Ding, dong, the witch is dead! Clap your hands, get out of bed! Ding, dong the wicked witch is dead! There might be half a Test match left to play, but celebrations have started early for the Munchkins of the cricketing world, and with good reason: regardless of where the Ashes go on Monday, the Australians have been roundly thrashed.
Of course, her body might give the odd twitch over the next couple of days, perhaps a spasmodic kick or two of a green-and-gold-stockinged leg: the absence through injury of the slippery Simon Jones — England’s best bowler in the series by some margin — could be just what Australia’s miserably off-colour batting line-up has been waiting for. Then again, on current form they’re as likely to give Michael Vaughan his first five-for.
The significance of what England are about to achieve — what they already have achieved — is most evident in their public’s joy and enthusiasm. These rowdy and breathless conversations, whether on the front page of stern broadsheets or between pop princesses on quiz shows, are entirely naive, lacking all the traditional measured wryness of the cricket pundit.
This is a cultural awakening, as people who didn’t know they didn’t know about cricket discover it. These are people who were, to put it simply, second-generation vassals of Australian sporting colonisation. Like most colonised masses they accepted their lot grudgingly, not liking what they saw (three-day Tests, Shane Warne mooning the Queen, and so on), but not knowing how to change it. And most tellingly, they first digested and then perpetuated myths of racial superiority: the Australians always win cricket matches because they are Australian.
It’s not suprising then that a real sense of emancipation has accompanied this most wonderful of series; and now that the house has fallen on the Wicked Witch of the South, the Munchkins are creeping closer to get a better look.
What they’re seeing isn’t impressive. The façade of fresh-faced sun-kissed athleticism has split away to reveal a faintly creaky body on the wrong side of 30.
It bowls lots of no-balls, it bowls down the leg side often, it gets bogged down and plays silly shots. It has a magic wand called Warne and a flying broomstick called Glenn McGrath, but rest of its arsenal is as scary as a pair of ruby slippers.
The Munchkins can’t be blamed for their surprise and euphoric confusion, of course. They’ve been on the receiving end for years, not just from cricketers but from lugubrious experts who paid the bills by predicting Australian domination (in all sports) for the next 20 years thanks to money and science and planning.
Rome might not have been built in a day, but it certainly didn’t fall in one either: a shaky Ashes series doesn’t necessarily mean the end of Australian civilisation as we know it. But one has to wonder just exactly which plans the experts have been referring to all this time: only five members of the current touring squad are in their twenties, and of them only Brett Lee and Michael Clarke have international careers under way.
And, unless the much-vaunted science we hear so much about is that of cloning (with labs in Melbourne putting the finishing touches on a strong, chubby bowling hand, floating in a petri dish and faintly stained with nicotine), one has to suggest that it hasn’t amounted to hill of beans.
In fact one can’t help feeling we’ve been here before. Ten years ago, to be precise, with a wet summer crouched over the Caribbean, and a fresh young Australian team breathing fire under Steve Waugh. The West Indies were beaten at home for the first time in 22 years, and the rest is dismal, sad history, illuminated in brief flickers by the sublime Brian Lara.
A series loss — or even a bloodying draw — in England is as good as a home series defeat. The ovals of England have been the playthings of Australians for 20 years, stages on which to posture and amaze and enrage, just as the West Indians of Vivian Richards did.
But the myth of production-line cricket development, and its inherent complacency, shattered Caribbean cricket; and Australians must be remembering with severe discomfort one of cricket’s oldest truths: when teams fall, they fall hard and fast. A year or two, and it’s all over.
When they rebuild — which they will — it will not be with flare and grace, but with grim determination. Allan Border came out of a scorched cricketing wasteland. Perhaps Clarke and Lee have been burned badly enough on this tour to be valuable in the future.
And as for England, those who love Test cricket are forever in their debt; for playing with the ferocity and spirit and sparkle of hares boxing in a sunlit field; for snatching us away from the money and mindless banal one-day rubbish spewed out by Asian tycoons in Dubai.
And, most of all, for dropping the house on the old baggage.