If it Was Raining Palaces, I'd Get the Dunny Door

Nigel Henderson

Description

After the "Greatest Ashes Series of All Time" comes the follow up: "The Most Anticipated Ashes Series in History". With hyperbole like that it is bound to end in disappointment - and it does, at least for England, who find themselves on the wrong end of a whopping. After chucking in the day job as a sports journalist on The Times, Nigel Henderson sets off Down Under with a flicker of hope in his heart. However, as carnage in Canberra gives way to agony in Adelaide, mayhem in Melbourne and surrender in Sydney, he finds his love for the game, and his appreciation of it, severely tested. If It Was Raining Palaces gives a darkly humorous insight into what it's like to be an England fan witnessing the first Ashes whitewash for 86 years - and perhaps the most poorly-conceived tour in cricket history.

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing (Brighton) Ltd
• Date de parution: 18 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908051974
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

IF IT WAS RAINING PALACES I D GET HIT BY THE DUNNY DOOR
IF IT WAS RAINING PALACES I D GET HIT BY THE DUNNY DOOR
The Ashes travails of a whingeing Pom
NIGEL HENDERSON
For KP Henderson (1917-1985)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Sue Corbett, for trying to learn to understand cricket and tolerate it, if not falling head-over-heels in love with it; to Irene Henderson, for initial reading of the text and suggestions; to Robert Henderson, for staying up half the night to help me book tickets, creating the website and sundry technical advice; and, keeping it in the family, to Fiona Henderson, for driving us to the airport. Thanks are also extended to Patrick Kidd, for his enthusiasm in publishing excerpts that are contained in the book on his excellent creation, The Times s blog Line and Length, David Townsend for miscellaneous ticket brokering and good company in Melbourne and Sydney, Walter Gammie for the same and John McNamara, for helping me into a Paddington taxi after an evening on the tiles. I m also grateful to Paul at Pitch for continuing to believe my books are worth publishing; Bill Swallow for designing the cover, twice over because of unforeseen circumstances, Jan Swallow for editing; and Graham Morris for the cover photograph.
Contents
PROLOGUE You little humdinger, you
PART ONE She ll be right - The Warm-Ups
PART TWO Done like a dinner - The Tests
Brisbane : Happy as a bastard on Father s Day
Adelaide : The middle of the bloody day and not a bone in the truck
Perth : Up and down like a bride s nightie
Melbourne : As miserable as a bandicoot
Sydney : Walking the wallaby trail
PART THREE Better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick - The One-Dayers
EPILOGUE Mad as a cut snake
PROLOGUE
You little humdinger, you
SYDNEY, 11 FEBRUARY 2007

PAUL Nixon threw himself into the crowd. Well, the tiny group of England spectators who, as the match had sped to its unlikely conclusion, had increasingly made themselves heard from the concourse in front of the Bill O Reilly Stand; Andrew Flintoff performed a bow of I m not worthy-ness in front of the same fans; and England, who had proved worthy only in the last ten days of their Ashes tour, and their followers, watered down to a sprinkling from the tidal wave who had travelled to see the country s defence of the urn, larked around in the latest downpour from the snarling Sydney skies that had threatened even at this late stage to ensure a third, and deciding, meeting with Australia in the Commonwealth Bank one-day series finals, at Adelaide. That was a place Flintoff and his men had good reason to want to avoid.
I knew all this only from the pictures in the Australian newspapers the following morning. Almost as soon as the clouds started to empty for the final time we turned from our seats five rows back in Bay 26 and scarpered for the cover of the overhanging Churchill Stand, eschewing celebration for shelter. I would have been happy to remain singing in the rain, revelling in the Australian spectators unfamiliar experience of the shock of defeat - a feeling I had encountered more than once too often in the previous three months - but Sue, my cricket-phobe girlfriend, who, to her credit and my chauvinistic shame and surprise, was emerging from her a version with a speed wholly unanticipated, had suffered one soaking too many on this day of changeable weather and changing fortunes. Having had the intricacies of the Duckworth/Lewis method explained - it was not a new form of contraception, I reassured her - she was ready for a warm bus, a dry white wine and the comfort of the sheets of even a two-star King s Cross hotel.
The photographs left me feeling a little peeved: had these supporters who frolicked so promiscuously with the inadequate Nixon, as one Australian journalist curiously referred to the veteran wicketkeeper, put in the hard yards? Had they been there in Canberra for the first day of the tour, when a combined Australian second and third team under the guise of the Prime Minister s XI dispatched England s tin-pot bowling to all parts of the Manuka Oval and raised the spectre that this touring team was not all it had been cracked up to be? In Brisbane, when Steve Harmison sent his first ball of the Ashes series to second slip, unfortunately not by way of an Australian bat? In Adelaide on the final day - I m sorry, I can t bring myself to think about that just yet - or at the back-to-back Tests in Melbourne and Sydney, the jewels in the crown of the Antipodean sporting summer, which fell as good as four days short of their allotted running time?
I doubted it: the main contingent of the Barmy Army, particularly their ubiquitous trumpeter Billy Cooper, were reported to have been stood down from duty after the Twenty20 international on January 9 and though I thought I caught a glimpse of Vic Flowers, their cheerleader, waving his flag and gearing up for another chorus of Everywhere We Go as I watched the first CB final from Melbourne on television, many, I was convinced, were Johnny-come-latelys, backpackers out for a day of fun before returning to a back-breaking week on the strawberry farm, or expats and would-be migr s touched only peripherally by 90-odd days of cricket failure.
But I knew someone who had. Me. I had flown 15,000 miles, driven several thousand more and eaten more chicken parmigiana than was probably healthy for one man as England s ineptitude went from bad to terminal. I had sat upright on trains that traversed whole deserts in the time it took Australia to wrap up a Test match, watching diverse characters such as a Kiwi surfer-dude who tried to engage his fellow passengers in bouts of arm wrestling, including one who turned him down on the grounds that he had cerebral palsy. Shame. That might have been some spectator sport.
I had spent more than 5,000 of my own money, 5,000 of Sue s and slept in 26 separate beds that I shared with her and, quite often, a species of bug that left us both looking like refugees from a smallpox outbreak. I had watched bemused as the world-beaters of the Greatest Ashes Series In History (trademark: English newspapers, September 2005) became pale imitations of their illustrious selves in the Most Anticipated Ashes Series of All Time (copyright: the Australian media, November 2007).
On top of that fostered by my cricket team s failings on the field, I had invited scorn and ridicule, fighting verbal battles with Australian cousins that, in the face of mounting evidence and a hatstand of intimidating green and gold sombreros, could not be won; worse, my love of cricket, that delight in the game for its skills, techniques, aesthetic qualities, reversals of fortune and subplots, that outweighs any concerns about a result, had showed significant indications of being on the wane; worst of all, I had discovered that I really was a whingeing Pom.
Surely, if Flintoff was to going to prostrate himself before anyone, it should have been me.
PART ONE
She ll be right
THE WARM UPS

THIRTY minutes out from Sydney early on the morning of Saturday November 4, the captain of Emirates Flight 412 from Dubai informed us that the weather at Kingsford Smith airport was fine and clear. It hadn t occurred to me that it would be anything but. For this was Australia, land of sand, sea, sun and some awesomely talented cricketers whose abilities, it was often argued, could be directly traced to the nourishing quality of the outdoor lives that they led. Twenty-five minutes later, as we descended through mist and light drizzle, I peered anxiously for the runway on the screen on the back of the seat in front of me that relayed images from a camera on the nose of the plane. Before I had found it we had hit Tarmac, safely if bumpily, but it was perhaps the earliest sign that England's attempts to retain the Ashes they had secured 14 months earlier for the first time in 16 years were to be subject to a degree of turbulence not reckoned on.
On the first leg of the journey, the seven-hour haul from Gatwick to Dubai, I had indulged myself by watching an hour-long highlights package of the 2005 series on the in-flight entertainment system. It was perhaps a foolish move, for I had avoided doing so in the intervening period, the realist in me aware that cricket s fates are fickle and had they changed sides for the briefest of moments - particularly had Glenn McGrath avoided turning his ankle on a wayward ball in the warm-up for the second Test at Edgbaston -England could have been looking down the barrel of a 3-0 defeat or more, rather than a 2-1 triumph. The open-top bus would have stayed in the garage, the Queen would have been forced to bestow honours on rather more deserving candidates than Paul Collingwood, whose reward for his contribution of 17 runs to the victory so riled Shane Warne, and the Freeman of Preston s mother-of-all-benders would not have passed into popular mythology.
So it was that my copy of The Ashes: the greatest series , all ten hours and one minute of it, had remained securely on the shelf at Woolies. Now, though, it seemed inappropriate to deprive myself further. If I was expecting the players to get psyched up, I must do the same myself. Besides which, it was something to take my mind off my ingrained fear of flying, a phobia that returned at the same rate as the molecules of Johnnie Walker, with which I had fortified myself for the journey, evaporated from my pores.
I experienced a couple of JFK moments as the footage rolled past me: the anxious phone calls I had made to Sue from my bed - there must have been at least half-a-dozen of them - on the decisive Sunday morning when Shane Warne, Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz were threatening to render England s attacking efforts at Edgbaston in vain; the strange afternoon we spent as almost the only customers in a Windsor pub, wolfing down a plateful of roast potatoes left over from Sunday lunch, as Australia lost careless wickets in