As the nation self-medicates after the nasty shock of a slightly interesting Sydney to Hobart boat race finish (remember that?), it’s time to ease ourselves gently back into the known world.
No, not via Glenn McGrath’s yawnsome predictions about a Test cricket whitewash (although he may well be right), but something closely related.
An SCG Test always brings back memories - of previous SCG Tests, oddly - but more specifically how my late father and I related over the years through the prism of our great summer game.
Dad was never a cricket tragic, but he helped me become one. He did, however, have his heroes. He spoke glowingly of Neil Harvey’s crisp cover drives and Sid Barnes’ pugnacity, but he saved his biggest raps for the great Keith Miller.
Like mine, Dad’s playing career was humble. His high point was getting the wicket of Alan Kippax in a charity match. Kippax once hit 260 not out in a record last-wicket stand at the SCG in a Sheffield Shield match (with 15,000 watching). Victoria’s finest couldn’t shift him. But Dad did.
Our first pitch was the hallway in Thirroul. It was not so much leather on willow as ping pong on plastic, him lobbing the ball down the floorboards and me waving a little blue bat. A leg-glance into my room was two runs (difficult shot for a five-year-old), a square cut into my sister’s room could have been four. The wicket offered consistent bounce for the batsman but there was still a bit there for the bowler prepared to work. Then the carpet went down in 1974 and it was never the same. But I was ready for the outdoors.
This is when my ambition terrified Dad the most. Like every other kid in that era, I wanted to bowl fast. He and I would grab the gear and head for the old nets in the far corner of Gibson Park. Once padded up, he was safe on the pitch - the one area my thunderbolts were guaranteed never to land.
Our first joint SCG visit was to see Greg Chappell’s team take on Clive Lloyd’s Caribbean collection in 1975. I remember a hot day, kids my age smoking cigarettes next to me on the terraces and Dennis Lillee having a fair old set-to with the likes of Gordon Greenidge.
The next time we went back, I had become an absolute cricket nut, ear glued to transistor, marking progress ball by ball in the ABC cricket book. It was the summer Simmo had come back to captain the Aussies at the age of 41 against Bishen Bedi’s Indians. The highlight of the day was seeing Thommo - who stayed true to the baggy green while everyone else took Kerry Packer’s coin - blast not one but two stumps out of the ground in bowling Gundappa Viswanath. A 14-year-old from the Gong was impressed.
Each time we went back, there seemed to be less grass and more concrete, not that it mattered once the batsman was taking block and the bowler marking out his run-up. I’d never heard a crowd roar louder than when Rodney Hogg pinged Geoff Boycott lbw first ball of England’s second dig in 1979.
It was about 20 years before our last visit in ’99 - another Ashes Test, McGrath giving Graham Thorpe and company plenty to think about. We got the train up. He told me tales of his boyhood days riding billycarts around Surry Hills and Paddo and selling papers outside the ground, dodging the tough kids. Some yarns I’d heard a hundred times, others never. We had a few beers, had our photo taken by two blokes from Derbyshire behind us, got sunburnt despite the shade, and made our way back to Thirroul.
All the trips were great on the day but the memories decades later are immeasurably more rewarding. It’s sad that Dad is no longer around to weigh in on this, but I doubt he’d disagree.
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