We’re under way. After the reading from William Blake, after the news of the toss (obscured, after 14 months of careful planning, by a commercial break and miserably goofed in the relaying by a wanly smiling David Gower), at precisely two minutes after midnight, British time, Stephen Harmison sent down the first ball to Justin Langer and the 2006 Ashes series embarked on the onerous job of living up to the excitement of Sky Sports’ trailer for it.
In that clip from an apocalyptic nightmare, England’s yeomen stand rock steady and firm of jaw at the centre of a terrifying whirlwind of fire and ash. It was only a set of bails burnt, wasn’t it? Sky’s trailer appears to hint that this hallowed cricketing contest had its origin in the laying to waste of 90 per cent of the Outback.
Anyway, that first ball? An enormous wide — so wide that it almost cleared the slips. “Harmison has bowled a ball to Flintoff,” a puzzled Nasser Hussain in the commentary box said. Apocalypse postponed.
Still, the fire and brimstone stuff beats the billing given to that other brave band of visiting combatants at present under the televisual microscope in Australia. In the opening credit sequence for I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, the key players appear in the form of drips on a tree. Now, there’s subversive humour and there’s being plain unkind. More dignified on the whole, probably, to be set up by the broadcasters as a wind-buffeted, fireproof warrior with a high tolerance for dust in the workplace, for all the possibilities of hubris.
And if it wasn’t clear before that humungous wide illustrated it, and before Langer and Matthew Hayden began helping themselves to early boundaries, those possibilities are real.
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Hussain alarmingly noted “some very serious Australians” warming up behind him in the hour before play, each one presumably hell bent on ensuring that it isn’t only David Gest who leaves Australia this winter with a bad taste in his mouth.
Shane Warne was quick to announce his intentions, walking deliberately between Gower, Hussain, Ian Botham and the pitch-side camera filming their stripey-shirted, pre-match discussions and offering a jaunty good morning on the way through.
One is expecting to see the spinner get among the batsmen during the coming weeks, but if he continues to get among the presenters in this way, only chaos can ensue.
One doesn’t wish to accuse Australia of underhand tactics so early in the series, but the English National Anthem began with a tinkle on the piano surprisingly reminiscent of the jingle that prefaces the announcement over the Tannoy of special offers in a supermarket. Also, the Australians had four female singers for their anthem, and we had only one.
In addition to these inconsistencies, it can hardly have escaped one’s notice that these Test matches are taking place in winter in the middle of the night - a situation that immediately puts the English television viewer at a woeful disadvantage.
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But if that’s the way they want to play it, then fine. Let it be on their consciences. And if it happens to be summer in Brisbane at the moment, on account of the strange way they organise things down there, then it is the duty of every English person who cares about watching this contest to ride with it, focus on their own game and overcome the obstacles as best he or she can.
Of course, even with the best of preparations, the cricketing all- nighter still has the power to confound us. Given the requirement for an implausibly rock-hard constitution, getting through to this morning’s tea interval without loss (of consciousness) will have represented a tough goal for anyone, apart, obviously, from Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. And even that legendary stay-awake could be in trouble if it goes to a fifth day.
The important thing is that all of us do the best we can, while remaining alert to the dangers. A friend of mine once nodded off in front of the television on a retro Fifties sofa with an authentic plastic-coated covering. By the time discomfort awoke him, perspiration and the weight of his head had caused one side of his face to become firmly attached by suction to the sofa’s shiny arm.
Painfully separating his skin from the plastic, my friend unleashed a loud “poink” directly into his ear canal, causing short-term hearing loss that only cleared after prolonged treatment with a GP-prescribed steroidal compound, taken nasally.
Despite the competing claims of a surprisingly high number of patients who have wounded themselves by dropping the remote control on their exposed toes, and discounting incidents in which the television actually fell on people, this sofa-based ear canal disaster remains the worst television-induced injury that I know of, and stands as a caustic rebuttal to those who think that consuming sport in the domestic setting, via broadcasting, is the easy way out with no risks.
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I offer it as a cautionary tale for the long nights ahead, as we wait to discover who is genuinely on fire and who is ash.