Just saw this – it’s an Eagar at Fenner’s but it’s the administrative-building backdrop that makes it and the administrative building makes me think of Gerhard Richter’s Administrative Building which he was painting and blurring, blurring and painting, nine years earlier.

on 01/08/20

for Wisden Cricket Monthly – hard copy only

East lies desert, west is ocean, wind can come from every direction, a windsock, ugly as any alone or lost sock, gives clues. The wind’s mind is only partly readable.

on 14/12/17

A ball, a legbreak, once written of by Sunil Gavaskar, beat his bat, missed the off stump and caused no wicket, no run, leaving a pencilled dot for a trace, and would now exist only in select eyewitness memory or be zapped entirely if not for Gavaskar’s telling and Ramachandra Guha’s retelling of it later. This ball was that non-epic.

on 5/1/16 

[Short piece for The Cricket Monthly jury, a Rahul Bhattacharya commission.
My choice: Murray Bennett to Viv Richards, Sydney, 1985]

on 28/6/15

Lillee in crotch-high shorts, black-bearded and leonine, stands by the bonnet of a second-hand Toyota Land Cruiser, which is parked on a side street just off a highway somewhere mid-Australia in the middle of 1985. The hair is thick on his cheeks and chin, tufty on top of his head. Sunglasses balanced at 70 degrees do not hide the encroaching baldness. It is not long since he exited [...]

on 5/5/15

When the Tests were over and the washed-out aimlessness I had been feeling all summer got too much, I went to Sam Morris’s grave. He was a black-skinned man who played a Test match for Australia. This made him unique at the time, 1885, and keeps him unique still. 

on 1/3/15

Hard copy only – in The Nightwatchman, Spring 2015 issue, commissioned by Tanya Aldred

[Another short one for The Cricket Monthly jury.
My choice: 1983] 

on 1/2/15

Occasionally he would make half circles out of his hands, cup them round his eyes and, squatting, peer gunbarrel straight down the pitch to re-focus, re-focus. But this was only occasionally and it wasn’t apparent to bystanders that he had ever lost focus in the first place, or played a mis-stroke. To say he was technically near-flawless, exquisite, is to wish we had in English a word less sciencey than flawless but minus the cheese of exquisite. In Russian it’s nepogreshimiy.

on 1/12/14

Hard copy only – in The Nightwatchman, Winter 2014

At the pitch-side interviews, the tournament took a heady twist.
Ian Chappell: “Imran, I thought you were the Lion of Lahore. What’s this [on your T-shirt]?”
Imran Khan: “Well, this is what I’ve been telling Border [Allan, at the toss, who’d evidently been asking WTF re the tiger on your shirt?], that I want my team today to play like a cornered tiger. You know, when it’s at its most dangerous.”
Ian Chappell: “Yeah?”

on 24/11/14

The grinner is seated in row S. Two ‘S’s - which may be meaningful, or not. Shane. Sex. Or, Simone* and Shane. We voyeurs are like desert interlopers pulling back the curtain on a forgotten clan’s sacred mating ceremony, and fumble and sweat as we might to draw the curtain shut, it won’t go, just jangles and bounces in the railing.

on 6/8/14

By 29 Gus Gilmour was three years out of Test cricket and retired to Newcastle. He was 31 when an English team came to town by plane and coach, Gus bowling swing at them off a seven-step shuffle-up and dropping Graeme Fowler in slips. At 33 he captained a game, third grade, local comp: “Got a duck. That convinced me to give it away altogether.” An older-than-his-skin 51 as he was telling me this, he was by now more or less stationary on the couch, roaring good-naturedly at his boys Clint, Ben, Sam. “You’re gunna have to pick up your mother. My car’s died.”

on 14/6/14

Late cut is the best-named shot. Hook, pull, glance, sweep and reverse sweep, on-drive, off-drive, cover drive, square cut, block – evocative labels all, and they paint what’s happening and where. Late cut tells you when. 

on 28/3/14

Some school semester in 1969 or ’70 – it was spring – a hazel-eyed boy under the influence of a particular teacher, a Mr Briggs, could feel his future floating out in front of him, uncertainly, like the insects. 

on 1/3/14

Hard copy only – The Nightwatchman, Spring 2014 & The Best Australian Essays 2014

If it is not his commentating shift, Lawry still watches every ball. He does not pull out his laptop. He does not bring a laptop.

on 26/12/13

Top of the fourth-floor escalator in the southern stand, Day 1, nine minutes till start time, his white hair bushy and windswept, making him look more and more as he ages like a koala-tastic Keith Miller, it’s Ian Chappell. “The media centre,” he says, confused, “it's over where?”

on 9/12/13

If there is a worry now, it’s not knowing where the next Joneses are coming from, and hoping whoever auditions for the role won’t wear the look of the man in the photo in front of the brown-bricked building, his whole Ashes tour like one long ugly stab through the gully-point region interrupted by the hotel room telephone ringing off the hook, South Africa on the line, his face violently forlorn.

[On the 1985 Aussies.]

on 22/11/13 

Hard copy only – The Cricketer, Dec 2013 issue

Jeff Thomson, running late, rolls over, sits upright, thinks of the many annoyances and injustices in his life, remembers how he hates liars and cheats, gets out of bed. He often drinks Scotch instead of beer because beer hangovers wake him up feeling bloated and lethargic. This morning he is in a lousy mood, cranky, but loose, which for Thomson is the optimum state of being for a day’s fast bowling. Without a glance in a mirror, he stuffs his white clothes under an arm and leaves the house on the last day of 1973.

on 11/4/13

First appeared in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2013, 150th issue

Where it matters, in the heart, and head, he is the unprogrammable man. In his hotel room before batting he bats each ball in his head. After batting he often does not look at the tape. Yet he still watches the replay – in his head. 

on 1/3/13

Hard copy only – The Nightwatchman, Spring 2013

In a break in play Michael Clarke, who’d been fielding at slip, said: “You’re so close, Bryce, so close.” You can count up to infinity, any minute of play, the unlikely yet imaginable scenarios by which a wicket might fall. Rare is the falling wicket that does not alter a game’s mood. So to be bowling – to be not yet dragged out of the attack – is by definition to be “so close”.

on 29/3/12

A friend telephoned wanting to know who was responsible for the decision to make Haddin vice-captain. “If Haddin is vice-captaincy material,” I heard my friend say, “who next?” Greg Matthews? Matthew Elliott? Eliot Weinberger?

on 1/12/11