Ten Things 2

A weekly list from GH

Gideon Haigh

A weekly list from GH.

• Ben Duckett on Yashasvi Jaiswal in Rajkot: ’When you see players from the opposition playing like that, it almost feels like we [England] should take credit that they’re playing differently than how other people play Test cricket.’ Does it really almost feel like that, Ben?  I’d fight that feeling if I were you, because it belongs to the universe of self-deception.  Time was when everyone wanted to beat Australia.  Such was their arrogance.  They still want to beat India.  Such are their moneybags.  But England are mutating from something uniquely refreshing into something very monotonous, leading even when they’re trailing, winning even when they lose, worseningly in love with their own reflections - that’s enough about me; what do you think of me?

• Joe Root always looked more like a willing conscript to Bazball than an eager volunteer, but there is something genuinely grisly about the dwindling of his batting since the Ashes.  AA tells us that the first step is admitting you have a problem; BB does not allow for it.  If the McCullum-Stokes regime chews up one of England’s greatest batters, what does that mean for its legacy?  I hope we don’t have to find out.

• The things teammates say.  Drivers going round Como Park often offer gratuitous advice.  Last week as we were looking on, we heard the double blast of a car horn and a cry of: ‘I hate cricket!’  Chiggers shook his head: ‘That guy obviously doesn’t know that nobody hates cricket as much as cricketers.’  There were murmurs of unanimous assent.

• The 2023 Cricinfo Awards were announced last week, on 21 February 2024.  I have no complaints about the awards, because it’s actually kind of difficult to recall the feats to which they correspond.  Travis Head won the batting gong, having in his most recent Test made a king pair.  Does anyone remember the T20 batting gong winner Jason Roy ‘setting the PSL ablaze’, given that it was a year ago?  Maybe it’s my own worsening senescence, but annual awards in this amnesiac world seem increasingly anachronistic, especially nearly eight weeks after the end of the relevant year.

• We launched The One Indiscretion of His Life in the MCC Library this week to an appreciative audience, but many copies remain - so many copies.  It’s a good job I never use my kitchen for anything other than work.

• The staccato sentences, the stale cultural references, the thudding ironies, the pedestrian opinions, the mirthless jokes, the upholstering quotes.  Honestly, is there a sports writer in this country more readily replaceable by AI than Will Swanton of The Australian?  Maybe it’s already happened.

• Sarah in Trailer Park Boys: ‘The only way Ricky could get smarter is if he died and came back as a turnip.’

• Paddy Chayesvsky’s script for Network is replete with great monologues (‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more’; ‘You have interfered with the forces of nature’ etc) that there’s a tendency to overlook the speech that provides the film’s moral centre.  We don’t see the whole of Max Schumacher (William Holden) confessing his affair with Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) to his wife Louise (Beatrice Straight) - we are dropped into the middle of it.  But we get her comeback and it’s devastating: ‘Then get out! Go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, but don't come back. Because after twenty-five years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm going to stand here and have you tell me you're in love with somebody else. Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or - or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it. And if you can't work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance. I hurt, don't you understand that? I hurt badly.’  There is a recurrent theme in the film about commodifying real emotion for television (‘What sort of script do you think we can make out of this?’; ‘I don’t like the way this script of our has turned out’) and here at last we face real human consequences - the irony being, of course, that Max’s rumpled integrity has so far been the only thing protecting his friend Howard Beale (Peter Finch) from Christiansen’s exploitation. Louise, eyes flashing, hair flaming, brings Max face to face with his own failures, unconsciously channelling one of Beale’s crazed but compelling monologues (‘All I know is, you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddamn it. My life has value” ’).  The scene is set in the Schumachers’s apartment, a kind of shrine to Max’s career, but which for all its spaciousness sudden feels claustrophobic, as though collapsing in on them both.

• But there is one line that gets me every time - and got me again when I was watching it again last night - as Louise lays bare the extent of Max’s delusions and defences.

Louise: Do you love her?

Max: I don't know how I feel. I'm grateful I can feel anything. [Louise flinches] I know I'm obsessed with her.

Louise: Then say it. You keep telling me that you're obsessed, you're infatuated. Say that you're in love with her.

Max: [pauses] I'm in love with her.

   Finally, Louise says: ‘You’re in for a lot of grief, Max.’ Seven words - caution, prophecy, benediction.  Addressing Max by name, Louise retrieves their decades of intimacy at the moment of her greatest extremity.  Beatrice Straight is on screen for five minutes of Network, surrounded by famous actors giving bravura performances for a brilliant director, but somehow, for me, always steals the show - nobody has given a shorter performance to win a major acting Oscar (1977 Best Supporting Actress).  The cameo has biographical resonances also: Straight was a stage actress who seldom appeared in films, her most substantial role being as Dr Lesh in Poltergeist four years later.  In film as in life, the marginalised woman.  

• Interviewing Brad Hodge tomorrow night at the Yarras as part of our Last Man Standing function.  I asked one of his old teammates for a question.  ‘Ask him about the time he broke his hand, pretended he hadn’t, went into the nets and faked getting hit,’ I was told.  Nice one.  No secrets from your teammates, eh?