Summer is all about cricket, and with the footy season far away, footballers get cricket envy | Cornes

With summer cricket well and truly here, and the AFL season far away, footy stars get envious around this time, and rightly so, writes Graham Cornes.

It is about this time of the year that we footballers get cricket envy.

Football is as far away as it can be. The teams have interrupted their pre-season training for the Christmas break and all the attention is on the cricket. The Boxing Day Test is imminent and the television screens are flooded with the T20 white-ball game.

Ah, the Boxing Day Test. It may very well be the most over-hyped event on the Australian sporting calendar. Yes, it’s a tradition but its importance has been over-inflated by the myth that Melbourne is the sporting capital of Australia. Promote the myth often enough and the Victorians will believe it.

Cricketer Eric Freeman bowling at training. Used in The News 17 Oct 1972.

The reality is that the MCG is a squashed concrete cylinder with an unpredictable, unreliable pitch. But the Victorians will flock there.

The first day is sold out. Who knows why? Rarely are they gripping, close contests. Often they are one-sided, tedious affairs.

We need to go back to 1998 to see anything like a close exciting finish when a Dean Headley-inspired England held on to win by 12 runs. But even that was influenced by the fact that the first day, Boxing Day, was washed out.

Nevertheless, my Boxing Day prejudices aside, at this time of year cricket is the focus and footballers get caught up in the emotions of it all because deep down, many of them are still cricketers at heart.

They played cricket when they were young. It was a time when they didn’t have to choose between one sport or the other. That would come later, although not that much later.

Footballers of today would find it hard to believe that there was a time when you could combine a league football career with a first-class cricket career.

Footballer Peter Anderson trying to smother Eric Freeman's kick. SANFL football - Port Adelaide vs North Adelaide match Jul 1971.

The seasons rarely overlapped. Indeed, some of the greats of football played Sheffield Shield cricket, and several also played Test cricketer for Australia. Magarey Medallists Barrie Robran, Lindsay Head and John Halbert all played Sheffield Shield cricket for SA.

Halbert holds a unique football/cricket record. He is the only person to have won both the Magarey Medal and the Bradman Medal. (The Bradman Medal is awarded to the player adjudged best in the District Cricket Association).

Other great footballers, Craig Bradley and Woodville’s Bob Simunsen played Shield cricket for SA. When Bradley moved to Melbourne to play football for Carlton, he still continued his cricket career, representing Victoria, and winning a district cricket premiership with the Melbourne Cricket Club - the last footballer to do so.

He even had an understanding with Carlton that cricket finals took precedence over early-season footy trials. Imagine that happening today.

More impressively however, are those league footballers who played Test cricket for Australia. Neil Hawke and Eric Freeman who both played for Port Adelaide (Hawke also played for West Torrens) played Test cricket.

There are many others. In Victoria, Max Walker who played for Melbourne, and St Kilda’s Simon O’Donnell both played Test cricket. Ironically O’Donnell’s father, Kevin played in the same St Kilda football team as two of Don Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles, Keith Miller and Sam Loxton.

They were the days – it was a time when the intimacy and intrusion of television hadn’t de-mystified the legend of the Australian Test cricketer or, for that matter, the Aussie rules league footballer. To a young generation of Australian boys, they were godlike heroes.

We baby-Boomers idolised Richie Benaud, our Test captain. He carried himself with a distinguished nobility that belied his public school upbringing. There have been great Test captains since but none had the impact, charisma or bearing of Richie Benaud.

Of course there were others. Norm O’Neill was young and dashing. Neil Harvey was older. He’d been the youngest member of Bradman’s Invincibles, but in the early 1960s he was still the most attractive left-handed batsman we’d seen.

The Chappells, Lillee, Thomson and Walters came later, baby boomers themselves. They were big cricketing names but, de-mystified by an increasingly voracious media, they didn’t hold us in the same thrall as the legends of the 50s and 60s.

By the 1970s it was getting harder to combine a career in cricket with one in league football. You had to choose.

It was also complicated by the arrangements that football and cricket clubs who shared the same oval tried to come to. It seemed to be accepted that the ground would be shared equally. Cricket would have the ground for the six months from the start of October until April when, in those days, the SANFL season started. But that didn’t suit the footy clubs who needed the ground to train and play trial games on, particularly if it was a trial game against a VFL club.

There is one bitter saga in the history of the relationship between the Glenelg Football Club and the Glenelg Cricket Club. The footy club had organised a trial game against Hawthorn to be played in March. Of course, it was a big deal.

However, the Glenelg Cricket Club was still in the finals and needed the ground. They were scheduled to play Port Adelaide in the district cricket preliminary final. If they won they would need the ground for the extra week. One of the Glenelg vice-presidents, a particularly benevolent benefactor, offered to finance a $10,000 bonus to the Port Adelaide team if they could beat the Seahorses (yes, that’s their nickname).

It didn’t work. Glenelg won, another example of why money is never an effective incentive. The relationship is better now but it did take some time to heal.

As much as I loved cricket, tried to absorb the culture and was seduced by the romance of it, I was a dud. Before suburbia overtook the small winegrowing country town, I played junior cricket for Reynella.

The better kids like the Gilbertson brothers, were often called up to the B grade when it was short. I never was. There are no remarkable bowling feats and only one memorable catch – against Port Noarlunga on their home ground that was ankle-deep in un-mown turf.

My only claim to fame from those under-16 years is a 100-run second-wicket partnership with Brian “Birdie” Adams.

I fell to a difficult diving catch at mid-on, dismissed for 42. Sadly, and embarrassingly, it was my highest score.

“Birdie”, a brilliant player one or two years younger than me, went on to make a century. I’ve never forgotten it.

Alas, at 17, my last game was for Central Whyalla C-grade under the captaincy of the legendary club stalwart, Kevin Cozier. One game - and I wasn’t invited back.

That’s the thing about cricketers. They have the best stories, the best trips and the best memories. They recall in intimate detail moments that should well and truly have been forgotten.

At this time when there is no football to distract us, are we envious? Indeed we are.