Dances With Chazzwazzers

Um, sorry folks. Ran out of time to Skype and text and all that, which is rather poor to be honest. So here’s a picture instead.

The obligatory ‘I’m alright mum, I’ve got my best shirt on, had a shave, been to church and I’m just about to eat something’ picture that always reassures those keeping the home fires burning.

Just off to the MCG. I’m hoping England’s performance today matches the substance of the bacon, egg and cheese pie, i.e. dependable.

Come on England!

Merry Christmas one and all. Thank you for sticking with my musings and for all your encouragement.

Apparently, I’ve missed the repeat of Escape To Victory on the telly at home. Bother. No matter, here, for me anyway, is what Christmas is all about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czc-0OqfhEM

Have a great time. X

It’s Christmas Eve. The night before. He’s coming! He’s coming!

http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/cricket/25490206

Greg, a few months off his fifth decade, has been reduced to a giggling seven-year-old. Don’t give him any Opal Fruits, it’ll send him over the edge.

To borrow, again, a quote from a cult film which has recently launched a less-successful sequel, I’m in a glass cage of emotion. Or a concrete and glass bunker of emotion to be exact. The compellingly unlovely part of the Southgate complex across the Yarra River from Flinders Street Station.

Yesterday evening from a restaurant table I marvelled at the rain embellished view of Melbourne’s CBD. A compelling patchwork of slate greys and blues underpinned by the orange lights of the station and the avenues of trees, all finished with a serene, soft pink sunset.

Twelve hours on and the rest of the gang are keen to get a preview of their venue for Christmas lunch with the Barmy Army in the very bowels of the Crown Casino. A behemoth of a dimly lit building lined with pokies, baccarat tables and asphyxiating false hope. I squirm. This is the reason I’ve never been to Vegas and part of me wishes I’d joined my roommates upcountry, down on the farm.
I shudder, reel and with the recce complete, we head for lunch. The rain means we don’t walk far and head instead for the adjoining food hall. Scores of Woolworth’s style breakfast counters jostle for the business of lunching Victorians. Curry counters with e-number sauces, burger bars with banality and mediocre meal deal touting sandwich shops are staffed by identikit people with processed pre-Christmas smiles.

Two days from the Christmas Day that I’m meant to be spending in the sun it’s raining. Hard. One of my boyhood heroes, David Coleman, has sadly died, Swann’s gone and after twenty five years of hard work and peerless involvement in the local church’s Carol Concert, the highlight of my home Christmas, news reaches me from back home that my father has hung up his cassock and won’t be there this year. Are the wheels of my life coming off?

It’s only Monday but there’s only one thing for it. I need a pie.

That glass cage of emotion. I look past the steak pie, even the chicken & mushroom. At least if I am to break with the PieDay Friday tradition, my faithful readers need to know why.

I go for tuna pie.

Yes, you read that correctly. Tuna.

And here’s why. One of my recent theories is that here in Melbourne, after days of several days of fantastic feeds and in one of the foodie capitals of the world, it is impossible to have a bad meal.
So with that safely established in my fragile psyche, how bad can it possibly be?

Halfway through the meal, it’s apparent to my fellow diner that it’s quite bad. Over the chews of my discomfort, Jackie casually asks if the Soon-To-Be-Michelin-Starred-Surely Green Man will be going in for this kind of thing anytime soon?
Greg thinks it only fair that in the wake of the recent opprobrium Tuna Pie is served at the England team’s Christmas Lunch as punishment. Meanwhile, Lucky Paul, a picture of Yorkie smugness, munches silently and contentedly on his steak pie. His smiley mouthfuls speak louder than words.

Where to begin. The brief microwaving prior to serving saps the pastry of the last vestiges of its character. A plasticky, flavourless top layer that adorns a mad professor’s out tray of muddled ingredients. The shredded tuna steak doesn’t begin to pretend it’s anything other than tinned. Did it swim the depths once, fleetingly, or was its unhappy life spent entirely in a laboratory? The onions, tomatoes and red peppers add a further unnecessary sweetness to the already lost cause, while the capers may as well be on hung on the Fed Square tree such is their superfluity.
This pie is not what an England cricket fan needs right now. Like the Ashes, this pie is un-saveable.

My head’s a muddled Monday mess. Then clarity. At last.

Because, this pie has shot down the unbreakable theory that you can’t have a bad meal in Melbourne. So if the impossible really can come true in Victoria’s fine capital, then, maybe, just maybe, there’s every chance England can win on Thursday.

Against all odds and all that.

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity’s central character, Rob, is a record store owner and list maker extraordinaire. I guess it’s a bloke thing, lists. Most of us empathise with Rob. We love a good list. One of my pals Chubby is an extension of this phenomenon. He’s a team-maker.

Texts, tweets, emails, whenever, however. If there’s an opinion to be had on sport, it’ll be winging its way to me, extemporised in the form of eleven (or fifteen) names. Win or lose, new era or not, Chubbs will have an opinion and I’ll usually be the first to know it. He’s not been in touch yet re yesterday’s big cricket news which must mean he’s really got his thinking cap clamped on.

The fallout from the Graeme Swann retirement is still swilling around social media circles like bitter sediment at the bottom of a cask. The great man has gone, let’s move on. Stop expending pointless energy on whether his decision was ‘cowardly’ or ‘traitorous’ (it wasn’t either of these by the way) and look to the future. The immediate future is the Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Thursday. I am fairly sure England will line up like this.

Cook (c)
Carberry
Root
Pietersen
Bell
Bairstow (wk)
Stokes
Broad
Bresnan
Anderson
Panesar

Yep, there’s yet another list on its way. In the long term England are at the beginning of a new era so must plan accordingly. Michael Carberry deserves another crack at the Test arena, although in a year or two will make way for either Joe Root or Alex Lees as partner for captain Alastair Cook at the top of the order. Ian Bell is a shoo-in at four. Johnny Bairstow will come good. Stephen Davies is the best wicket keeper in the country so should come into the team. Durham have given England their newest star, Ben Stokes and his colleague Scott Borthwick, the young leggie, should be a de facto replacement for Swann. Stuart Broad is now in essence the attack leader and Steven Finn, I am confident, will come back a better player next year. Tymal Mills is bloomin’ quick and should be given a chance at the highest level with James Harris and Chris Jordan next in line for a Test call up.

Cook (c)
Carberry
Root
Bell
Bairstow
Davies (wk)
Stokes
Borthwick
Broad
Finn
Mills

Correspondence from Mr Chubb, incoming I dare say. We do it because we love it. We do it because we care. Even if it makes not a jot of difference.

Lists. Teams. Prattle.

A rainy Sunday morning in Melbourne and the shock news that Graeme Swann, one of the best players of his generation, has retired from the game with immediate effect has hit me hard. It’s been a tough few weeks following England and today’s developments have exacerbated this.

Elizabeth Street is teeming with shoppers dodging the showers making their way towards the busy Queen Victoria Market. Still reeling from the news, I head to what has become our local cafe for a restorative Long Black to be met by the grinning Greg.

‘Bad news about Swanny’ I say. ‘Dreadful’ Greg agrees. Then he fixes me one of his trademark smiles, there’s hope heading my way somewhere in his next sentence. With Arthur Daley assuredness he drags me into his scheme. I feel like Edmund Blackadder in the eye of a gathering Baldrick cunning plan storm.

‘You know there’s only one man who can save us here don’t you?’

I know exactly who he means but magnanimously I let him finish his own point. I brace myself.

‘Tredders’.

It’s another belter. But then Greg is one of life’s optimists. When he isn’t being unfailingly positive, he’s being unfailingly loyal to one of his sports teams. Usually it’s England or Arsenal but mainly it’s Kent County Cricket Club and their underachieving, under-appreciated band of brothers.
He reserves particular affection for their erstwhile captain and jobbing England ODI player James Tredwell. On another tour in New Zealand, I lost count of the amount of times Tredwell’s name was presented as the answer to England’s problems (not that we had any back then, by the way…). I’m only surprised it’s taken Greg ten days to crowbar his beloved Tredwell in here.

The last time I saw Greg he asked me, in all seriousness, to prepare the preface to his debut book, ‘Tredwell’s Ashes’, the inside story of how, against all odds, one man inspired a nation to victory over their oldest foes. For one reason or another (but mainly because Tredwell left his position half way through the season winless and comparatively wicket-less and wasn’t even thought of, let alone picked for England) the book never saw the light of day.

‘It’s made for him’ Greg continues. ‘He’ll take Swanny’s position at second slip, bat at number four and spin us to victory in the remaining Tests.’

‘What do you think?’

Silence. Reflective silence.

Following England. You don’t have to be mad to do it.

But it helps.

The saviour of English cricket? Err, probably not.

There should be more to put in here today than this.

But I can’t walk past a one man band, in the middle of Melbourne, on the last Saturday before Christmas without taking a picture of him.

I’m only human.

And here, for good measure and on a similar theme, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMuItKJGBzY

Have a great weekend.

I told them, I said to them, ‘Lads,’ I said, ‘Would I ever let you down? I mean, look at this.’

‘You’ve got your space to swing a quokka (for earlier in the day the boys had enjoyed a day on Rottnest Island, the exclusive home of the aforementioned macropod), you’ve got your air conditioning. What more could you possibly want?’

‘How about this, in hostel form, on a full time basis. For the rest of the tour….’

And with that, we glumly boarded the midnight plane to Melbourne. Like Andre Villas-Boas, I think I may have lost the dressing room.

‘Lads?’

‘Err, lads?’

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ etc etc. Exuent, pursued by a stare. And a jolly harsh one at that.

A quokka, yesterday.

My beloved England have just lost The Ashes. We’ve been out-thought and outplayed in every game so far and are in all sorts of bother but, but, at least we don’t do team photos like this.

What on earth is that all about? Is this the most homoerotic shot of an international cricket team ever taken?

Don Bradman would turn in his grave.

There’s a traditional ditty sung at birthdays and stag nights that burns through to the very core of my soul. It’s sung in all oblivious innocence in my presence by people who aren’t in on the joke. For those who are, it’s sung as a rapier-like riposte, the tip of which pierces the soul like the sight of your best fast bowler being flayed back over his head for six. ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ they’ll lustily sing, eyes pointing like daggers my way, smirks with razor-sharp edges.

Occasionally my mates will just sing this without waiting for an occasion. ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. It still hurts.

Several years ago I organised a Stag Do (it may even have been my own, I wasn’t even getting married, it didn’t matter) to the West Coast of Ireland. As tradition dictates everything fell to me to arrange, which, having done a few of these tours before, I undertook this task with customary enthusiasm with nothing overlooked or left to chance.

We would fly the red eye from Luton to get to our transit destination, Knock, for breakfast. We’d then get to our destination proper, Galway, for a weekend’s worth of salty badinage and the type of drinking sessions the late, lamented Peter O’Toole may have been proud of.

A gin-soaked EasyJet flight from Luton was followed by a lot of waiting around at Knock airport for, seemingly, the only six-seater taxi journey of the day to George Town, the closest town to Knock Airport. In this time Welsh Andy broke the Guinness World Record for Speedy Stout Skulling as impatience infiltrated our close knit group like boozy wildfire. Unluckily, we had to wait some more time for a bus, and rather than doing something sensible like completing the sudoku or playing I-Spy, we availed ourselves of one or two of the local hostelries to raise the hedonism levels another notch.

Couldn’t we just have gone to Edinburgh instead?

Glances were shot my way, bitter murmurings had permeated the sweet drunk talk. In short, my abilities as the group’s peerless party planner were being called into question. What had seemed such a good idea at the time was now looking insanely daft.

Couldn’t we just have gone out in London instead?

The bus journey, when it eventually came, was the longest three hours of my life, longer, even, than the complete hash I made of my History A-Level exam. We trashed the bus. I sobered up enough to sink into the depths of despair as the chaos raged all around me. Oliver Cromwell himself would’ve been made more welcome had he embarked at one of the pretty villages we passed through.

Couldn’t we just have gone out in Bedford instead?

After an eternity, we reached Galway. I don’t know how we made it off the coach into the next pub, but we did.
We’re met there by Eats’ cousin. ‘What took you so long? she asked. Sheepishly I spoke up.
‘Well, the airlines running from Luton fly only to Knock which is, quite clearly, the nearest airport to Galway. We’ve had to get a bus down here. I’ll be honest, when I booked it, it seemed reasonably straightforward.’

‘Yeah, you know all the Irish airlines fly from Luton straight to Galway.’

The jukebox ceased. Drinks were slammed down on the table. The whole pub, no, the entire town seemed to be looking at me. The world stopped. My knees gave. My throat dried. My soul sunk like a ten pence piece to the bottom of a pint glass.

I slowly turned round to look at my mates. Anger, visceral hatred, then laughter. Howls and howls of raucous laughter.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow….’

I think you know where this is going….