(Above: a cricket sketch from the magazine Punch, and a book by Dal Stivens).Inspired by the loss of the Ashes by Australia - well it'll take a miracle for them to turn it around - and inspired by Tim Blair scribbling a column based on him selecting a first eleven from the current politicians going around (Our pollies on a sticky wicket), I thought it'd be timely, what with the cricket season coming up quickly thanks to global warming, to select a team from our finest commentariat columnists.
After all, if the Australian selectors can select a specialist spinner to tour, then not select him to play on a spinning wicket, how wrong could you go by selecting a team of heavy hitters? So without further ado, maestro the envelope please:
Piers Akerman
Andrew Bolt
These lads just have to be the openers. What you need are a couple of relentless, remorseless types who'll grind the opposition bowlers into the ground, through dint of endless repetition. These are as close as we can get to a current Bill Lawry or Geoffrey Boycott, and like Bill, they love to keep pigeons flapping in the air. Sure, it's boring, but it's got to be done. Never a backward step, always on the front foot, then neatly blocked like a Trevor Bailey for a dot ball. Maybe a single every five overs or so. You can waste five days like this, so a social fifty overs is a doodle.
Tim Blair: just has to go in as 1st drop. First of all he's a cricket tragic, and so is steeped in the lore of the game. He even stays up late at night blogging about the Australians being thrashed, a weird kind of masochism typical of Australian cricket enthusiasts.
He loves to steal cheeky singles from other players, and scampers around like a driven hyper active gadfly ready to tear into anyone or anything without regard for tradition or a by your leave. On a good day, he might even make captain, bringing with him a love of slagging and sledging that'd unnerve any timid opponent and allow him to drop catches in slips.
Janet Albrechtsen: surely a solid middle order bat. The way she thwacks activist judges around just makes you drool at the prospect of seeing her apply willow to leather. Sssh, let's not get her angry, let's just get her out on the field with those pesky lefties.
Miranda Devine: here's where it starts to get risky. If the players higher up in the order have built a solid innings, then the Devine is a fair bet. She flails about with passion, and will either score a duck or knock off a hundred leftie greenie heads. Risky, but you need someone in the middle order with that passionate sparkle, someone who can demolish video games, computers, the intertubes, screen culture and the plastic brains we now use for thinking.
Paul Sheehan: well he just has to be included, but where and doing what? Perhaps as wicketkeeper, because he's willing to catch any idea from right field, be it magic water, Ian Plimer or the sorting of socks, and hurl it at loose thinking types with a view to a stumping. And he might do okay with the bat, though he's inclined to sweeping strokes that fail to connect. Think of him as Rodney Marsh, and you might see how it'll work.
Christopher Pearson: oh dear. I'm told that when assembling a social cricket team, you always get to the point where you end up a player or two short, and then the call goes out. Who wants to play, who'll help out, who can we dragoon into the squad. Perhaps we could persuade Pearson to roll his arm over as a spinner, though any guile he should be directing at Chairman Rudd could just as easily lob in the direction of the Roman Catholic church, as Pearson explains away current policies by referencing medieval theology.
And he'd have to be hidden in the field, somewhere down in deep third man territory. But if given lessons by Johnny Gleeson, he might just manage a two fingered grip, and be able to tweak the ball so it landed on the pitch. After that ... who knows.
Hal G. P. Colebatch: a natural, perhaps best as a steady seamer, replete with worship of England and the good old days when cricket was shipped to all corners of the globe. As a reliable traditionalist, he doesn't stand for any nonsense, but instead trundles down with that solid British reliability found in the likes of Freddie Trueman and Andrew Flintoff. A cutter from him could decapitate the typical leftie determined to ruin civilization by a taste for color television and the Beatles, not to mention their abhorrence for bowler hats.
Greg Melleuish: we're starting to struggle now. No disrespect, but Melleuish is more by way of a second eleven, given that he's also an academic and so only appears irregularly in The Australian. He's also inclined to be wayward in line and length, and the lack of direction makes him erratic, easily picked off for boundaries at regular intervals. But put him up against the likes of David Burchell, who's such a ponderous pontificator that he might reduce a game to existential boredom, or the rantings of Clive Hamilton, who fancies himself as a progressive but wants to ban everything in sight, and Melleuish is worth the risk.
David Penberthy: whew, back on more solid tabloid turf with Penbo, who loves to spray the ball around, preferably at head height, and though he's inclined to spend too much time in an off the cuff way with text messages, he's sure to produce a lively spell, which might range from support of gay marriage to the banning of nudity on beaches, along with a few bouncers aimed at anyone who gets in the way. As producer of Australia's most cheap skate conversation at The Punch, he should also be obliged to fund the meat and grog for the post match BBQ.
Finally, it's time to pull a swiftie. In Dal Stivens funny book about cricket - well funny if you grew up in the country in the middle of cricket tragics - the opposing team brought in a demon bowler as a ringer, so fierce he was likely to set beards on fire. Well that kind of humor doesn't cut it any more in this modern age, but the principle is sound. Just because we're dealing with commentariat columnists, there's no reason why we couldn't smuggle a politician into the team.
After all, that offers up the likes of Peter Costello, John Hewson, and Tony Abbott. Well there's no room for Costello. He packs up his bat and goes home too often, and then you're a man or a PM short, and his smug smirk and self satisfaction level is way too off-putting, especially when you consider he's likely to end up praying for a result rather than actually going out and saving the game. Let's just count him retired.
Hewson is simply too erratic and angry, and anyhow tends to operate behind a pay wall, and we like to keep this kind of game to a social level. He's just as likely to injure one of his team mates in the nets with a bouncer as do over the opposition, and that's why they don't really like him.
Which leaves:
Tony Abbott: now admittedly he's been selected by Tim Blair as a top order batsman and religious order bowler for his team, but we like the fact that Abbott is actually fit, athletically inclined, has God on his side (as well as the pope), will cover for Pearson in the field, and isn't afraid to thump a ball into the pitch just short of a length in the hope of knocking off an opponent's head.
And he's a regular. He always turns up to play, and he always has bat and ball in hand. Give him a blog in the Daily Terror, offer him a spot on Lateline or the 7.30 Report, call up for a chat on radio, and he's there. When Malcolm Turnbull goes missing, this terrier is still into it. He can open the bowling, and by golly give him a bat and he might just do a Mitchell Johnson and thump those progressives for a century.
As for twelfth man, it's tricky. So hard to get reliable players these days. There was Michael Duffy, the original inspiration for this site, but he's given up the daily scribbling and now only appears on radio and in book form. Michael "neo" Costa seems to have been a flash in the pan, but no doubt he'll come back into form at some point, so we should keep him in mind and fond memory, and there seem to be a few others who turn up for a quick flourish of the bat, before edging to slips like any Test level Australian cricketer, and then promptly retiring. I guess we'll be able to rustle someone up on the day.
No, it's the balance that worries me a little. Everyone, you see, is a right handed batter and bowler. There's no way to attack over the stumps, or break up the line and length of the opposition bowlers by having a cacky hander at the other end while the right handers go about their business.
And frankly the team will find it hard to cope with anything coming from left field, whether it's a bouncer, or a spinner or just a plain old leg cutter. Same goes with anything else down the leg side - like a hook or a pull shot or even a catch at leg slip.
Put a ball on the off and it's four, but when a ball darts in from the left, it's bound to find an edge or a way on to the pads. And of course that's what those deviant lefties are bound to do.
All the same, with John Howard, cricket tragic supreme, as spiritual coach - he'll be a great comfort to Pearson and Abbott - this team would do Australia proud.
Try to come up with a matching team of progressives and watch how their spirits would falter, and they'd skulk away, tails between their legs.
But wait, you cry, you've forgotten the most important person! What about Gerard Henderson? Hah, I'm told every team has to offer up an umpire, preferably someone who likes to dress up in a nifty panama straw hat, with a nice casual blazer, who can stand behind the stumps and ensure fair and decent and balanced play. Who better than Mr. Henderson?
Just to make sure those lefties don't get out of hand, and instead have to play up and play the game.
By golly, I wonder if I can pitch this idea to Chairman Rupert?
(PS I think most of what I wrote above is gibberish, but I'm assured by reliable sources who helped with the text that everything I've written is technically correct in terms of cricket and men at silly leg. Well who knows? Watching men run around in whites can only put you to sleep, most likely with nightmares about green grass stains and red leathery marks around the groin area).
(Below: a cricket cartoon from Vanity Fair, 1884 by Carlo Pellegrini. Golly, a good stare is enough to send those lefties packing).
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