Almanac (Cricket) Satire: Viv on Mick ballsing up things to do with his weight

(Viv Tufnell is a Tasmanian Shield cricketer in an alternate universe. He lies, makes excuses and plods at a 28.3 strike rate, while all the while busying himself in the art of being an a@#*hole. In this installment, Viv updates readers about his latest frustration with his inept agent Mick.)

 

 

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Well the good news is that Mick and I are talking again. The not so good news is that Mick is still ballsing up sh*t.

 

So I was looking over my profile photo on Mick’s agency’s site the other day, and after I got to thinking I could maybe get away with cheating the scales a little, I called him to play around with the 4:3 ratio. ‘Narrow the width a little,’ I asked, feeling it would melt away a few pounds. But upon sizing up the results, I thought that it came out all crushed and unnatural, so I rang him right back to restore it. But what did he do? He set it as 16:9.

 

‘MICK!’ I screamed, upon calling him again, ‘You’ve f@#*^d up the aspect. I’m all stretched and twice my weight!’

 

‘Are you sure?’ he questioned. ‘It looks right to me?’

 

‘Yes I’m f@#*^g sure. You’ve made me as fat as Bargearse!’

 

And what did he have to say after pondering it over? What did he have to note that was as unhelpful as it was insulting? It was, ‘Well it is an old photo, mate. You have piled it on since then.’

 

Grrrr/Argh!

 

F@#*^g up sh*t to do with my weight isn’t limited to this episode, either: Mick also did so a few years back…

 

It was the middle of winter and we were watching a Lords test at my house. ‘F@#*,’ I said, having a real laugh watching the Aussies crumble, ‘another collapse. How good is this, Mick?’

 

‘Lovin’ the schadenfreude,’ he responded, beaming.

 

In reference to weighing up an offer to play in England that winter, I then lamented, ‘Sh*t Mick, with half the team out of form and with all them injuries, I could have been half a chance of being added to the squad. Damn, should I have accepted that offer from Glamorgan after all?’

 

I didn’t notice it at the time but the blood drained from Mick’s face.

 

‘I mean,’ I continued, ‘when you’ve been as spurned by the selectors as I’ve been, that’s the best chance you’ll ever get of getting a gig, isn’t it? You know, being close at hand by playing county cricket during an Ashes tour. Plenty of dark horses have been called up like that.’

 

Again, I didn’t notice it right there and then but Mick was getting more pale by the second.

 

‘Like, f@#*, what was I thinking? I could have been there right now, making mountains of runs, with the tyranny of distance working in my favor and all the other sh*t … I’ve really shot myself in the foot!’

 

I now noticed that Mick was looking anemic. ‘What?’

 

The blood leaked back into his face. ‘I wouldn’t beat myself up about that, Viv.’

 

‘Why?’

 

‘The offer was off the table.’

 

‘Huh?’

 

‘Yeah mate, remember that shitstorm on Twitter?’

 

As you may well know, the shitstorm Mick was referring to was to do with a mashup jpeg some troll posted on twitter. For those of you in the dark, the image was a composite of myself, Mark Cosgrove and a pig, which came with the caption, ‘Viv, Mark Cosgrove and a big fat pig.’ The troll then added, ‘Viv is the one on the right.’

 

As you also well know, things gotta a little crazy from there. Mick got all fired up and tweeted, ‘Fat-shaming is out of line nowadays, you dinosaur-arse.’ But I so, so wished he hadn’t. Yep, didn’t the whole thing spiral out of control from there? As you’ll recall, soon there were hashtags popping up all over twitter: #IStandWithViv, #FatProudViv and (from women who like fatties) #GetSomePorkOnYourForkViv. Sure it didn’t go mega viral or make the papers or anything, but everyone in the cricket community got wind of it. And that included, Rhodri Jones, the Glamorgan recruiter.

 

‘Yeah, Rhodri came across the Twitter feed and didn’t think you’d pass the skin-fold test –  but hey,’ Mick then added all upbeat, ‘you’d already decided you were gonna take the winter off, so I figured you never needed to know.’

 

I quizzed Mick later whether I’d beaten them to the table on this and it turned out I hadn’t. ‘So you never told them I’d decided I wanted the winter off?’ I later asked. ‘Nah,’ he answered, ‘as far as they’re concerned, you’re still up for an offer.’

 

Ordinarily, I would have been furious with Mick about f@#*^g things up like that, but I let it go ‘cos I’m mindful that he’s hypersensitive about weight issues. Though you’d never know it to look at him now, Mick was a fat kid and endured terrible teasing throughout his school days.

 

‘Yeah I’m sorry about causing that, Viv,’ he went on to apologise, ‘but you know I get in a rage about fat-shaming. I’ve only been thin since my late teens, so it’s still a raw nerve.’

 

Anyway, as I said, that was another time Mick ballsed up things to do with my weight … well, technically ballzed up things, because I wouldn’t have of accepted an offer anyway, so…

 

As for how I feel about all this now? Well, though I told Mick, ‘No biggie,’ at the time, on occasion I want to clip him behind the ear over it. You see, the fat acceptance movement still consider me an icon and constantly invite me to be a keynote speaker at their events. I always yell ‘em, ‘Not interested; don’t consider myself one of you; go and bug Mark Cosgrove,’ but they persist. I can only hope they stop chasing me before I’m forced to humiliate them with a cease and desist; and that especially goes for a woman down there named Colleen. She’s a feeder enabler and wants to fatten me up until I’m immobile … well, at least that’s what I’m interpreting whenever she sends me a pair of her panties, alongside a voucher to McDonalds, in the mail.

 

 

 

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