Net Gain

A night at Como Park

What happened next was that I went to cricket training at Como Park. Thursday’s balmy weather guaranteed a good turnout.  As I walked over the brow of the hill and surveyed the tableau below, it was hard not to feel uplifted by the general love of the game on show in our twice-weekly communion.

There is cricket training, then there is park cricket training.  Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of good cricketers at the Yarras who take it plenty seriously.  But they stand on equal terms with everyone else - good, bad, terrible, really terrible and primarily social.  I love that at park cricket training, everybody bats in the order in which they turn up and mark their name in the roll, then for exactly the same amount of time.  In that rough and ready egalitarianism, it feels like I would want Australia to be: turn up and you’ll get a go like everybody else; there’s a level for everyone; all contributions are valued.  And when everyone understands and trusts a process, anything is possible: even running fifty blokes through three nets over two hours.

I’m sure I’m not alone in having over the years found the companionable busyness of training a reliable relief from worry.  You seldom arrive and depart with the same set of thoughts or preoccupations.  A couple of colleagues were interested in My Brother Jaz in that nodding way (‘Nice piece’ - ‘Thanks’ - ‘Take long?’ - ‘Nope’) but otherwise the pleasure was in blending in and taking part.  A bit of committee chat; a yarn with a guy who’s returned; a look at a couple of new poms; a severe glance at pitches that resembled an unkempt nature strip. Walking in to bat after a couple of weeks without a hit, I immediately hit all round a good yorker, and swore at myself.  But training is as forgiving as cricket, and life, can be unforgiving.  I replaced the prone metal stumps, carried on, hit them OK.  That capacity for forgiveness appealed likewise to Philip Hodgins in his wonderful poem The Practice Nets, ‘It doesn’t matter how many times you’re out/You’ll always carry your bat. It’s like a dream.’  And it is.

Speaking of stumps, one artefact at Como Park connects this post and the last.  Over my thirty-odd years at the Yarras, my gear and the club’s have become, almost symbolically, communal: I’m always lending shirts to guys who don’t have them; I wear boots that I fished from lost property.  At one stage many years ago I deposited a set of metal stumps - with a one-off design with a bar bent in the shape of an elongated, upside-down U - in the equipment bunker.  They’re the stumps I was given for my twelfth birthday, which my brother Jaz and I used for games down the driveway, so have stood the test of forty-five years.  It was with these stumps behind me that I broke my only kitchen window trying to hit Jaz over the top; I’ll blame residual trauma from that for my inability to repeat the shot since.  We’ve taken the same journey, me and those stumps: from a boyhood backyard in Geelong to a suburban enclave at Como Park, and they’re probably bearing up better than I am.  In them, another vestigial trace of my brother, never far away.

What is ‘training’ at our level?  We’re not really going to get much better, we’ll be happy enough not to get too much worse, there’s something curiously pure about a pursuit for the sake simply of its moral and kinaesthetic pleasures.  A few years ago we brought a Sheffield Shield coach down for a look in the hope of criticism.  He commented on the noisiness, the mutual chiacking, the obvious cameraderie.  ‘Enjoy it,’ he said, advice we’d unconsciously followed and I hope always will.

I stop at one point to chat to Marty, who is not only a Cricket Et Al subscriber (g’day Marty), but joined the week after I ran him out against Burnley, thereby becoming one of nature’s gentlemen.  ‘Beautiful night,’ I say.  ‘Wouldn’t be anywhere else,’ he says.  ‘Ready for the weekend?’ I ask.  ‘Ready to make a hard-earned 3,’ he laughs.  And there’s park cricket right there.  No great expectations; just a cushioning of never-fading hope against the press of our personal limits.  Although Marty, you can play, OK?  Go out and get some this weekend, comrade…..

I love this place.  I love these people.  In their own haphazard and knockabout ways they’ve always been there for me, picked me up, pushed me on, shared the good, and laughed, sometimes uncontrollably, at the bad.  Thwarted by my endless shortcomings, I’ve retired in my head a dozen times; the Yarras just wait patiently for me to see sense. So here I am again.  Half an hour of short catches and my hands throb happily.  Pick up a Kookaburra two-piece and swing it a mile.  Bwahahaha!  Never gets old, does it? Hilarity is derived from a massive unflushable turd in the downstairs toilet, optimistically wadded with yards of toilet paper, which our indefatigable 76-year-old left-arm tweaker Scuz likens to a Robert Crumb cartoon.  Night closes in and cricket abides at Como Park.