Now is the summer
p. 51 · Read in the full issue
of our discontent
SUMMER, like nostalgia, just ain’t what it used to be. The livin’ ain’t easy, not when the brightest icons of the sunni est season are darkened by the shadow of drugs, corruption and body bags, not to mention overpriced mangoes.
The national summer sport is supposed to entice Antipodeans to Elysian fields.
The sweet crack of leather on willow, the seductive mantra of cricket on radio, should be the signal for the eyes to close and the imagination to take over.
But whereas wirelesses once dis pensed poetry, trannies now pit out stac cato reports of match-fixing and bribery, and grim inquiries into what relationship book manufacturers have had with those
handsomely remunerated heroes wearing
advertising hoarding instead of cricket clobber. Even an upholder of the great game’s laws faces disciplinary action for explaining in a book why he reckons a Sri Lankan bowler is a diabolical chucker, a comment that authorities hope becomes a receding Hair line.
Then there’s the weather, worth thou sands to Indian John but not worth a zac to anyone on December 26. No matter what it does for the rest of the year, it should not rain in Melbourne on day one of the Boxing Day Test. Brisbane’s biggest day of the season was ruined because half the Gabba was an excavation site. Poor old tradition-loving Adelaide doesn’t even get the Australia Day Test any longer. There isn’t one.
Other sports have been no help.
Tennis, which used to be lawn tennis, staged a national title where the defend ing champion is an accused drug cheat, and where world-beating heart-throb Pat Rafter always wants to please his home fans so badly that he can’t. The stirring spectacle of spinnakers billowing o’er the briny was marred this year by six deaths in the Sydney-Hobart race, and an unedi fying squabble over whether the public purse should fund the rescue of rich yachties in strife at sea. The mesmerising scent of coconut oil playing on zinc creamed noses loses its appeal with the realisation that 32 people perished in the surf of our fatal shores. (AAP) ■