post-Christmas idling. Was a beneficiary of the seeming arms race among extended family to own the grandest, crispest TV. And as my paucity of live attendance suggests, the relationship between cricket and I has always been mediated by television, has never been healthier than at present, what with two channels competing for coverage. At the ground, so far removed from the TV vista, unable to track the bowling, it felt to me as if 80,000 people had come to witness a show’s recording, albeit at a grand studio. Curious as to how it all gets put together, how it dissembles in the ‘real’ world, we’d compromised the easy vantage of our living rooms, à la the night I went to Q+A for the heck of it, got pinned behind the cameraperson, watched the whole show through their view-screen. Perhaps cheap tickets to the cricket don’t merely attempt to grow interest in the game, but compensate our being TV extras. We’re minor contributors, too; our clustering shall be browsed by producers to create enthusiasm and atmosphere, like faces arranged behind the lecterns of rallying politicians.
Hundreds of times, this afternoon, I watched magicians Starc, Cummins, and Mitch Marsh disappear a Kookaburra out of their paw. We got it back by its suspicious arrival at an Indian blade, or Alex Carey’s proving gloves, but there’d be twenty yards or so where, for all intents and purposes, the ball seemed not to really exist. Companions confirmed this wasn’t relevant to the prescription in my glasses; they couldn’t see it either. The only scientific apparatus that could prove a passage was being made at all, that these weren’t just apparitions at the other end of the pitch, were those blessed TV cameras, whose results were submitted to the big-screen. An alternative proof were the slower overs of Nathan Lyon. For all of spin bowling’s intentions to bamboozle, it serves as the only digestible style to the crowd, and it’s the sole form we might drift into wonderings of being able to tonk ourselves. Although, if batsmen took a shine to a Lyon delivery, swatting towards the boundary, the orb’s journey along the grass would be very difficult to track, as well.
Generally deprived of being able to see the game’s vital motions, the crowd seemed dependent upon the jolting reactions of Australian fielders for any quick idea of what had occurred, never mind their oohs! and flinches were largely manufactured to intimidate the batsmen or confuse the umpire. In this way, players add ‘usher’ or ‘interpreter’ to their job description. Tall-poppyists will have been roused by the spectacle of Sam Konstas, 19-years-old, swinging his arms to marshal the crowd, as if he were an established great and the owner of much more than an ephemeral debut half-century. But truth may be that Sam’s precociousness includes an understanding he and his compadres are the only conduits by which the overlooking 80,000 can understand what to make of it all, how to behave, and why they oughtn’t dissolve into post-Christmas recaps or piss off to look for food and drink.
Yes, the players exist within some ocular membrane (the boundary rope, perhaps?) allowing they can mostly track what the hell is going on, but of course even they’re occasionally prone to mystification, and left to lean upon the camerawork. Take Steve Smith, at slip, dropping a half-chance that had deflected off the inside shoulder of Washington Sundar’s flailing bat. Perhaps Smith was feigning ignorance, in embarrassment, but his gaze did veer appealingly to the big screen afterwards for evidence of how the edge had ever come his way. And he – at 35 still a renowned fielder, deft batter – may have been a candidate for the arena’s sharpest reflexes. Aspects of a cricketer's uniform – the long sleeves, the sloppy, seemingly homespun vests, the fact you may see no problem fielding while the bowler’s cap bobbles over your own – can tease the impression it’s a languid, academic sort of a game, giving ample time for combatants to self-correct with the aid of conscious thought. Nothing of the sort, of course. Really, it exists among those sports which demand the finest of motor skills, the swiftest reactions, and all answers and anticipatory abilities must already be cooked into the neurons of the batter or slips fielder before the horrible ball is upon them. Performance speaks only to the training, the pre-conditioning. When Mohammed Siraj wandered out to the crease late, giving the day its most exciting episode, the crowd were stirred, its Indians anxiously supportive, by the knowledge this specialist fast bowler had little in his pre-conditioned armoury to withstand enough deliveries to allow his partner, Nitish Kumar Reddy, to reach the century he’d been stalking all afternoon. In such moments as this trial of Siraj, cricket is a public health message, is society-wide encouragement towards enduring the moments which belie one’s interest or training. By the humiliations of tail-end batsmen, it says that the body can only be primed for so much, that for any ability, a weakness must be paid. Granted, Reddy himself is listed as an all-rounder, and therefore a kind of freak specimen, but he'd only bowled a few first innings overs and never looked like taking a wicket. On the international stage, batting might be his real forte. Much of the healthy crowd – even the Indians diaspora, perhaps – had attended this day in the hope of seeing the second innings of Konstas, yet this was to be terminally delayed by the skill of a guy only a few years his senior. Reddy is 21, his age should still be attention-grabbing. And parochialism aside, it was a relief to somewhat see him cross 100 with an indistinct boundary, because it gave a real highlight to a day that otherwise would only have brandished Sundar’s stoic half-century, and four wickets as random as dog farts. Reddy planted his bat, in celebration, like it was a sword, and he a filmic warrior.
I don’t think I’m being too much of a stick in the mud to assess it as something of a dull, disorienting day overall, this backed-up by heavy clouds soon after Reddy's milestone obstructing enough light to close play about an hour prematurely. Sudden rain vindicated the umpires’ assessment. I passed one of the outposts, the pop-up heart clinics, of the ‘Shane Warne Legacy’ group on the way out of the park, and many of my prudent and hypochondriac pieces would have liked to queue if this wasn’t delaying the rest of my de-party. It’s reasonable to assume, however, the measure for my heart rate would have been consistent with ‘underwhelmed’. We’d picked the quietest segment of what was nevertheless poised to become a famous test match.
The next day, play began balancingly early, and I anticipated this well enough to be watching from the arranged cushions of my own couch. Feeling restored in front of the TV, mentored by Ponting and co., I was able to track a Bumrah in-swinger better than Konstas could possibly have managed, though it passed right under his nose. At the ground, I imagine, for all those sitting in the stands: just the crack of the wickets, like a puff of smoke, and the full span of a 19-year-old wandering off the field of play, probably regretting some of his triumphant mid-match interviews from previous days. Nevertheless, please let Sam not be humbled. For I’ve been told confidence is the closest thing to real magic in this world, if we momentarily put television to one side.