THE ASHES: PART TWO

And so, after the less than emphatic shenanigans of the summer contest, which ended on that rather sour note of the England team quite literally taking the piss, before you even know it, the second round of this year's two back-to-back Ashes series begins, this time being played in Australia.

I don't know, but it feels different this time... and not just because it's in Australia, either. After all, we've been here before. Well, you know what I mean. I, of course, have not been there before or, indeed, even now... Perhaps I should start again.

It's "The Ashes: Part Two" but somehow the anticipation, for me at least, is somewhat lacking this time around.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that other, more personal issues have made it difficult to enjoy anything all that much, or maybe it's just too soon after the last battle finished and a kind of "Ashes Fatigue" is creeping in, something that I never thought would happen.

Still one good old "Up and at 'em" rant from Geoffrey Boycott should set those juices stirring again at least, and that "tactful" old so-and-so isn't shy when it comes to poking at a beehive, even when he's not in his own backyard any more, and the beehive is full of alligators.

I do wonder whether this lacklustre feeling I have is because the summer's contest actually seemed to fall rather flat in the end after all of the build up, especially as it all seemed so much less of a contest and more of a muddle as the season rolled along. The margin between defeat and victory seemed definitely so much tighter than expected, giving a feeling of "surviving by the skin of our teeth" rather than an outright win, and maybe it's because you know, you just know, that things are so less likely to go "our" way this time around and that there's the very likely prospect of the England Cricket Team returning home having lost their grip on that little urn, so my own pessimism seems to be seeping into my sense of anticipation for this second half of the contest.

After all, you're not really expected to win the away series, really, are you...?

I know that I don't enjoy the taste of defeat any more than I enjoy the smug triumphant look of other's sense of victory getting in my face, (although I don't like it when "our" side do that sort of thing either, to be honest... must be something to do with my own lack of competitiveness...) but the nail-biting anxiety of "not yet knowing" has returned, this time with the added difficulty of a twelve or thirteen hour time difference to deal with meaning that I'll be getting up in the middle of the night to hear more bad news, or "just to find out how it's going", and that I won't be able to sleep and so instead I'll be tuning in at a time when I really, really ought to be sleeping soundly and trying to catch up with my own levels of exhaustion.

Damn it's hard work sometimes being an obsessive and no doubt I'm going to be "difficult" to be around again as I stagger through the mornings after the nights before...

Still, it is something that I can look forward to, at any rate, which is a nice thing to have again, even if bits of it aren't actually all that nice at all.