When we told friends and family–whom we were visiting in Adelaide, South Australia–that we planned to see a cricket match, they usually responded with a single syllable: “Hmmm.” Australians have produced a hybrid culture from elements garnered from Britain and the United States, a unique culture, that, in many ways, defies attempts to divide it into U.S. and British elements, but in their use of “hmm” Aussies tend quite heavily toward their British roots. An Australian can remain aloft in any conversation simply by resting on “hmm” and its various upswings and downdrafts. When we asked about cricket, most persons seemed somewhat embarrassed about it–as if it were bad enough that Australians have adopted this most British of games, so why would an American be interested–but in dismissing the sport they were at their most British. They didn’t attack it, as an Amrican would, but instead let the whole thing slide in a particularly British fashion. “Hmmm,” they’d say, tracing a small, descending melody in the air, in the manner of a bird warbling pessimistically to itself in a tree. “Yes. Well. The Oval is quite beautiful.”
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The Adelaide Oval is, indeed, beautiful. The oval itself is large enough to accommodate any of several different Australian football games–from Australian rules to soccer via rugby–and it is well manicured and tended, a lush green without bare patches. It is bounded by a short fence of wide, colorful advertising billboards. A grandstand follows the oval down one stretch and around the comer; it is of a single level, with the roof a soft-brown terra-cotta shade, offering protection from the sun for those below and a nice backdrop for “those yobs” sitting across the oval, on the slightly pitched bank that surrounds the rest of the field. Viewed from the grandstand, the Oval offers, to the left, trees at the far end, then a hand-operated scoreboard with characters in yellow and white on a black background. Behind the scoreboard rise the spires of Saint Peter’s Cathedral; on Sundays its bells chime out above the play. A line of trees follows behind the bank of grass along the back stretch. To the right, above the grandstand at the far turn, rise the skyscrapers and cranes of growing downtown Adelaide–a sore point for our host of the day, Arch Campbell, 84, of Adelaide, who also happens to be a new grandfather I obtained in a recent transaction. He is a spry, lively, ageless gent, with a glint in his eye that is odd not so much for his age as for his former profession–schoolmaster. (Obviously, somewhere along the line a little puckish energy got passed in the wrong direction.) He proved himself knowledgeable about cricket and willing to instruct a couple of ignorant Yanks, but when he spoke of how beautiful the Oval was he ended by looking off to the right grandstand and the rising skyline beyond, and squinting he said, “They’ve quite ruined it, putting up those tall buildings,” with that glint showing through to distort the seriousness of the remark.
It was good advice. We were entering upon the third day of a four-day match between the home South Australian team and the visiting Tasmanians. This was not a test match between nations but a state match in the Sheffield Shield standings. Six of Australia’s seven states have cricket teams, with the winner at the end of the season awarded the Sheffield Shield. It was summer approaching autumn in Australia, and the season was coming to a close with Tasmania at the bottom rung and South Australia not much better. This inherent lack of interest in the match was augmented by Tasmania’s scoring a whopping 592 runs in its first innings, which took over a day and a half to complete. The crowd was small and dominated by elderly spectators.
The day’s pleasant pace should not give anyone the idea that cricket is a simple or simpleminded game. The battle between batter and bowler offers all the intricacies of baseball’s battle between pitcher and hitter, but instead of the struggle lasting five or six pitches, with one pitch setting up the next, the batter-bowler conflict has no set end, and a bowler may be looking ahead two overs (sets of six pitches apiece) in delivering a certain pitch.
Hookes was in good form, and he used the oval’s pitch to whack some long balls off the boundary. The score climbed higher into the 300s by 5, when I left. I walked home to where we were staying with relatives, through downtown Adelaide, stopping at what seemed the halfway point, the King’s Head Hotel, where I had a Cooper’s (a heavy ale much like Belgium’s Chimay, especially in that it is fermented in the bottle) and watched the end of the day’s action on television. Nearby, people watching the match were amazed at the scoring. Bishop and Hilditch are like the Dernier and Sandberg of S.A., and while both are fine players neither is expected to routinely go out and rack up a century. Listening to the talk of the S.A. fans was like sitting in Murphy’s after a game in which both Dernier and Sandberg had hit three home runs. It wasn’t your everyday occurrence. The following day, Hookes too completed a century, and S.A. went on to win 673-592 in a match called after first innings (normally, there is time for each team to bat twice in the four days). This we learned in Monday’s paper, for one day of slow cricket goes a long way.
