To belong to a tribe, you have first to understand its rituals.
Here in Britain, for example, you need to understand that the question ‘how are you?’ is not one that requires anything other than a formulaic ‘fine’ in response, and certainly not honesty; that the required answer to a doctor’s question ‘how much do you drink?’ is ‘moderately and only socially’, even if you are a roaring alcoholic; that the airline captain dims the cabin light on take-off for no better reason than he can, and it tells the passengers who is boss. Even this week, rather magnificently, I got behind someone in the petrol station queue whose answer to the ritualistic question: ‘have you got one of our BP fuel cards?’ was ‘No. But please tell me about its benefits.’ The cashier looked as if he had seen a ghost, and the queue behind her hated her for the three minutes it took him to explain it.
One of my own rituals is to go to Lords once a year to watch half a day of rain and half a day of England getting bossed into submission by the visiting side. Think of it as training for life’s disappointments.
I went today, and it all changed. They bowled Ireland out for 38 runs in 95 balls of merciless dominance. ‘Men against boys,’ said the commentators, and, even if you hated the cliché, you had to admit that they had a point. Woakes and Broad were as near to brilliant as a sportsman can be without media hyperbole, and on the stroke of lunch we were done and dusted. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat and an afternoon to enjoy the dampish home of cricket. Job done. National pride restored. What could be better?
And yet. And yet. Even as the England players went through the fist-pumps and hair-ruffling of victory, you could sense that their hearts weren’t quite in it, ditto the mainly English crowd, ditto the commentators. True enough, they had avoided a humiliation against the newest and least funded test-playing nation, and true enough, we were all to be spared the decade of ribbing we would have got if we had lost, but it just wasn’t quite the demolition it seemed.
This was partly because cricket is something that is in its professional infancy in Ireland, and the truth that dare not speak its name is that England should have thumped them. Ireland had gone toe to toe with us on equal terms for two days, and might easily have won had the overcast, gloomy conditions not conspired to weaponise England’s bowlers to the extent they did. Ireland had played as well as they possibly could, and England simply hadn’t, until those last 95 balls. Maybe we had all just got a bit carried away with the euphoria of winning the ICC World Cup twelve days ago.
But there was a bigger reason for our modified rapture, a reason that lives 10,497 miles away at 60 Joliment Street, East Melbourne, a reason called Cricket Australia. A reason we love to hate.
Sandpaper is a common commodity in the hardware shops of England, as is Humble Pie in the delicatessens of our national consciousness. And, after seventeen months of hurt, not one hardened England supporter was thinking anything other than this: ‘why the hell have we used up such a day of brilliance before the Ashes had even started?’.
No disrespect to anyone, except perhaps David Warner, but couldn’t we have saved it for next week?
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