There was a lot loaded into that weekend of sport.
I reckon you could have got the $16,000 quaddie at Flemington, had a week’s pay on the Japanese horse in the Golden Eagle, been a Swans fan that saw the big finish to claim the last place in the AFLW Finals or an Indian cricket devotee celebrating Virat Kohli’s birthday with a century… but the highlight was still indisputable.
Mitch Starc’s first ball to Johnny Bairstow on Saturday night.
Keep walking, Jonny. How utterly perfect.
A golden duck, and by night’s end Australia had finished off England’s hopeless World Cup defence.
At a time when the Poms should have been hiding in the corner through sheer embarrassment… they were still boasting of their superiority… egos completely out of check.
‘Man for man the better team’, have you ever heard such nonsense?
They enshrined ‘Bazball’ into the Collins Dictionary last week.
‘A style of Test cricket in which the batting side attempts to gain the initiative by playing in a highly aggressive manner’.
So terribly British. It is so vanilla and actually misses the essence of it.
It entirely misses the permanent state of delusion, the cult like devotion and the appalling arrogance to see the world as you want it to be rather than how it is
There was a moment early in the commentary on Saturday night when Mike Atherton pondered whether the residue of the Ashes carried into this World Cup match. Surely a rhetorical question.
He chided Aaron Finch about the whinging over the ball change in the final Test. What’s that saying about a log in your own eye?
Aaron Finch shut him down simply stating the Ashes are where they should be. It was one of Finch’s most beautifully timed dispatches.
The more we encounter this England side the more they remind me of the big kid in your street… if you want a game of cricket in your neighbourhood you have to go and play in their driveway.
But he always insists on batting and he’s never out… when you get one through onto his legs there’s no LBW… and when he nicks one onto the garage door there’s no automatic wicketkeeper…
And when you finally get him out, well that’s the end of the game. He’s headed inside to go and play guitar.
Australia had a very unbalanced team on Saturday night in the absence of Glenn Maxwell and Mitch Marsh, yet still prevailed over the ‘pound-for-pound champions’.
The sense of satisfaction I imagine was far reaching for the team, and for the nation more broadly at home.
Australia is Semi Final bound, England sits last with one win from seven games… still below the Netherlands and Bangladesh.
Maybe they’ll write another book about it… and read it while drinking their own bath water.
‘Man for man I’d have this team every day over the Australians’.
Cry me a river, England.
Bazball - The permanent state of delusion, the cult like devotion and the appalling arrogance to see the world as you want it to be rather than how it is.