 'there are no winners' As a sportsman, I am a member of the ‘ -y’ family. I’m related to Straussy and Backy. In our small sub-species, Homo Olympiens, there are three primary families. We are joined by the ‘-o’ family (Wilko, Johnno) and the ‘-ers’ family (Aggers, Athers).
We get along famously, because these sporting nicknames are names stripped down. They are names in the dressing room in their jockstraps. They’re no respecters of names. On the team-sheet nobody escapes – the system is automatic and egalitarian, and amid the mud and studs everyone is quickly allocated to one of the families.
The same does not happen in individual sports. One of the horrors of golf coverage on the TV is the smarmy use of first names – ‘Tiger’, ‘Lee’ – as if everyone was on first name terms. You’re not fooling anybody.
I’m thinking about this because I was surprised to be referred to on the net as Beardy. Over on his excellent blog designed for auto-didact, spliffy, anti-establishment ranting polymaths (who like trains), Ian Marchant reminded me (and all those in his wide constituency) that I’d offered to take the Physical Education Classes at the Free University of Radnorshire.
(This will be free like the National Gallery and not like Westminster Abbey, which is free except if you don’t pay you can’t go in. At the National Gallery there’s no bullying, and you’d have to have a heart of socialist stone not to bung a few coins in the tin or pay a couple of quid for some overpriced postcards).
But Ian is right. I have put myself forward as the Professor of PE at FUR. He was therefore correct to give me my active sporting name, and you know what, Marchers? That’s going to be the first class we take, before preparing for the more philosophical Race With No Finish Line (practical).
What are team nicknames all about? They announce an intimacy. They also infantilise, which makes them true. Those of us who like games and rolling about on grass are in touch with our inner child. A baby name is the best we deserve, and there is no room for airs and graces.
I was reminded of this once in the letter pages of the Times. A show-off Dad proudly wrote in to say that his eight-month old son was a keen fan of BBC’s Test Match Special. Not only did he like to listen to every ball of a Test match, at the age of eight months, but only the day before he’d uttered his first words: ‘Aggers.’
The next day another reader replied that his son, too, was eight months old and listened to every ball of the Test match. His first words were ‘Christoper Martin-Jenkins.’
 Cyclists Beware I’m trying to find out about the new place I’ve come to live. One way is to walk about. I’ve done a bit of that. There’s also jogging. I’m now a familiar sight along the Thames, tripping over mooring lines and dodging courting couples. Courting doesn’t involve much talking these days, it seems, and you can do most of it with your eyes shut. The Thames on a summer evening is the longest Lover’s Lane in England, with boys and girls in their late teenage taking another last chance to grow older without regrets.
For the broader view, I’ve also taken to my bike, and yesterday I rode from Slough to Oxford. Somewhere outside Henley I took a detour into the Chilterns, and learnt an important lesson: stone-age English folk knew what they were talking about when they named their villages.
Last October, with Virtual Tom, I cycled up a Tour de France Category 1 climb in the Vosges, the Ballon d’Alsace. It was so much fun we did it twice in a day, and Tom’s typically concise account can be found here. Riding a bicycle up a proper mountain is a very relaxing experience. There’s no rush. You physically can’t go any faster than you’re going. And you can’t go any slower because at 8 kph the bicyle topples over and you fall off. Nothing else for it but to settle in, and enjoy the views for the next ten upward kilometres.
There’s no such philosophy to save the unwary bike rider in the Chilterns. It’s the Chilterns, I kept thinking, I can go faster than this. I’m heading for a place called Pishill, I told myself, which is a pissy little hill outside Henley.
Only it isn’t. It keeps on going, and going, not steep, but by now I’m completely cooked from failing to notice that I’ve been going uphill for some considerable distance. While I thought I was pushing on, the Chiltern hills have gradually been stealing away my soul.
I should have learnt my lesson years ago, at a place called High Ham near Glastonbury. That High isn’t there for fun, and especially not on a bicycle.
Towards the end of the trip, I saw two small boys waving from the entrance to a Garden Centre. I pulled across the road to ask them if they needed any help.
‘No,’ they said. ‘We’re playing a game. We wave at cars. If the passenger waves back we get a point. If the driver waves back we get two points.’
I’m the competitive sort. We entered into an interesting discussion, and eventually decided that a cyclist pulling over and stopping was worth ten whole points. It was the bomb that decided the game.
It was only as I was riding away that I realised this game can only be fun to play in a part of the country that is essentially unfriendly. Who wouldn’t wave back? Then I remembered. I’m in the Home Counties, or near enough.
Choke Chain
In the absence of James Campbell’s formidable memory, a view of College sport over the last sixty years becomes dependent on the club pages of the Pembroke Gazette. Fortunately, at least in its sports section, the little blue book can be made to yield to statistical analysis.
Since 1945 in all sports except rowing, as recorded in the Gazette, Pembroke has managed outright Championship or Cuppers wins on thirty occasions. I include the unbeaten cricket season of 1947, even though that year’s cricket team professed themselves ‘free from the anxieties of competitions.’ Nevertheless.
Over a sixty year period the maths couldn’t be easier: we have a habit of being the best in at least one University sport about every two years. A closer study of the Gazette, however, reveals a much more alarming fact. Pembroke has been runner-up, either second in the League or beaten finalist in Cuppers, an astonishing 54 times. I’m sorry to have to be the one to break this news, but when the pressure comes on, when the kitchen heats up, when the tough get going, we the sportier members of Pembroke College have a collective tendency to choke.
What well-rounded people we must be. Not for us the one-eyed focus on victory, but the peripheral vision that takes in doubt and self-destruction (and just in case boaties think they’re immune from this, in the Lents and Mays Pembroke has finished second-placed on the river 19 times since 1945, Head only 8). Sometimes, our casual attitude to conquest can defy belief, as at the end of the 1970 squash season: ‘We lost the Cuppers final to Selwyn by a walkover – surely the first time ever – after an unfortunate series of misunderstandings.’
Personally, I find our habit of coming second rather endearing, like Orwell’s model Englishman prepared to step off the pavement for any stranger to whom the pavement matters more. I particularly like the involved, complicated philosophy of the second XI football team of 1988, who ‘took great pleasure in beating teams who placed too great an emphasis on winning.’ Discuss.
Was there ever a Golden Age? From 1976 until 1978, Pembroke was dominant on the river, had a champion rugby team, was a top-flight contender in squash and an irresistible force both in the pool and on the croquet lawn. Again between 1983 and1986, coinciding with more success for the oarsmen, the rugby team won the league title twice, the hockey was strong and the cricket and tennis teams both contested Cuppers finals. Two separate Golden Ages, though both short-lived.
Otherwise, there isn’t one club that hasn’t been up and down through the divisions, nor any sport too often robbed of glory. Rivalries shift and change, but Pembroke teams most often suffer and fall at the hands of the ‘eventual winners’. The ‘eventual winners’ are always beating us at an unreasonably early stage of Cuppers, except in weaker seasons when we lose to the ‘eventual finalists’. In 1968, an otherwise promising year for hockey, our hopes were brought to an end by ‘last year’s winners’, as close to glory as that particular team could claim to come. It should be said that on the whole we take defeat well, often losing to the better team. There are, however, anguished exceptions, as with the Rugby Cuppers Final in 1974, when ‘the final score (27-13) was a tragic lie.’
If a specifically Pembroke set of characteristics reveals itself across all sports, it’s how defeat or limited success can always be redeemed by ‘spirit’ and ‘keenness’. There’s a noble tradition of self-sacrifice in times of difficulty, no more so than by poor overworked Reg Carnell in 1965, ‘who for much of the season was the only goalkeeper in College, and so had to play several games a week.’
The sports in the Gazette change with the times. There’s a core group of boats, rugby, soccer, hockey, cricket, tennis and squash, while other sports come and go depending on fashion and whether Pembroke can raise a plausible team. In the late 1940’s, for example, the Gazette has space for the highly successful Cruising Club, yachting champions in both 1945 and 1946 (and more in College character, runners-up in 1947). By 2006 there’s pool and volleyball and ultimate frisbee. In between times there are sporadic appearances for golf and fives, athletics, badminton, water polo, table tennis, chess, and some mostly solemn entries on croquet. 1977: ‘Croquet is now taken seriously in Pembroke and many other Colleges. Pembroke entered 12 teams for the Cuppers and were most successful.’
Whatever the sport, Pembroke teams encounter the same perennial problems. ‘The weather was not generally good’, there are injuries, the scientists have too many practicals. The College admissions policy is always a target for clubs in trouble, such as the 1980 soccer team who’ve ‘done their best to halt the decline of Pembroke’s football prowess, a decline caused by factors beyond the control of junior members of College.’ In 2002 there’s more dark talk about ‘the diminishing intake of athletes’, but those of us with a torch for Pembroke sport should keep a sense of perspective. Our passion can sometimes create unreasonable expectations, possibly betrayed by the hockey team of 1967 – ‘things looked promising with an encouraging number of freshmen, but it was an intake of defensive players and our requirement was for forwards.’ Admissions tutors! Whatever were you thinking?
Having said that, the fair-play Pembroke teams are consistently opposed to ‘imports’, something those redoubtable opponents the ‘eventual winners’ always seem to have.
Other recurring problems include players seduced from the games-field by ‘rival attractions’, which I always hope is a euphemism for requited passion, and therefore beyond reproach. In cricket, even in 1970, ‘the main problem is still to persuade people that eight hours cricket in a week is better for the constitution than eight hours revision.’ And then there’s the University, avid for Pembroke talent. Any current or former College sports captain will understand the 1960 soccer skipper’s sigh of relief when ‘the stronger players, such as D.Perkin and B.Butler, fail their freshman trials.’
Over the last sixty years Pembroke has been more than generous in loaning out athletes of ability. In 1951 the College provided a third of the Blues rugby team and half of the pack. In 1969 we had a third of the basketball team and in 1972 three of the Modern Pentathletes. In 1974 we made up half the Boat Race crew and in 1979 University water polo would have been three men short if it wasn’t for Pembroke. Every year someone at Pembroke excels at Blues level in sports as diverse as (to offer some random examples) Ice-Hockey (D.G.Hobart 1959), Golf (W.G.Morrison 1964), Caneoing (P.S.Humm 1979), Karate ( J.J.Purcell 1989), Weight-Lifting (S.W.Garland 1993) and Orienteering (M.W.Collis 1999).
As if this wasn’t enough, we also supply sports stars to the nation, most famously the England cricket captain P.B.H.May. His appointment in 1955 was gratifying though hardly surprising, as he was in fact the fifth Pembroke man to captain England in the preceding 33 years (after F.T.Mann, A.E.R.Gilligan, A.P.F Chapman and F.G.Mann). This strong College showing was dryly exploited by Vernon Pennell, a Pembroke Fellow since 1914, in his Gazette appreciation of May’s achievement:
‘Probably no English captain since the days of the late Hon F.S.Jackson – not of Pembroke – has so captured the imagination of the English people.’
Before Peter May, A.P.Henderson had played rugby for England while an undergraduate in 1947. In 1953 J.P.K.Asquith kept wicket for Cambridge against the Australians, and a year later against Pakistan. Pembroke’s other internationals, while still at College, include N.M Forster and P.G.Clark, who in 1951 played hockey for England and Wales respectively, and G.H.Waddell, who captained Scotland against England at Twickenham in 1959.
As anyone who keeps in touch with Pembroke will know, they don’t make sporting heroes like they used to. When the College admitted women in 1984 there were grave fears for Pembroke’s sporting heritage. Only the Boat Club dared openly express their doubts, noting that ‘in the last year in which the PCBC has an all-male membership, it demonstrated its manly vigour and enthusiasm with significant successes.’ Boat Club nerves are still in evidence a year later, with the patronizing observation that ‘all Ladies’ crews gained places on the river, and places in the admiring hearts of many towpath supporters’.
Evidence of a less sickly attitude comes from the hockey field, with the Gazette’s first sporting reference to a female student by name. ‘Next year sees a break with tradition as Miss S.M.Butler has been appointed Second XI Captain for the 1985-86 season.’ Even the oldest former Pembroke sports-people will remember that captain of the second team is the most important position in any club, the player who holds everything together without fear or favour, or indeed much in the way of reward at all. The Squash Club, clearly a happy and welcoming ship throughout the eighties, is also quick to set up a Ladies team, led by Katrin Latta who ‘easily outclassed her opponents at this level.’ Julia Jowett, sometimes Julia and sometimes J.M., as the writers struggle with etiquette and instinct, becomes in 1986 Pembroke’s first University representative, in badminton.
The new teams quickly adapt, and already by 1988 the women’s cricket team is demonstrating its full assimilation to Pembroke sporting values by reaching the final of Cuppers. And losing.
The Boat Club, too, is soon put to rights. In 1994 the men’s eights are punished when not one boat makes a bump in the Mays. This is desperate, but the women’s eight moves up three places that year and by 1996 Erin Rose is PCBC’s first female captain and Catherine Bishop is rowing for Britain at the Atlanta Olympics. The women are Head of the River in 1997, again in 1998 and most recently in 2006. The patronizing reports have disappeared.
Other changes witnessed by the Gazette include the commercial sponsorship of College kit, first mentioned in 1991 when the footballers were supported by Russell Hume, the College ‘butcher’. The inverted commas are left unexplained. From then on, in nearly all sports, sponsors are routinely thanked, to the point where in 2001 the hockey team wins the league and their first expression of gratitude is to the sponsoring bank.
Over the years, the cricket club have been most consistently courteous in thanking the groundsman, as they should be because their tea depends upon it. In 1954 the cricketers make sure to credit Mr and Mrs Cousins, ‘again, for innumerable services’, and Stan Chown for his fine lunches. The Cousins were succeeded by Roger and Les Pearl, and it was in 1974 that the notion first surfaced of a Pembroke cricket wicket that was ‘better than Fenners.’ This reputation has been maintained by Pembroke’s current groundsman, Trevor Munns, the ‘miracle worker’. Whereas Mrs Cousins and Mrs Pearl provided teas, Mr Munns goes further and has represented the College on his own pitch, no doubt to the great relief of an undermanned captain.
These days the familiar figure of James Campbell no longer stalks the touchlines, as he did so faithfully over most of the last sixty years. It is now Michael Kuczynski who has taken on the often lonely task of providing crowd atmosphere, while the men and women of the College continue to battle against dubious referees and stronger opponents, giving everything for no greater reward than a team photo and some of the funniest times of their lives. As the light fades, and the weary blue shirts traipse once more from the field, everyone’s an eventual winner.
From Esquire, Jan 2007
So why do the Australians enjoy seeing us grovel?
In the Australian Book of Life, the British drop them in it. One way they can climb back out again is by smashing England at cricket. In the twentieth century this ambition was occasionally thwarted, sometimes by individual genius (Dennis Compton and Ian Botham), at others by brutal acts of pre-meditated cheating (the Bodyline series).
In the 1990’s, however, the Australians finally achieved outright dominance in the Ashes. They then triumphed in two Rugby World Cups, consecutive Cricket World Cups, and the Davis Cup. Lleyton Hewitt won Wimbledon, and between 1991 and 2000 Australia were world champions in 12 team and 21 individual sports, including eight-ball pool and orienteering.
So there wasn’t even the sweet and sour consolation of thinking they saved their best for England. At the last Olympics, Australia won more medals than all but three other countries – the United States, China and Russia. These medals were distributed across fifteen sports, a range matched only by the United States, and there were no medals for rugby league. They’d probably also make a decent fist of Olympic Australian Rules.
Still they hadn’t finished. In 2003 at Upton Park, the England football team were humbled 3-1 by the Socceroos. During that match the Australians in the crowd held up a banner saying ”If we win, you suck at everything,” while chanting ‘You’ll never win the Ashes.’ I believed them.
In the summer of 2005, as the touring Australian cricketers landed in England, I therefore went to Sydney to write a book about how Australians had become unbeatable at sport. I would then be able to explain rationally why England would never win the Ashes ever again. Yes, I know; and I’ve never been happier about being wrong.
It started out predictably enough: in Sydney the winter weather made its strong and sunny case to be the source of all England’s misery. For twelve months every year, Australians can be confident that their superb facilities will be available for outside practice from sunrise to sunset, and in such a small population, anyone who’s any good is quickly identified and soon honing their talent in a lavishly funded Academy of Sport.
I duly noted these familiar reasons for Australian sporting success, but I also wanted to find out whether Australians are more likely to win simply because they’re Australian. A suspicion lingers that Australian and English sports-people are somehow differently equipped. If the rivalry is gladiatorial, then it doesn’t seem as evenly-matched as the shield and short-sword against the trident and net. The Australians have the sword and the trident, and in recent years we’ve backed off, fending and feinting, knowing the result in advance but hoping at best to make a fight of it.
The most simple-minded explanation, always guaranteed an airing at some stage in every Ashes series, has it that Australians are difficult to beat at games because their ancestors were convicts. A distant history of flogging and sodomy is somehow rewarded in the here and now by grace under sporting pressure.
This theory ignores the blunt maths of immigration. In the full period of transportation, from 1788 to 1868, about 160,000 prisoners arrived in Australia. Roughly the same number arrived voluntarily in the early 1850’s hoping to strike gold, and among these was a Suffolk farm labourer called Charles Bradman. He had no criminal record, yet his grandson Sir Donald Bradman was to become Australia’s alpha national hero, the patron saint of a recognisably Australian type of competitor. Relentless and uncompromising, Bradman scored 19 centuries against England, 8 of them successive, and this in the days when sportsmen weren’t big healthy kids but lean and hungry working men.
Bradman wasn’t re-enacting a kind of delayed revenge on behalf of his transported forefathers. He may, however, have been enjoying a more immediate type of gratification. A hundred runs before lunch was Bradman’s elegant version of Pom-bashing, but why did they want so much to bash us? Quite a lot of good reasons, as it happens, usually condensed into the single accusation of ‘arrogance’.
And one consistent demonstration of English arrogance is the assumption that no genuine ill-will exists between us and our former English-speaking colonies.
After the shambles of Gallipoli, and despite the Anzac sacrifice, the British billed the Australian government for every penny spent in Europe on Australian troops. The economic depression of the 1930’s, which saw Australian families living on beaches in shelters made of sacks, was made worse by English banks draining the economy with demands for debt repayment (a national debt partly incurred by saving Europe from tyranny) In World War II Roosevelt and Churchill put their heads together, discussed Australia, and decided the Japanese could do what they liked with her.
Worse was to come. Between 1952 and 1963 the British government carried out A-bomb tests in central Australia. These explosions contaminated ‘extensive areas’ of the outback, and mean that Australia remains, with Japan, one of only two industrialised countries to have had nuclear bombs dropped on it by a foreign power. Just in case Australians hadn’t got the message, the 1971 UK Immigration Act ended their special status privilege of ‘free and full right of entry’ into Britain. The European Common Market then decimated the Australian butter and fruit trades.
Against this background, sporting victories could seem immensely important, an indirect yet aggressive resistance to such casually supercilious treatment. It wasn’t a convict heritage that made the sporting rivalry matter to Australians, but repeated, up-to-the-minute abuses.
For a long time we dismissed this edge as evidence that Australians cared too much about winning, a sporting asset but a human frailty. They’re obsessed, unhinged. This national psychological disorder, brilliantly embodied by the humourless Chappell brothers or the snarling Glenn McGrath, allows England to lose and yet still feel superior.
Ingenious as this consolation is, it has its limits, as I discovered in the Sydney suburb of Manly – namely that it isn’t true. The Australians are no more obsessed by sport and winning than we are, a fact that can be established by spending time in Australia going to readings, galleries, and concerts. Failing that, respected doctors of sport have collated reliable data from around the world on sports participation, attendance and television coverage. The statistics show that Australia is as sports-minded and sports-active, but no more so, than several other countries. These include the United States, Brazil and, inevitably, Britain.
We care just as much. No surprise then that between 2003 and 2005, London was brought to a standstill three times in honour of sporting heroes. You can wait decades for an open-top bus, and then three come along at once. Two of these celebrations, in rugby and cricket, were for victories over Australia.
But were Australians that bothered? In a ranking of Australian sports by participation, none of the top five – golf, basketball, Australian rules, netball, soccer – are in sports with a strong traditional rivalry with England. While rightly treasuring 130 years of shared sporting adventure, we’ve been slow to appreciate that these days we’re playing against a country with 120 ethnic groups, 90 languages, and 60 religions. This means there’s the distinct possibility that Ashes rivalry has become more important to us than it is to them.
These social changes provide a more convincing explanation than the glib idea that Australians are simply bored of beating England at cricket. They’re not bored of winning in any other arena, and elite athletes at the Olympics prove this as conclusively as the community sporties I set out to beat at their own games in Manly.
I now appreciate that Australians are good at sport because down to the lowest level points mean prizes, often money, the Australians competitive because this is the way their sport is organised and organised this way because they’re competitive. Along the way I also discovered the contribution made by the terms and conditions of licensed premises, the absence of class inhibitions and Puritan guilt, and the privileged status of clubs as surrogate families in an immigrant society. Local councils support facilities that make it easy to walk round the corner and have a go, and fellow Australians who’ve achieved the dream live next door, or in the same street. Not least, Australians are continuously inspired by any of the forty-one international sporting events saved by law for free-to-air television.
These include the Ashes, in 2005 broadcast live both on satellite and by the terrestrial channel SBS. When the cricket’s not on, this is an ethnic channel (the Special Broadcasting Service) that offers morning news in Hungarian, Maltese, Polish and Ukrainian – without subtitles. It is the ‘voice and vision of multicultural Australia’, and cricket from England is one proud element of that contemporary reality. One among many.
For a full roll-call, read the name-badges of the youngsters at work in Australia’s cities. At the end of the day when the badges come off and everyone gets changed for some kind of fun in the guaranteed sunshine, there’s little to be gained by guessing where anyone’s from. They’re Australians, at the beginning of Australia, and everything that came before is the first page of the prologue, if that. Britain can be sure of a place in the Acknowledgements.
Australia is vigorously living a future divorced from the British past, each day more historically distant than the last. Once, sporting victories over England could help unify the nation, but these days the Olympics and FIFA World Cups are better candidates for the same job, sports in which Australia measures itself against a wider world. The traditional rivalry with England was largely irrelevant when earlier this year, in front of a global TV audience, the Socceroos in green and gold ran out for their first World Cup Finals match in 30 years. They were up against Asian neighbour and economic competitor Japan, making our wistful historical rivalries seem quaint, and somehow doomed.
At least we can only hope the Australians might think so. It would give us a much better chance of winning.
 'not scared' Broadcasting House, Radio 4
19/11/06
One hundred and thirty years ago, when English sportsmen first sailed to Australia to play cricket, their supporters back home were the same people who a generation earlier had been equally keen on brutal animal events like bull-baiting. This was the popular spectacle that made the British bulldog a national emblem, for its tenacity in seizing a bull’s testicles. Between its teeth.
Regrettably, painfully, for most of the last two decades, at cricket the English have been the bull and the Australians the dog.
Despite the heroics of last summer, anyone who’s been paying attention expects Australia to win the Ashes series that starts next week. They have a psychological advantage simply because they’re Australian, but it wasn’t always this way.
Until recently, Australians were alleged to suffer from the Cultural Cringe, a term coined in the 1960’s to describe Antipodean insecurity when faced with centuries of European achievement. The Cringe came in two forms: Direct and Inverted. The direct version explained the Queen as head of state. Inverted, it became the ocker Australian male flaunting his assumed grossness of character:
[sound archive – an Australian making a joke. Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson style]
There was, however, a cure. Australian sporting victories were supposed to help banish such feelings of inadequacy, and in world-beaters like Donald Bradman the Australian people could appreciate some unique and superior quality invested in a fellow Australian. Or as Thomas Keneally later wrote: ‘While no Australian had written Paradise Lost, Don Bradman had made a hundred before lunch at Lord’s.’ This was, by implication, beyond the abilities of English poet John Milton, and not only because Milton was blind.
Bradman was then followed by an impeccable sequence of winners.
[sound archive – a medley of Australian winners winning, say, Dawn Fraser, Herb Elliot, Rod Laver etc]
These, and many more like them, were the battling culture heroes, who by defying all odds to win across the globe gradually fostered a sense of shared Australianness.
In the twentieth century this theory may have convinced, Australians offsetting the cultural cringe against unrivalled sporting excellence. But times change.
In 2003 at Upton Park, the England football team were humbled 3-1 by the Socceroos. At that match the Australians in the crowd held up a banner saying: ”If we win, you suck at everything.” The Cringe had swung so far across the hemispheres that this banner referred to far more than sport. It meant we sucked at Booker prize-winning literary novels and female impersonators and show-ring feminism and wise-guy TV presenters and infinite daytime soaps.
The Australian Cultural Cringe has disappeared, to be replaced, on the British side, by a new and chronic condition. The Recreational Cringe. That’s what it is, that’s what we have.
Now that leisure can count for more than culture, the Australians have what we want. Wherever in the world they started out, Australians have the gift of picking themselves up and starting afresh, a talent for re-creation, a bundle of positive present-day virtues that make for a better film of the book of the life. Confident, famously without worries (mate), they excel at the here and now.
Which is likely to come in useful next week in Brisbane, with the score at 40 for 3. I’d like to be wrong, but England’s victory in 2005 already shines like a glorious exception. The Cringe is back, and yet again we’re the ones feeling inadequate and in need of victory, and if last time round you woke up to the radio and groaned at the morning scorecard from the Gabba, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
[sound archive – Jonathan Agnew’s first Test, first day Radio 5 report of the 2002 tour. It goes something like: ‘We thought it might be bad. Nobody imagined it would be as bad as this’.]
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and recently took up the post as Director of the National Academy of Writing. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed aboved. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below right. I'll get back to you.
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