The Ashes: At the end of a long series, cricket descends into fever dreams
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Wisden cricket writer Felix White has an efficient catch phrase. When something unexpected happens, something strange or majestic, he glances over and says, "cricket".
Says it when he nails a shot in front of a bin in a laneway. Says it when Test players do what they do. A cocked eyebrow and an implication, an unsaid Mark Nicholas, "how about it?"
Cricket. The way it gets hold of you. It seems absurd that you should still be here, after such a long series, at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG), watching another match unfold slowly as trampled grass regaining its posture.
It's not that it doesn't matter. Tell that to Cameron Bancroft, his spot hanging by a thread. To Usman Khawaja, on the brink of a first Ashes century. To David Warner, quietly touching a memorial plaque on his way to the middle.
Every time you're tired, you're jaded, something happens. On day two, Stuart Broad gets one to lean off a length and poor Bancroft is castled. Warner punches through cover with a whip-crack and the crowd finds voice.
When two wickets fell in the final minutes of day one, abruptly came the coppery tang of adrenaline, the feel of standing in a thunderstorm sucking coins. Capillary blood a membrane away.
My colleague Adam Collins has cricket dreams. Reported in the morning with an enquiring concern, scouring them for meaning.
A few weeks ago, a partnership with Greg Matthews. The most consistent batsman in history by way of standard deviation from the mean, mutters Adam, who a fortnight later is dream-umpiring his first Test match.
Terrified, and deciding not to worry about no-balls, his sleeping self sees the appeal in letting the camera deal with them. Sympathy comes from strange sources.
I have my cricket dreams while I'm awake. From the time when the game first got me, it was always a dream.
Figures flared out to whiteness on television screens, or too distant to interpret in the centres of grounds. Trying to decode far-off signals, Voyager's gold record playing Stravinsky to bewildered aliens.
Getting sick during a Test match is a new way to watch it. A fever that comes down as abruptly as blinds drawn at dusk.
I'm supposed to be watching for a story, something that emerges from the narrative of the play, a debate to unravel or a corner needing light. Instead the game softens into Impressionist blurs.
The way Broad drags his whole body away to the leg side as he plays the pull shot. His sleeveless sweater billowing behind him, accentuating the impression that he's one of those inflatable tube-men outside a car wash.
Thanks to the poet Emilie Zoey Baker, I know those things are called skydancers. Hopefully that brings some joy to your day.
There is always a peculiarity. A couple of hoicks over backward square leg, and the skydancer has the second-most sixes at the SCG. Seven in two Tests. Adam Gilchrist played 13 Tests for 11.
There is Mason Crane's first bowl. A little ball of limbs, spokes protruding here and there, and from the flurry a ball emerging, wrist pointing skyward on the high arm, ball tumbling out and over in the curve of a long architrave.
People ask, why watch cricket? It takes so long, they say.
You watch because it takes so long. Because you can surrender yourself to it, bodily. You can be entirely consumed by it, or pay it no attention.
You can do both at the same time, or alternating in the same span of minutes or hours. You can fall into and out of it, like rolling into a resort pool.
In the stands, the singers sing, the police police, the beach balls get beached. "The little things that amuse you when the game isn't going on," says Jim Maxwell on the radio. "That's one of the joys of cricket, in a way, the gaps between the action."
Two spinners bowl, Warner in the baggy green. Khawaja more pragmatic, keeping the helmet. Even pub cricketers get the odd split lip from a top edge to the face, batting lidless. Don't be so reckless, throw down your guns.
Cap or no, Warner departs. Australia's captain continues his own knock from Melbourne. Steve Smith is batting this series like gumbo, slow-stewing the thickening juice towards substance, occasionally throwing in a dash of spice.
He passes 6,000, matching Garfield Sobers' 111 innings for the mark, the second-fastest ever. Bradman of course is laughing off in the distance on 68. It makes recent comparisons, mine included, look silly.
What you can say is that Smith is vaguely in Bradman's vicinity in terms of his rate of scoring hundreds, but Bradman got them faster and much, much, much bigger. His sheer volume is what creates the gulf.
The stew prepares, and wounds are salted, as outside edges go short and wide and high, England paying for their perfect 2015 Trent Bridge day in perpetuity. Broad would probably take the trade.
The slip cordon gradually creeps closer, a Prussian regiment on a salient. Third slip bobbing up with a helmet only firming the impression.
For the feverish, the chill sinks deeper, air-conditioning at your back. Skin crawling up and down like Alastair Cook taking two runs.
So out into sunlight that stews the same, thickens the same, laid across forearms like a poultice. Waves of sickness casting and receding, a medical waveform.
Lying on a bench listening to the radio. Trying to hold onto the warmth from the sun as the day meanders on, and Maxwell and Chris Rogers compare who has had more naps. It's a compelling idea.
"The crowd has that slightly restless feel to them, late in the day here," says Jim.
The final over. I reckon it means more in Australia than anywhere. Bill Lawry hardwired into the consciousness of a generation: "Got him! Last ball of the day, can you believe that?"
At home under blankets, the heat of the fever beats back from the fabric like the same sunlight, crisp on your skin. Figures move in the gloaming and the gloom, throwing strange shapes in their distended shadows.
"We will become silhouettes when our bodies finally go." The best apocalypse song of all, by The Postal Service. The echo left when substance is gone. There are moments like this at the SCG. Figments in a fever dream.
Topics: sport, cricket, ashes, sydney-2000
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