Australian Ripping Yarns 2 by Paul Taylor

Author:Paul Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Australia, Australian folklore, Melbourne, Sydney, Victoria, New South Walkes, Bogle-Chandler, William Dampier, Captain Moonlite, James Nesbitt, Andrew Scott, Captain Thunderbolt, Mad Dog Morgan, Annette Kellerman, Errol Flynn, George Morrison, Bogle-Chandler, John Landy, Foreign Legion, Sir Eugene Goossens, Rosaleen Norton, Loch Ard, Francis James, Horrie the Wog Dog, cannibals, bunnaneers, pirates, heroes, villains, lowlife, legends, Paul Taylor, Jack Johnson, Tommy Burns
ISBN: 9781743004722
Publisher: Five Mile Press
Published: 2012-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

— Excerpt from Happy Dispatches, a collection of Paterson’s essays on famous men he had met, published in 1934.

Chapter 5

Good sports, bad sports

A chip off the young block

There were 144,319,628 men, women and children in Bangladesh on 18 June 2005 and every one of them over the age of five almost died of joy. Playing in a one-day cricket match, the Bangladesh XI soundly trounced the Australians on that historic day. It was – the experts were as one on this – the most unexpected and astonishing win in the long history of cricket.

Well, no. It wasn’t. That distinction belongs to an Australian XI – the very first eleven players selected to play for their country. And they beat England on 15 March 1877. The joy in Bangladesh 128 years later was unconfined. But the thrill that had rushed through the colonies with the news that the English had been beaten was almost palpable. Keith Dunstan, the journalist and author, has described it as cricket’s Gallipoli: 38 years before the landing at Anzac Cove, the win at the Melbourne Cricket Ground welded the colonies into one nation.

The loss, on the other hand, was a traumatic shock to the Mother Country’s psyche. It badly damaged England’s image of itself as the imperious ruler of the world, superior to all others in all ways. The very large chip which had rested on the shoulders of the young nation had been put on that of their masters. In the 310 Test matches played between the two countries since then it has remained on their shoulders.

Until 15 March 1877 it was universally acknowledged that the English could not be beaten at cricket. The game belonged to them. They invented it and they played it at a level the Australians (and the Canadians and Americans, until they came up with its cousin, baseball) simply couldn’t match. The only way to give the English a run for their money was to set the odds in your favour: play twice as many men as they put on the field. And even then, even with 22 players to their 11, they’d still beat you.

The Englishmen, not surprisingly, suffered from a marked superiority complex, tinged with more than a touch of condescension. Asked what he thought of colonial cricketers, Roger Iddison, a Yorkshire all-rounder, said: ‘Well, I don’t think much of their play, but they’re a wonderful lot of drinking men.’ This characteristic was to distinguish Australian sides for the next century and more.

But pride comes before a fall and perhaps the first premonition that the English might one day come a cropper came when an all-England XI, under Mr H.H. Stephenson, started its 1861 tour of the colonies on an unheard-of note: a team of 15 New South Wales players beat the English by two wickets. Stephenson took his team to Victoria. The Melbourne Cricket Ground astonished him: England had no oval so well prepared and so suited for cricket, and the grandstand, 700 feet long, was the finest in the world.

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