Third Test – Day 3: Tasmania is on fire

Tasmania is on fire: Australia is not is the message from ABC radio. We constantly cross between the WACA and Hobart for updates on each of the potentially catastrophic events at distant sides of the country.

The precursor to day three was a day two that clearly indicated where Australia are with respect to cricket standings. But why just use day two as the reference vehicle into this report I ask myself. You learn a lot from referring to history. So I dig up a reference from my day three first test report. Has anything changed?

Ponting must have rolled about in bed now realising his time has come even if the selectors are being driven by blind nostalgic loyalty and lack of creativity. He continues to scratch about like an old chook at the early quick stuff on or about off stump and his dismissal was pretty consistent with how he plays at the elite end of the scale these days.

All team brains trusts, except Australia of course, have worked Warner out. He can no longer be selected for his fielding; opening batsmen are expected to take the shine off the ball every now and again. Tonkers to Bondi Beach……………………… 

……………………………………With an aging list and even if there are a few wannabes champing at the bit Australia’s immediate batting stocks must be a worry to those whose job it is to worry. I don’t anymore. I think I am over cricket at the moment. 

The Australian bowlers continue to be working class. Honest enough but every now and again they get distracted and lose focus and concentration. When they got their length radar locked in the horses (Amla and Kallis) had well and truly bolted. Six for about two hundred was ok and again they bowled without luck; but that’s show biz baby. 

To their credit they continued to put pressure on the highly rated South African middle and late order but there never appeared to any time when there was going to be a collapse. Two years away from being a really formidable attack is my belief. 

With my lawn mower pull start broken the fire hazard adjacent to the national park remains and I am grumpy. There are scuddy showers blasting outside, I am booked (novel variety) out for the moment and feeling lethargic. I browse through a box of DVD’s and up jumps the War of the Worlds live concert from Wembley Stadium. It is to be the annihilation of humanity at the hands of the deadly accurate Martian scything heat ray, rather than the annihilation of Australia by the deadly accurate scything South African willow blades?

The first option is sweetened by the sublime music (the harpist from the London Symphony Orchestra performs with grace, rhythm and determination) and stunning animation around and on screen at that famous place Poms like to cheer en mass in that is screaming at me through my small shack screen. (Still there, I’m afraid, knackers).  The second option is soured by the sublime batting of the Sudafrikans. Hashim Amla plays like the harpist in a cameo role.

The Australian bowlers are stumbling around like the dazed soldier of the London defence regiment; ineffective. Starc valiantly slips in like the battle ship “Thunder Child” and takes one of the invaders (Kallis) out but then the retribution carnage begins and he, and all others pay the price with swift, brutal unstoppable force.

By the mid afternoon the commentators are talking in tongues, like the preacher Nathaniel, cursing the evil of the invading devil and bemoaning the lack of spiritually disciplined foresight to combat the apocalypse.

As the world, albeit severely battered and bruised, is eventually saved by the most unlikely of heroes the unseen bacteria at the conclusion of the DVD I am distraught. For in our sterile state of cricket all the natural bacteria appear to have been purged in order to develop the bright new sanitised and nicely marketable product.

The sun and heat returns to my afternoon. I retire to the beach for fresh air and an ale.

I don’t like cricket: I hate it.

No radio, just the sound of the waves.