ASHES MORNINGS (4)

It really is a hard sell, you know, to persuade anyone in England now abed to listen to the fourth game in a five match series when the side you have attempted to follow are already three-nil down.

A harder sell too to expect even the most loyal of followers to stay up on Christmas night to endure another day of abject humiliation after surviving the rigours of too much fine food and drink, and a long day spent with their nearest and dearest.

Not such a hard sell in Australia, I suppose, where the prospect of a total whitewash against the "old enemy" should keep the turnstiles turning.

For the fair weather fans currently residing upon the chillier side of the globe, though, this might become something of a turning point, given that we've developed a "winning is everything" culture in recent years which old traditionalist curmudgeons like me can find rather distasteful at times.

Football fans might follow their teams through thick and thin and each week believe that this is going to be the one where everything turns around and glory inevitably awaits them, but then they only have to endure another ninety minutes each time with the prospect of a full season of games in which to actually turn their runaway supertanker around.

The test match cricket fan, sadly, has no such escape route available, and instead has to endure five full days of embarrassment and disappointment knowing full well that the battle is lost before the skirmish has even begun, and, for a team which has won a few wars itself in recent years, somehow the pain of watching this deterioration is even worse.

That said, the summer never really felt emphatic in the way that this series has, and consequently, I might question the wisdom of the two series having been played "back to back" as it were instead of the winning team having the high ground to keep for long enough to instill some doubt in their opposition…

Then there were those stupid, stupid predictions which some people made way back in the early summer, with talk of a ten-nil drubbing which was never likely to do anything other than motivate the opposition to do everything in their power to make sure that would not and could not actually happen.

Since the last test, the spinning stalwart that is Graeme Swann had announced his "immediate retirement" from the game (following some unwise Twittery which he had since apologised for) putting whatever plans England (and Wales) might have had into a bit of a spin in the run-up to Christmas and the Boxing Day Test, and managing, perhaps unwittingly, to place a couple of moggies amongst the pigeons into the bargain.

Like I said... The game looks like a pretty hard sell...

Meanwhile, my own Christmas Day had been a rather understated affair with a small exchange of gifts in the morning followed by an afternoon at the Beloved's parents house with Christmas Dinner included, and an evening of disappointing telly...

So... Much like a lot of other people's then...

(Sometimes this stuff really just writes itself, you know...)

One of my gifts was some wi-fi headphones which are going to make overnight cricket listening a lot more comfortable in future although I didn't manage to get an opportunity to charge them up during my protracted absence from the keyboard, so I went off to bed knowing that broadcasts from Australia were going to begin around 11.30pm but feeling fairly certain that I would be missing most, if not all, of the day's play for once.

And so we come to Melbourne, and the traditional Boxing Day Test at the M.C.G.

After I exhaustedly dragged myself to bed without having the expected disturbing shiver running up and down my spine (and when did ghost stories stop being in any way scary...?) I had an unexpected bout of insomnia and lay awake until at least 3.30am when I finally got up and went downstairs to find out what the score was, finding out that, at that point, England had lost yet another toss and been made to bat and had already reached a rather woeful 137 for 3...

Secure in the knowledge that, once again, they were living down to my expectations, I returned to my pit and lay awake again... although I must have nodded off for a while because I suddenly became aware that the central heating boiler was running and so a couple of hours must have passed...

Admitting defeat and knowing that the arms of Morpheus were unlikely to encircle me, I got up and listened to the final session of the day, which turned out to be an interesting experience because the coverage was lurking on an unfamiliar radio station which occasionally went over to the studio for no very good reason at all and giving me rather pointless footballing news which I didn't really require or need.

Happily, Aggers and Blowers et al were there to guide me though yet another traumatic session of Test Cricket where a ship which had somewhat steadied whilst I'd apparently been a-slumbering, suddenly hit another gale as soon as I was paying some attention, and those much treasured and carefully defended wickets started tumbling again, so that, by the end of the day's play, England were once again sitting on a rather precarious score, which was, this time, 226 for 6, and Australia seem to have won another day.