My Favourite Boxing Day
An encounter with Warnie and some homespun wisdom
Gideon Haigh
In my bonsai family, Christmas has never been a big deal. Boxing Day, thanks to cricket, has always loomed larger. It was the first day I went to a Test match, back in 1974. It is the day I have been generally guaranteed to be in the same place, year after year. Over that time, I’ve often been asked for my favourite memory of summer’s hardiest annual. Predictably, it involves Shane Warne; less predictably, it occurred three years after the fabled pageant of his 700th wicket, which I also witnessed, but which is naturally more universal than personal.
On Boxing Day 2009, I was accompanied to the Test by (to borrow Michael Chabon’s expression) my future ex-wife Charlotte, then heavily pregnant with our first child. Cricket had shadowed the whole gestation. We’d had our twenty-week scan in Birmingham the day before the Edgbaston Test; we had then learned that Charlotte was expecting a daughter; I had learned, from my instant inward thrill, that a girl is what I’d always wanted. Our due date was 18 December. When nothing happened, I played for the Yarras, Charlotte looking on, as a precaution.
As you do, we trooped on to the obstetrician, who booked Charlotte in to be induced on 27 December. And as we’d planned, the day after Christmas, with Cricinfo’s Osman Samiuddin as guest, we wended our way to the Melbourne Cricket Ground where Australia was hosting Pakistan - popping in, at one stage, to see our friends in the MCC’s wonderful library.
It was returning from this visit along one of the ground’s serpentine corridors that we encountered Shane Warne and Michael Slater coming the opposite way from the commentary boxes. Everyone, I had learned over the previous nine months, is buoyed by the sight of a pregnant woman. Warnie and Slats were no exception. They fussed and clucked; made comments and asked questions; smiled warmly when told that on the morrow we would be parents. Then Warnie, stepping back slightly, studied Charlotte closely. ‘It’s a boy,’ he pronounced earnestly. I must have looked a little sceptical because he hastened to explain: ‘Simone was that shape when she was pregnant with Jackson.’
Charlotte and I looked at each other. We knew we were having a girl; we even had a name, Cecilia, in mind. But we silently consented to say nothing. Besides, Warnie spoke with such confidence. What was the evidence of a mere ultrasound compared to the certitude of cricket’s master exponent? Part of me, actually, loved that Warnie had not even asked; he clearly believed, on the basis of prior observation and homespun wisdom, that he could determine the sex of an unborn child from a pregnant woman’s ‘shape’. Look, Charlotte and I laughed once Warnie and Slats had pronounced a parting benediction and moved on. Ha! Ridiculous! But I must admit that, when Cecilia was born about thirty-six hours later, we were quick to check that the scoreline was Medical Science 1, Warnie 0.
For all that, I still recollect the exchange fondly - my own intimate exposure to Warnie’s unshakeable belief in his judgement. He pronounced ‘it’s a boy’ with what I fondly imagined was the same conviction he would have stated ‘you can play’ or ‘we can win’ - and it was, in the instant, in the context of the great man’s personality and charisma, weirdly persuasive.
The other outcome of that interlude was, of course, that Cecilia has the birthdate 28 December, and that for me it has always been a work day - in many of her parties, cricket has rendered me a minimal participant. This year, at last, I can set the cricket to one side. The rest of you, play on.
