I Made Some Runs

Nudging, nurdling, "All Day" Dave, two Greeks, a Pom, and The Pogues. The pleasures of a successful Saturday.

Gideon Haigh

As golfers get older they talk about breaking their age - completing a round in fewer strokes than their years.  Cricket should really have an opposite benchmark, or so I thought yesterday after grinding out 59 aged fifty-seven.  Nothing brilliant; a couple of good shots, much nudging, some nurdling.  But a bit of an effort on a hot day against a good attack on a big ground; the laptop autocorrecting ‘nurdling’ for ‘hurdling’ has a certain resonance.

Cricket Et Al won’t, I promise, become a seasonal diary, as I can hardly think of anything duller, and as it was bottom us versus second them we not unexpectedly lost.  It was, however, a day to be reminded of time’s passage, from the moment we arrived at the ground.  Treyvaud Reserve used to have a lovely rambling pavilion with decades of sprig marks in the floorboards.  Sometime since we last played there, a new sporting complex has replaced the old sporting simple: a huge and charmless multi-purpose building with dressing rooms somehow smaller and less comfortable than before, like a kind of reverse Tardis.  We’ll get used to it, and it’s to council’s credit that the pitch and outfield were flawless.  But getting older, and not dealing so well with change, I felt a twinge of regret.

Our team probably wasn’t atypical for park cricket these days, formed largely of five south Asian lads, crazy for cricket, and three Aussie battlers in their late fifties, just crazy; it was rounded off with two Greeks, Christos and Tom, and a pom, Dave.  Every team I’ve ever played in at the Yarras kind of becomes my favourite, and this cheery, hearty bunch is no exception.  I’ve been playing a couple of seasons with Tom, for instance, and you’d not find a better bloke in a day’s march than our barrel-chested and booming-voiced keeper.  Even at 50, Tom's a cricketer of enormous gusto.  When he dives it’s always with the extra roll.  When he takes the ball it makes a sound like a fist hitting a punching bag. When he comes up for a mid-pitch conference, he offers more motivational slogans than your average footy coach; when we’re finished he’s the first to offer lifts in his new-model 4 * 4 with massage seats and sound system attuned to 80s bangers (‘a big fuckin’ car for a big fuckin’ wog’).  It also has assisted driving, which Tom says is perfect for Greeks - no worries about your hands leaving the wheel because you're gesticulating.

Tom also likes nicknames, but he’s been struggling to find one for tall, beardy Dave, who hits the deck like his countryman Gus Fraser and swings a bat with abandon.  Big Dave?  Not really distinctive.  Dirty Dave?  Hardly accurate.  Then as Dave plugged away on his nagging length on Sunday, an encouraging voice was heard: ‘You can bowl it there all day, Dave.’  Perfect!  When he took a wicket soon after I arrived in the celebratory huddle with an announcement of a new nickname: ‘All Day Dave.’ Tom smiled, gave an approving nod, and the name rippled round the field the rest of the day.  ‘Carn All Day!’ ‘Get another, All Day!’ It’s dumb, but smart nicknames seldom stick, do they?  Certainly the most successful coinages I've known over the years, like ‘Chips’ Pringle and ‘Rolf’ Harris, have succeeded by their stubborn adhesive stupidity, by their flavour of the free-associated nonsense of a dressing room.

Of this, yesterday’s post-match chat was a classic sample.  Somehow, the Pogues came up, via the funeral of Shane McGowan.  Had two less similar famous people died on the same day than McGowan and Henry Kissinger, I asked? ‘Kissinger was 100!’ commented one voice.  ‘The good die young, eh?’ answered another.  When Tom complained he’d never heard of McGowan, Dave introduced him to Fairytale of New York.

I missed the next bit because I was standing on my kit trying to fit everything in it, but evidently the subject shifted to Mykonos, because Tom and Christos were discussing Club Tropicana.  ‘Wasn’t that a song by Duran Duran?’ I interjected.  ‘Wham!’ a half dozen voices corrected me.  When someone then misattributed a Duran Duran song to Wham, it was generally agreed that ‘Duwham Duwham’ had written many fine tunes, all of them indistinguishable.  To cap it off, Dave and I having chucked our bags in his boot, Tom reached for the console so that his car began throbbing with the beat of ‘Club Tropicana’.  Go Duwham Duwham!  Being old has its pleasures too.