South Africa 1 Australia 1

It’s never quite as intense when you can’t smell the red and white face paint around your nostrils, but watching South Africa take on Australia at cricket is nearly always absorbing, even as a Englishman from afar. The current series is as magnetic as ever, thanks largely to the flailing failures (flailures? that should be a word) of the batsmen on either side.

Australian tribulations are particularly satisfying. Phil Hughes is the Great White Hope of the batting line-up and he isn’t that great. Although he is white to be fair to him. He’s also a human slip cradle. A Mardi Gras-style parade nearly broke out in Sydney when Usman Khawaja made a whole 37 on debut against England, such was the craving for a new talent to emerge. His average has since dipped to 32.5. Mitchell Johnson runs into bowl with the grace of a pantomime horse whose front portion has just farted into his partner’s face. He took 3 wickets at 85. All good fun.

But it is also strangely comforting to witness the Australians reveal their survival instincts and level the series at the Wanderers (obviously disregarding the pustular look of jubilation on Peter Siddle‘s face). Hughes and Khawaja made runs. Pat Cummins is a very fast bowler and he was born in 1993. I’m literally old enough to be his dad, although that would have required relations with a girl when I was 14, where I was actually just at home playing carpet bowls with myself on my parents’ landing. And even Mitch dusted himself down and made a poised 40 to win the game. In Perth last winter he seemed to strike a rhythm with the ball after showing it with the bat. Perhaps this will be the impetus for a five-fer in the deciding test.

The series is tantalisingly poised. It promises much. A famous showdown between two ferocious rivals.

What’s that?

Really?

Oh.

Something Kind Of Ooh

I wish that when I was in the careers office I had chosen to be a songwriter instead of amateur blogger. Mainly because if you pen just one successful pop song then you are set for a life spent supping Tropicana in your pants and not much else. I’m guessing that writing a winning blog post gets you nothing apart from minor kudos and possibly a few spelling corrections from your dad.

The other advantage is that when a lyricist is struggling for an apt word or two they can just indiscriminately sprinkle in a bar or two of indistinct noises. An oohoohooh here, a lalalala there. Bloggers can’t do this. It wouldn’t make any sense.

This becomes particularly problematic when you have to describe a day like today at Edgbaston when not very much happens. You have to feed off the scraps of action.

Well firstly Phil Hughes made social cricket media history by becoming the first man to announce his dropping from the team on Twitter. The indiscriminate use of capitals in the middle of his news suggests that his technique is not the only thing that is deficient about Hughes.

He was replaced at the top of the order by Shane Watson, which was a shock that most of us kind of expected. If that makes any sense.

I certainly understood the theory: Australia desperately needed an extra bowler. So they had to drop the batsman who has the least experience and form. And then slot the replacement into his position to cause minimum disruption to the rest of the batting order.

I wasn’t so keen on the practice. It’s a bit like putting a cucumber in your fruit salad. It is technically a fruit but it still leaves a strange taste in yor mouth. Shane Watson averages about 4 opening in first class cricket. And opening in test cricket is way different to opening in one-day cricket. Ask Nick Knight.

But now Watson is 62 not out and flying.

Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh la la la la la la la la.

CyberAussies

I had so much fun ambling around Phil Hughes’ website the other day, it occurred to me that similar pleasures were on offer on the sites of other members of the Australia squad. I reckon that I wiled away 10 minutes clicking about on the Hughes site, so by my calculations with a eleven blokes in a team there could be around another 100 minutes of entertainment available. Which is about half a Hollyoaks omnibus. So well worth it.

This is what I found, let’s start at the top:

Simon Katich: Katich doesn’t have website that I can find. He probably doesn’t know what the internet is, or if he does, he still calls it cyberspace.

Ricky Ponting: Richard seems to have bypassed the traditional website route and got himself one of those Facebook pages complete with a lovely picture of him and his new hair. His suspiciously regular updates are fulsomely commented on by people who obviously don’t know a lot about cricket. Like this obnoxious and agrammatical effort: “Im english but i can’t help but like you. Hope you guys come back in the next test and make it a really close contest, there is nothing like an Ashes test series! :)”. I couldn’t spot a single comment that said: ‘Ponting, you’re a cunt” which there clearly would be if an actual cricket fan had ventured their opinion, including Australian ones.

Mike Hussey: there’s a lot of interesting stuff on here about his career as Professor of Financial Economics at the University of Maine. In retrospect I think this might be a different Mike Hussey but if you’re at all interested in financial economics definitely worth a look.

Michael Clarke: I could only find a fansite that looks like it’s been written by someone who speaks in tongues. I also had never noticed that Clarke look strikingly similar to former Blue Peter presenter Stuart Miles so that is nice.

Marcus North: No. Clearly no. Although I did find a site for the Marcus North Shore cinema in Wisconsin. They’re currently running a season of flims about quite dull middle-order batsmen.

Brad Haddin: No. Nothing that even sounds lamely like Brad Haddin.

Mitchell Johnson: Nope. There is a Mitchell Johnson Financial Services though. And the first four results on the Google image search inadvertently creates the easiest odd one out round ever:

One of these men is an actual serial killer.

Nathan Hauritz, Peter Siddle, Ben Hilfenhaus: not so much as a Twitter account between them. Poor show.

So Phil Hughes is the only Australian cricketer in the Lords starting XI to have his own website which means that this post is a bit of a waste of time. Arguably they all are. I should have stuck to watching Hollyoaks.

Pad Up And Enter

Like many I am ambivalent about Twitter. It works mainly as a global guff-stream where commonfolk and celebrity swim side by side amid currents of fatuous flotsam about their banal existences.

Of course I use it a lot. After all most of my family and pals would say a pretty banal sort of a guy. And a massive hypocrite. For a blogger Twitter becomes more of a seamy canal-side street in Amsterdam. I prostitute myself on there on a daily basis: pestering fellow twunts with posts they almost certainly have no interest in.

I have spotted three participants from this summer’s Ashes series. It comes as no shock to see Graeme Swann on there, a man whose metaphorical head is almost as big as his actual one. It’s the perfect platform for his brand of self-regarding wiffle. I shouldn’t grumble, it’s just this kind of bluster that gets under the collective Australian skin.

My eyebrow raised a millimetre or so more when I saw that Swann was following Jimmy Anderson. I think I just assumed that because he was from Burnley he’d sooner be off racing pigeons in his spare time than get himself involved in this Twitter shambles.

An even bigger surprise was to see that there’s an Aussie on there: although we can forgive Phil Hughes because he’s only little. I do have a difficulty with the egregious amount of exclamation marks polluting his tweets. Five !s in a row should only be used by overexcited prom queens or people who have no idea what punctuation is.

I would commend you to click onto the link to his website though. I’m not sure if Hughes intended his site to reflect his batting technique but it does: unconventional, unprofessional-looking but quite entertaining. Most of the content reads like the slightly more tedious pages of a Conference football programme but the photo album is certainly worthy of a look, in particular snaps of a trip back to his hometown of Macksville.

Here’s one of my favourites: Hughes parading in his homeland from the sun roof of some souped-up motor. He looks like the Pope’s rebellious son (unlikely as that concept is) clutching an obligatory can of VB as if it’s his rosary beads. I’m starting to really like him. I’d estimate that the site gave me about ten minutes of amusement.

Twitter is brilliant.

Pope Philip I