A team loosely drawn from a country that used to be great and mistakingly believes it still is shares a field with a team from a country that proclaims its assumed exceptionalism in rude and reckless ways.
Times Select
TELFORD VICE in London
THE Ashes is about many things. Cricket is among them only in the sense that Jackson Pollock’s pictures are about paint. What Pollock’s paintings are about can be difficult to nail down. Ditto the Ashes.
Whether Frank O’Hara, the poet, knew much about the Ashes isn’t known. But he knew Pollock: “There has never been enough said about Pollock’s draughtsmanship, that amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line — to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass of drawing alone.”
Substitute Pollock with Shane Warne, draughtsmanship with technique, and drawing with bowling, and tell me that doesn’t fit.
You know a Pollock when you see one — a mad, mess of manic, magnificently male energy poured, dripped, puddled, swirled, flicked, smeared and, yes, sometimes even painted onto a canvas bigger than any wall in the average house. Not that the owner of the average house could afford anything as outrageously expensive as a Pollock.
The same doesn’t go for the Ashes. It looks, sounds and seems like any other game of first-class cricket. In a word, average.
We know it isn’t, just like we know the nonsense of the assertion that any eight-year-old armed with a leaky tin of paint and left alone for a few minutes could deliver something Pollock might have rendered as a masterpiece of modern art.
Stand in front of Pollock’s Number 8, for instance, for as long as it takes your breath to flood back from wherever it was taken by your first sight of this frozen fireworks display in oil, enamel and aluminium, and know that you are in the presence of greatness. It’s not about the paint.
Neither was it about cricket at Old Trafford on June 4, 1993, when Warne, looking like a podgy refugee from a surfers-only boyband sponsored by peroxide and sunblock manufacturers, delivered his first ball in an Ashes Test. Facing it was a gormless, girthfull greybeard of an uncle who thought he had seen it all.
Not that you could blame Mike Gatting for not having seen, particularly in that lean time for leg spin, too many deliveries that hooked wickedly away from their leg stump line through the air, pitched well outside leg, and came roaring back off the spitting, snarling seam to hit off-stump three-quarters of the way up.
When the clatter was complete, Gatting wore a look of blanched bewilderment not dissimilar to how he had countenanced, three years previously, the terrible but undeniable truth writ large on streets teeming with angry black South Africans mobilised by the presence of him and his rebels and their well-paid role in helping to normalise a distinctly abnormal society.
Arresting deliveries are, of course, bowled in matches that don’t involve England or Australia. And often when a game features England the margins framing the picture of the contest are coloured darkly by the knowledge that, were it not for slavery and colonialism, far fewer of us would call cricket our game.
The Ashes isn’t about that. Australians no longer try to prove that the colonised can beat the colonisers. They have done it so often it no longer exists as a point worth proving. The English no longer consider themselves colonisers, which is a copout considering the vast swathes of the world they stole in the name of monarch and money are still suffering the consequences.
Indeed, Australianess can be said to have colonised modern England to a significant degree — from the style of espresso and origin of much of the wine in the better cafés and restaurants to the hankering of English employers after Australian employees, to the easy, shorts-and-shirt Aussie casualness that pervades a society once constructed along rigidly buttoned-down lines of class and rules.
Elementally, the Ashes is about a team loosely drawn from a country that used to be great and mistakingly believes it still is, sharing a field with a team from a country that proclaims its assumed exceptionalism in rude and reckless ways.
Three of England’s squad for the first Test are from the colonies, another part of a community victimised daily by racism visited on them by those who consider themselves more English than thou.
Three of the Australians are freshly returned from bans earned in the cause of a still septic culture that puts winning above all else, including cheating and behaviour that would score a beating from a pub bouncer.
A fourth is from Klerksdorp. His surname, dear Aussies, is pronounced labooskaghknee — not labooshane — and you need to consult that bit of your throat that meets the back of your mouth to get out a properly guttural “kagh”.
Five Ashes paintings will be made these next few weeks, each on a different canvas. They will be definitively similar and starkly different, and they will be slapped thick with history, hagiography, and heroes old and new.
Who, what, when, where, why and how we can’t yet say. But we can be sure that cricket will be only the paint in these pictures. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.
Bulletproof Truth 