SPECTATOR SPORT
Making a meal of them
Frank Keating
THE WINTRY CLOUDS, reflecting the phosphorous tinge of the street lights, hur- ried across a watery sun as it dropped west- erly behind the black moors at 'the Don Revie end' of the football stadium at Leeds last Sunday afternoon. No place on earth could be further away, culturally, spiritually and just about actually, from Australia's white-hot, white-rollered Pacific gold coast and Brisbane and the Gabba. On Sunday, at Leeds' colosseum, the gal- lant British rugby league squad was being torn limb from limb, chewed up and spat out by 13 cruel, composed and cold-eyed Australians. If, by some glorious happen- stance, the same sort of meal is not tucked Into this weekend at the Gabba cricket ground it will be an occasion for rejoicing and harmonised plainchant Te Deums all round. For certainly the mouth-watering menus have been printed, in green-and- gold leaf.
If England cannot put up a challengingly competitive show at the Gabba — short- ened from the Aboriginal word Wool- !oongabba — you have seriously to wonder if they can ever win cricket's Ashes again. Just as the rugby league Brits on Sunday were looking for a first series victory at
home against the Australians since 1959, all of 35 years.
Australia's recent sportsfield leaps and bounds can be directly attributed to the foundation of the government-funded Insti- tute of Sport, which sponsors higher educa- tion centres of excellence to focus and channel the inborn competitive instinct. Its cricket academy is in Adelaide, and its director the former wicket-keeper, Rodney Marsh. How does he select his creme de la creme? 'I look in their eyes to see if they've got the hunger,' he says. Marsh scoffs at English bowlers as 'pie-throwers'. Five of his graduates are in this week's Test team, including the established young demons Slater and Warne.
In the fug of showering celebrations at Leeds on Sunday, an Australian forward unstrapped his massive shoulder-pads and laconically explained the victory: 'You Brits lose because you play only three matches a year of any intensity. At home we play one or two of those a week, and with five guys on your own bench all thinking they're bet- ter than you. That's competition.'
It goes without saying that if Aussie 'Roos are playing rugby league against the Poms, then the novelist Tom Keneally will be there. As he was, whooping it up, on Sunday. In his sunny boyhood, any Ashes contest was simply a way to prove you were better fed and came from a happier tribe than that up in the northern hemi- sphere.
1 remember a day when I was about ten. The December 1945 Test at the Sydney cricket ground. Within no time Sid Barnes and Don Bradman scored 243 each. Hammond's Eng- land team had barely made 200 in reply. I thought at that stage, 'That just shows you.' We might not have H.G. Wells or Dickens or Shakespeare, but we can show them how to do this other thing.
Like sport. And now they are applying university science to it. Meaningful Eng- land-Australia level playing-field contests may be at an end.
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