Confession from a sporting dunce

I don’t understand sport.  Never have.  Never will.  When sport comes up in conversation, I usually drift off or politely leave the room.  I know I am unAustralian, I am ignorant and I am stubborn because I refuse to engage.  

     Of course, I'm not stupid. I understand there are sporting seasons yet last week, a student mentioned ashes while we were working on spelling.  The poor dear hadn't grasped the concept of plurals.

     “Ash?” I said, confused.  “Why are you talking about ash?”

     “Miss,” said the young man in a patronising tone, “The Ashes is a cricket game.”

     “Der,” I said wondering why he was talking about The Ashes in August when it’s a game played in summer.  He needed to be focused on spelling.  “Okay, let me check your spelling.”

     Oh, I know about The Ashes.  The Christmas holidays of my youth were spoilt by cricket. We travelled from New Guinea to Australia for the holidays and it should have been an exciting time; reconnecting with relatives, seeing new sights and doing things we couldn't do in PNG.  But there was cricket ... for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It dominated every TV screen (we didn't have TV in PNG).  Cricket was televised at relatives’ houses where we stayed during our travels, in hotel rooms, in fish and chip shops as we stopped to buy lunch or dinner.  Everywhere.  Cricket was even on the TVs in the windows of electrical appliance stores.  That messed with my mind, seeing not just one screen, but numerous ones stacked on top of each other, all playing the same scene - always a wide-angled shot - the expansive pitch, the batsman bent like an old man leaning on his walking stick, the fielders who seemed to wander around aimlessly, spectators frying in the summer heat.  I look back and wonder how many malignant skin cancers grew during those summer matches. The only good thing about appliance store TVs screening cricket was the absence of volume.  My skin still crawls at the thought of the tinny male voice (always male), the cheers rising to a crescendo when someone hit a big one and then a moment’s silence until the tinny voice started on again.

These images remind me of a string of boring Christmas holidays.

So much time wasted waiting around while my family put summer cricket first.

      Mostly I drifted off or read or drew.  The Ashes was synonymous with endless and boring Christmas holidays.

     So it was surprising my mother should mention The Ashes less than 24 hours after my young student.  I’d called in to my mother's place on my way to school.  She was rugged up in front of one of those morning news shows with unimaginative names like Day Break or Sun Rise.

     “Oh, Cath,” said Bubu, her voice full of tragedy.  “Did you hear about The Ashes?”

     Immediately I thought of a match fixing scandal that had been busted before the next season.  Worse, there was a terror plot that would put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk.

     “What’s happened?”

     “We were all out for 60 before lunch,” said Bubu.  Her expression of despair told me whatever these code words stood for, it was terminal.  She continued.  “Julie Bishop was asked if their visas should be cancelled and she said they should all go home and face the music.”

     I wondered why the foreign minister was weighing in on a summer game of cricket.  And honestly, visas for Australians?

     “Bubu,” I said in a tone similar to my student the day before.  “Australians don’t need visas to be in Australia.”

     Now it was Bubu’s turn to be patronising.  “Catherine, the Australians are in Britain playing The Ashes.”

     Obviously, the risk of skin cancer during the Australian summer had proved too high.  Sometime in the last three decades the game had been moved to England where there is barely a solar glow during summer.  My mother’s expression suggested I should leave for school.  
     I don’t understand sport.  Never have.  Never will.