The country carnival cricket will soon be with us, bringing its adherents to the luxury of turf wickets and wall-to- wall grass.
They’ll come from country grounds of questionable surface, surrounded by oceans of straw. Harvest-hardened hands will grip the Gray-Nicholls, the Gunn and Moore, the County and the Slazenger and all the other great bat brands.
Some old and venerable bats will be coming to clunk a greeting to warriors from Weetulta or sloggers from the South-East. There will be bats with binding and heavy as lead, laden with linseed and reeking of runs.
Some say country cricket is now more sophisticated. Certainly I know of at least one country cricketer who clears the area around his telly set so that he can practise the strokes he sees in instant-replay. Only recently when I was at his residence his bat drove a tray of scones straight through the gap between the lounge and the occasional table, Thank goodness I was there to take a diving catch.
Then again, I always was a butterfingers.
I suppose the country cricketers will be wearing new caps, although our team never reached the cap status. In fact we could only boast two caps between us, We had several washing hats, two stained felts and half a dozen straw harvester hats which threw a big shadow when you crouched low over the bat.
I was once caught off my straw harvester hat, the only hat-trick in which I was ever involved and which I indeed considered as the last straw.
The umpire was adamant. He was a member of my team and he never again got a drink from my waterbag.
Our association sent a team to the carnival and everyone manoeuvred desperately for selection. We even tried to improve our fielding on the ground which was where we put most of our catches.
We also tried all kinds of wiles to woo the selectors—filling up their cars at the hand-operated petrol pump at the local store and even allowing them to use our team batting glove when they played against us. Too late we discovered they were hand-in-glove in more ways than one!
As the country carnival selector came in to bat my captain would whisper “Give him a gentle full toss, Max,” and that’s what I’d bowl. It was no hardship because I rarely bowled anything else.
The names of the country carnival team went up on the notice board of the local post offices.
We gathered around. There was no glory for most of us, the habitual tail-enders, the matting masochists, the rural trundlers and the faithful who brought the waterbags.
Oh they’d picked the good ones. There was the flashing blade from Virginia, the all- from Penfield, he of the craggy countenance and the seaming ball, the terror of tail-enders.
There was the guileful spinner of Gawler River, smiling as he spun. There was the scourge of Angle Vale who ran us all out with his stentorian “Come on. There’s two in it” even if the ball had but trickled at his feet.
Yet he could win a match in an afternoon, his sixes bouncing into the gum trees and a nearby graveyard where the umpire called dead ball.
There were also the Stan McCabes of Smithfield, members of a cricketing and wicketing clan with batting oil in their blood and who showed their babies how to grip the rattle correctly before they were weaned.
So the team was chosen! The rest of us went away and sat down heavily in our cars, Bradmans nipped in the bud, Woodfulls wasted, Oldfields ostracised. But we went to the country carnival anyway.
We were dazzled by the opulence of city grounds. Green grass AND curators, if you please.
Where was the cow at long on and the brown snake where straight hit dipped down into a forest of artichokes and star thistles?
There was a river called the Torrens running near some urban grounds, a river with visible water and boats and girls.
Perhaps there was more rural mysticism in the hunting of the ball hit for a six into the Gawler River, an old river full of gnarled gums and gnarled yabbies.
It was a river high with the scent of eucalyptus and maybe a departed sheep, a river with a jewel of a waterhole where kids fished with bamboo rods and corks on the line until the corks bobbed in a frenzy, activated by a “muddy” a small fish much sought after by anglers in short pants.
There was none of that on this urban ground. There was even a scoreboard and drinks were taken from glasses and a jug, mind you.
There was, of course, the dressing room and, it was rumoured, even showers.
We spectators were shown the mysterious sightscreens so different from looking into a gum tree or a haystack or the rump of a passing cow.
We did have a sort of dressing. room on our home ground. It was a tin shed. Alas, in the weekdays cattle horned it and horses leant against it or used it for itchy rumps until its tortured tin was bent into such a shape that we could only dress in it while lying down.
So our district team took the field. The country carnival was on. We stared at our lean opponents from the Mallee, men raised on dust storms and full of grit.
It was a beautiful time particularly when we won the toss.
And while our star batsman, true to form, ran his partner out in the first over, he did atone by hitting a passing bus and holing the sightboard with two towering sixes!
Max Fatchen