With Brisbane still a riotous hangover upon which the eyes have barely found strength to open, Adelaide now appears in a tall and horrifyingly foaming glass on the bar. What’s more, the bar appears to be stuffed with shiny-faced Australians chanting, “Down in one!” The problem with back-to-back Tests, clearly, is that they leave little time for recovery.
Nevertheless, a couple of simple steps could be taken between now and the queasy prospect of resumption in the early hours of Friday morning, which could make at least some aspects of this Australian cricket experience less of a headache for all of us.
For a kick-off, Ian Botham and Michael Atherton can start taking their hands out of their pockets. Each of these Sky Sports employees speaks to us from the pitch with one fist thrust deep into his leisure slacks in the manner preferred by saloon bar world-righters everywhere. You can almost hear the jingling of loose change, not to mention an unlooked- for note of complacency.
One expects more by way of decorum from these venerable men. Botham, let no one forget, is our time’s leading proponent of whole-wheat breakfast cereals with none of the goodness taken out. You need one of those at times such as these.
Do you remember that embarrassing phase in Botham’s life when his agent was noisily predicting a future for him in Hollywood? One sees him now, eating Shredded Wheat, and one is forcibly reminded that the agent was mistaken. Then again, Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, said that Cilla Black was going to be the next Edith Piaf. No one gets everything right.
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To the best of my knowledge, Hollywood was never said to beckon for Atherton, even by his agent. But that’s as well, because it would have been punditry’s loss. He seems to combine wisdom with articulacy to a degree that would get him thrown out of most sports broadcasting booths for being a threat to the entire scam. You can imagine worried fellow pundits taking him aside during the commercials and saying, “Go easy, mate, won’t you? They’ll be expecting all of us to say something interesting.”
Indeed, one more adroit summary, like Atherton’s at the start of day five, of the reasons why Kevin Pietersen would be better off going in at No 4 rather than No 5, and the whole edifice of punditry by retired professionals as we know it could come crashing down.
Incidentally, Atherton has just published Gambling, an excellent, curiosity-driven, social history book about the spread of the culture of betting, and a volume which is so misleadingly packaged that my local WH Smith has shelved it under autobiography. This is not quite as outstanding as the legendary bookshop error that saw The Joy of Sex filed under fiction, but it is still an unhelpful mistake, and almost entirely the fault of the publisher.
There is, after all, no reason that a big colour photograph of its author should have appeared on the jacket of this book — let alone a photograph depicting him in a tuxedo, in a casino, surrounded by smiling women in evening dress — except, of course that Atherton is famous, and book publishers are wildly dazzled by famous people, presumably because they so rarely get to work with any.
By any sensible estimate of the odds, day five in Brisbane was unlikely to dawn on Atherton, Botham, or anyone else on Sky Sports, and the fact that it did so was down to Australia’s decision to go back in for a second innings when a follow-on was looking like the more merciful option. In television terms, it was akin to watching a beloved labrador brought to the verge of humane extinction on the operating table in Animal Hospital, only for Rolf Harris to decide abruptly to take it out for one last walk.
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Pretty much the only upshot was that Michael Holding got to give us another of his estimable inspections of the pitch, one in which he revealed cracks so wide and deep that they swallowed his biro from clicker to nib. England had been hoping the ground would open up and swallow them, and lo and behold, the ground was suddenly looking as though it might oblige. In fact, it held for the 90 minutes required to finish off the team who had begun the day needing approximately 9,417 runs and the Thunderball to win. English viewers were left reflecting positively on a day’s play that could be fitted in before a reasonable night’s sleep — all over, bar the weeping and gnashing, by 1.30am — but that was about it for positives.
“You can’t go on sticking the needle in, can you?” David Gower said. He was referring to the treatment that Glenn McGrath was allegedly having on his dodgy heel, but he might have been speaking about the occasion more broadly. The awful truth is, though, that they probably can keep sticking the needle in, and most likely will, starting again on Friday. Up for it?