Time To Thank Our Heroes

He doesn’t attract many column inches, may only occasionally be mentioned in his club’s newsletter and his contribution most weeks won’t be noticed, but the average club cricketer is probably the hero of the game the English invented so they could be belittled by Australians.

He’s a hero because he doesn’t play for money or accolade or recognition – he plays through a combination of a sheer unadulterated love of the game and because he likes the time away from being owned by the man or managed by the woman, to be spent with his mates on Saturday. It’s not like football and never will be. For five or six hours, it’s just man time and much of that is understanding the value this time can be in forming relationship and learning to be the man everyone expects him to be. Before he can dress like – look like – the different expectations people have of him, he needs to stand naked and like what he sees.

Saturday afternoon, playing in the local Club’s colours with other blokes is the most naked he’s prepared to get.

At first, he’s 14 and in his first season – probably in the 4ths with a tribe of beardless youths and one or two old hands who teach as much of the spirit of the game as the skills. These first steps to manhood are largely taken in the footsteps of others, mostly the old hands on a Saturday but sometimes the first grade stars at training. Every word of the dashing number four, fresh from a match winning century, is absorbed and replayed with every shot and every delivery, the junior listener testing his own performance against the advice. When a boy comes to cricket this early, it’s hard to know whether his love of the game is more of an obsession than the acquisition of pubic hair.

There will be a top score in the teens which he’ll talk about for days, including a four blazed past point which actually went chest high through a vacant second slip, but why ruin a good story with the facts. He probably bowled a few overs, maybe even snagged a wicket. Either way, he will have learned some secret men’s business without knowing it and if a father is on the scene, they’ll have more to talk about, even if Dad is only listening.

By 19, the average club man has probably played a lot of 3rds and the odd game off 2nds before going off to uni and continuing his love affair of the game through a haze of stimulants he’ll never talk about at home, nor remember. Maybe he gets a few fifties or bags wickets in three or fours but comes home to The Club over the Christmas break to fill in. The older men remark his height or his pace or his solid defence.

In his twenties and mid thirties, as life goes on around Saturdays, the best of his skills will rise and peak and he’ll probably play a bit of 1st grade, without ever cementing a place but that’s okay, because he preferred the blokes in 2nds anyway. There will be golden days, maybe half a dozen at best, in those fifteen years. Days when centuries are scored or Pfeifer’s snared or classic catches taken. Moments when he suddenly rose above himself and understood the magic of the game played at its glorious extremes. Finals will be won and days taken from the boss to recover from celebrations.

All the while, he’ll revel in his mates and never quite understand why their company away from the rough outfields and rougher wickets of park cricket is different – apart from when they are enjoying the sponsor’s facilities. Why are you lost for words when you bump into Thomo outside Woolies?

Then in those last five to ten years, as the skills slip and the excuses for not attending training mount, he’ll be eased back into the thirds, where he’ll bat at seven and only bowl when the captain can’t think of anyone else. By then, it won’t matter: he’s worked out what playing his game was all about and now when he bumps into Thomo, he can keep the conversation going for fifteen minutes before Thomo just about pulls a note from his mother out of his pocket as an excuse to get away. Thomo’s ten years younger. He’ll be on the executive of the Club by now, maybe even making phone calls on Friday night or Saturday morning chasing those with girlfriends or hangovers or bosses who only ever played football.

Then, as fifty approaches and he starts to get that vague notion that he’d rather be gardening than gaining bruises from next year’s Mitch or Brett or Doug, the Club President rings in August to ask a favour.

“Bob, there’s this crop of youngsters coming on from the juniors and we were wondering ...”
On that first Saturday of the season, surrounded by bright eyes tossing cricket balls from hand to hand or practising their forward defensive shot, he knows everything that came before this moment, dressed in white, was a rehearsal for the one or two seasons left when he will be elevated to hero status by players who won’t have to play for Australia to be forever grateful for his leadership in their first seasons ... for his footsteps to follow.

As another Australian season ends, leave Ponting and his players to the press for their plaudits. Instead, seek out Bob and the other real heroes of the game, buy them a beer and say thanks.

You owe them more than you think.