The Beige Brigade take Adelaide. Photo / Kristos Focas.
The Beige Brigade take Adelaide. Photo / Kristos Focas.
The pink ball Test match in Adelaide on Friday, Saturday and Sunday was a sensational event to have attended. The niggliest part of the trip which was making sure we made it to the City of Churches with our bags and sanity intact after flight diversions, storms and spewing passengers. After a late night arrival on Thursday, we were in heaven for three days, apart from the result.
The Adelaide Oval's makeover since the last time we were here watching a baby-faced Shane Bond wreak havoc on Australia Day is nothing short of amazing. (We also had a police escort out of the ground that day, so it was nice to have avoided that this time.) The Oval has retained its sense of charm, but has been augmented by a range of brilliant stands and facilities. There were multiple beer options, good food, ridiculously friendly security guards and seamless transport options. It is heaven on earth for cricket fans - and as riff-raff non-members we could only soak up half of what was on offer.
Any cricket ground where you can build a snake of beer cups and not have security intervene is a hell of a place to watch cricket.
We were massively impressed with the Australian cricket fans we sat near and queued up with to buy food and beers with too. Even the low-intensity Trevor Chappell Fan Club were pretty decent, and there were only about 712 Aussie Aussie Aussie chants over the three days, plus the usual lame efforts to start Mexican waves and a bit of baaa-ing. The most passionate moment of the three days, unfortunately, was when spleens were vented after Mitchell Santner dropped Steve Smith on Day 3.
The fans were infatuated with our pink Stubbies, the class and style of Kane Williamson, the poise of Mitchell Santner until his yoga-splits dismissal, and the audacity and bamboozling captaincy of Brendon McCullum. Many of them hated David Warner more than us - good batsman, no charisma, out of his league on the wife front, terrible human was a familiar refrain. They liked it when Mark Craig bowled too, it seemed.
Black Caps all-rounder Grant Elliott with the pink stubbies. Photo / Beige Brigade
***
The Phil Hughes tribute on Day 1 at the Adelaide Oval was a classy affair. It wasn't over-engineered or overwrought - just 3 minutes of video footage in the tea break at 4:08pm and a simple message: 'Remembering 408'. Everyone around us stopped cackling, scoffing pistachio nuts, and telling tall tales and stood to soak it in, taking a moment to remember the player that never made it back to the dressing room a year ago.
Hughes' teammate and real world mate Adam Zampa penned a column which is well worth a read: "What happened 12 months ago has definitely thrown a different light on cricket for all of us. You'd struggle to find a photo of Hughesy without a cheeky smirk on his face, and that's how we remember him. And we still say that it's just like he's on tour with the Aussies - and that he's going to walk back through the door any time soon."
Apparently there was a discrete portrait of Hughes on the players' dressing room door too. Classy all round.
***
Day/night Test cricket is here to stay, there can be no doubt about that. But doing it better than South Australia will be a very tough indeed, as the bar has been set extremely high with this combination of fascination around the inaugural event, utterly perfect weather, the tribute, and a heavenly venue. Will it be the same sitting in 12 degrees of dew-filled Hamilton night-time in December 2016? Hmmm.
There was plenty of chatter about this eroding the traditions of Test cricket. I beg to differ - it's a fan-focused option that is all part of the ongoing evolution of the game. Let's not forget that we used to have 4-ball overs, timeless Test matches, Bodyline and an allergy to drop-in pitches too. Not every match should involve pink leather but it's a welcome addition to the options available to the home team, especially if they have swing bowlers who know what they are doing.
***
White floppy hats off to all the New Zealand fans who made it along to Adelaide. There were twanging Kiwi accents, Beige Brigade rugs and onesies, NPC rugby shirts, Steinlager hats, sunburnt faces, Mr Vintage tshirts, and bewildered middle-aged tour groups with maps at every turn across the city on match days.
Yes the pink ball freakishness was a magnet for anyone vaguely interested in cricket history, but Brendon McCullum's team has earned a lot of respect with their approach to the game - winning regularly but not acting like dickheads - and that translated into plenty of folks making the effort to be there to soak it all up.
***
Occasional gambler Martin Guptill is destined to be a trivia question forevermore: first Test batsman to face the pink ball, score off the pink ball and be dismissed by the pink ball. Mr Laura McGoldrick had a tough series - 6 bats for 82 runs, a top score of 23 and an average worse than Tim Southee and Doug Bracewell.
Over in Number-cruncher corner, Australian cricket's hard-working PR machine has published some numbers and proclaimed that batting at night was not harder than batting in the day. It'd be interesting to overlay that quantitative analysis with some qualitative feedback from the players who had to try and guide the pink orb onto their bats.
Day-night Test: Session-by-session breakdown Day 1 Afternoon: 2-80 from 28 overs Evening: 5-93 from 28 overs Night: 5-83 from 31.2 overs
Day 2 Afternoon: 6-62 from 29.5 overs Evening: 2-130 from 27 overs Night: 5-94 from 30 overs
Day 3 Afternoon: 5-92 from 25.5 overs Evening: 3-113 from 28 overs Night: 4-74 from 23 overs
TOTALS Afternoon: 13-234 from 83.4 overs Evening: 10-336 from 85 overs Night: 14-251 from 84.2 overs
We were hanging about on Sunday night after the match concluded, keen to wish vision-impaired delusionist Nigel Llong a merry Christmas but after Mark Taylor made an award to Roshan Mahanama, announced the men of the match and series, then tried to force Steve Smith to confess his love for day/night Test cricket, everyone left. The demon of the day-nighter never made it onto the stage and avoided our wrath. However, it looks like social media has more than made up for it - plus a couple of savage emails from NZ team management.
New Zealand was robbed was the unanimous verdict, even from the most cycloptic Australian fans. Nobody was saying it would have meant New Zealand would have won the game, but it made Australia's task in chasing down the runs much less Herculean than it should have been. The upshot is that everyone who was there to witness those 445 seconds of embarrassing umpiring incompetence has a go-to whinge for life whenever there is a pink ball match in play. I know I will be playing that broken record a few times...
After the loss, we were expecting taunting and abuse on our way to a late night dinner in Chinatown, but instead received bucketloads of sympathy. It was eye-opening, and shows that many Australian cricket fans have a healthy disrespect for their team, a massive change from a decade ago when the Baggy Greens doubled as a World XI.
BUY: Keep an eye out for Jarrod Kimber's new book, Test Cricket: The Unauthorised Biography. Melburnian Kimber is one of the most talented cricket writers on the planet, having graduated from expletive-laden cricket blogging to deliciously idiosyncratic prose for Cricinfo and elsewhere. If you have a cricket fan in the house with a sense of humour, then this is the book to hunt down. Once I have read it, I will review it here too.
WATCH: This could be some sort of record: Pakistani wicketkeeper-batsman Umar Akmal was dismissed thrice in 24 hours . The first dismissal was against England in a T20 international (caught slogging), followed up in the super over of the same game (bowled slogging), then a third time in the Bangladesh premier league (caught behind).
LISTEN: In The Radelaide Cumming Episode the boys are in hotel room Adelaide recuperating after the inaugural Pink Ball Test. They talk about the smorgasbord of pros and very few cons of this evolution of Test match cricket. The song - the Australian national anthem by a local taxi driver - is a real treat.
Middle & Leg is a cricket newsletter for New Zealand cricket fans who like a dose of optimism and a tablespoon of take the piss with their weekly cricket informational. It is tapped out by Paul Ford, co-founder of the Beige Brigade, and one-seventh of the Alternative Commentary Collective. You can email him here beigehq@beigebrigade.co.nz.
