Professional Writing - Recent Work

The Perfect Game for a Team of One - The Age, Feb. 2006

My wife had a horse in her backyard as a kid. She looks wistfully around our little suburban backyard now and wishes our daughter could have one too. I look wistfully around that same backyard – especially at the weatherboard house at one end of it – and wish I could give my son something better: a brick wall.

Growing up with only a sister for company, he’s going to need one.

When I was a kid in suburban Geelong, there was nothing better than a game of backyard cricket with my two younger brothers during the summer holidays. But because they were younger brothers they were prone to first innings dummy spits.

We’d be less than a session into a Test and one or both of them would be inside whinging to mum about an alleged ball thrown at a head on a run between wickets or an unfair dismissal (because I apparently bowled too fast). Like a lonely 12th man, I’d be left outside with my bat, tennis ball and a wicket-sized plastic bin. But I still had my brick wall.

Like the wardrobe that lets the kids go through to Narnia, mine was no ordinary brick wall. It was the site for many five Test series and the occasional one-day international. And it was the reason I’ve got both the best non-preferred throwing arm and the worst batting technique at my cricket club.

You might think, playing cricket by yourself, the rules would be simple – Bradman-like, you just grab your cricket stump and golf ball, right? Alas, no. My rules were detailed and meant that the game was played in the true spirit of cricket. The best man, me, always won.

Most Tests in my era – the early to mid-‘80s – were played between an Australian team starting to lose a lot of its stars and an all-conquering West Indian line-up. The toss would decide both which team I would represent and whether that team would be batting or bowling first.

If we were in first, I would hold the bat and stand in front of the plastic bin a good distance from my magical wall. My left arm would be used for chucking the ball against the wall so that as a right-hand batsman it was easier to get my hands back on the bat. But the ball would still be on me so quick I’d never get the chance to move my feet. I was batting by pure instinct as I faced quicks like Garner, Ambrose, a waning Lillee or a waxing Merv Hughes.

I’d use a tennis ball that was as close as possible to new (pinched from my Dad’s Slazenger can) so that the first morning of the Test had the customary lift off the wicket. The pitch itself was rough-hewn grass that caused a lot of deviation and the bricks on the wall were uneven, meaning there was sometimes what amounted to swing through the air. It was pretty easy to get an edge through to the shrubs and lose Haynes, Greenidge or Richards cheaply.

Runs were judged not by the distance the shots travelled, but by the quality of the shot. Sixes were disallowed (I wasn’t going to fox my own rubbish and who could hit a six off Colin Croft anyway?), fours were into fences on either side of me, and any tree, shrub or other garden obstacle (hose, gnome) on the full was out. To ensure the tailenders didn’t outscore the regular batsmen, I batted left-handed and threw with my right. The tail was blasted out quickly via some Holding or Lawson yorkers.

Once a team was all-out it was, of course, time to get into the field. The rubbish bin wicket had to be moved back a few paces and the complex task of bowling to an invisible batting team would begin. The basic principle was that the bin became both the wickets and the opposing player’s bat.

I’d steam in (actually take one step) and bowl, but not necessarily straight at the bin-wicket-batsman. The only way a batsman could be bowled or lbw was if the ball hit the wicket straight on – not easy with the lumps on the wall – and then went straight back up the pitch (a few centimetres meant bowled, just about up to the wall meant lb). If, however, the ball deviated in any direction after hitting the bin that was a shot from the batsman and scored runs for his invisible team.

The phantom Aussies or Caribbeans could also score runs from balls I deemed to be, basically, crap. If the ball was on a bad length or line it would, of course, pass through to me as I morphed from bowler into wicket-keeper. But I would adjudge how many runs the batsman would have scored off the bad ball.

Invisible batsmen could still be caught in the field, but it was a rarity. The ball would need to fly off the bin lid and stray into a shrub. The main way a batsman went out, as in a normal Test, was caught behind or in the slips. After I bowled the ball it might hit a part of the bin and fly off to my right or left and I’d dive and take a blinder. Seeya later Mr Chappell, let’s see what little AB’s got to offer!

And to think, if I can’t play with him, my son has to make do with Ricky Ponting Cricket on Playstation . . . It’s time to whack some brick veneer over the old weatherboards, I think.

*this is the full version of an article that appeared in The Age, Feb 2006

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