The sticky wickets of making the grade

15/12/2015 Cricket authors Sam Perry and Dave Edwards, who have just written a tribute book to the game of cricket. David Geraghty / The Australian

As Australia take the field at the Melbourne Cricket Ground today, he’ll be looking on with a vague sense of what might have been, and an acuter sense of what isn’t.

It could have been him out there, you see. He played juniors and rep cricket against a few of the Aussie guys. He’s seen a couple of blokes up close. One of them once looked in his direction with a hint of recognition, then condescendingly called him “champ”. He consoled himself with the thought that he plays the highest standard of amateur cricket in the world. For he is The Grade Cricketer.

None of the foregoing is quite true, except in slightly soured spirit. The Grade Cricketeris instead a three-year-old Twitter handle and a month-old book by three disarmingly cheerful young men from Sydney, 30-year-old Sam Perry, 30-year-old Dave Edwards and 29-year-old Ian Higgins. It concerns the cricket, seldom described, just below first-class level, where “young blokes morph from polite teenagers to arrogant pricks in the space of a season”.

@gradecricketer has 42,000 followers, including Test cricketers from Kerry O’Keeffe to Ed Cowan, while The Grade Cricketer (Melbourne Books) has won testimonials from personalities as diverse as Big Brother’s Ryan Fitzgerald and Booker prizewinner Thomas Kenneally (“The finest tribute to a sport since Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and the best cricket book in yonks”).

Almost any cricketer can identify with the hopeless addictedness of such reflections as: “I couldn’t tell you what colour my girlfriend’s eyes are but I’ll never forget that one glorious cover drive I hit in 2006.”

But it’s not entirely a joking matter, for the authors also cast an eye on the mores of the young, insecure Australian sporting male. “We’re not academic experts,” says Perry. “But we’ve tried in a clumsy way to make broader sociological commentary on Australian men. And it does strike us that the cricket club has been left behind as the world has moved on.”

Of this world, Perry, Edwards and Higgins have first-hand experience. They started together in the mid-1990s as junior cricketers at the venerable Gordon District CC, home base through history to such names as Victor Trumper, Charlie Macartney, Bert Oldfield and Adam Gilchrist. Higgins is still there captaining the Third XI, after six years in the Seconds never quite cracking the Firsts.

Both Edwards and Perry crossed paths again at North Sydney CC, then moved to Melbourne where they hovered in the middle grades of Prahran and St Kilda respectively before a combination of injury and adulthood took its toll.

Each by now worked on the fringes of media, in sales and communications, and they wrote a group blog, The Public Apology. And in September 2012, Perry chanced on their subject.

To mark the first cricket pre-season he was not involved in since childhood, Perry dashed off a 1500-word instructional guide to ‘‘How to Make It in Grade Cricket’’ which identified the central importance of looking the part — on the field, in the nets, in the sheds, in the showers.

“If you’ve batted for over forty-five minutes, and have a modicum of sweat about you, definitely call for new gloves,” was a typical recommendation. “In essence, this will demonstrate to your team that you are committed enough to have multiple sets of gloves, which therefore means you are good at the game.”

To the trio’s surprise, the piece was widely circulated. Appreciative comments were forthcoming from the likes of former Test opener Justin Langer and one-day international player Brett Geeves.

Emboldened, Perry began tweeting in the persona of a cricketer “unemployed, pushing 30, and barely clinging to my spot in 5th grade” yet somehow unable to give the game up.

After nine months, Edwards and Higgins started pitching in, and the character began developing a kind of backstory complementing his sardonic advice and rueful self-reflections.

On Twitter, TGC has a demanding father: “Dad never told me he loved me but he did say ‘nice shot’ once, so there’s that.”

His friendships are few and strained: “I’ll miss my best mate’s wedding if I think I can score a fifty against the bottom placed side in 4th grade”.

His possessions are few and shabby: “My car smells like pad-sweat, grass stains and wasted youth.”

The persona, as Perry observes, “breaks the rules of Twitter” in its instability. Some tweets are young and arrogant: “Oh, you’re new at this club? Allow me to bestow a demeaning nickname upon you in order to cement my fledgling alpha dog status.”

Others are older and sadder, if none the wiser. TGC’s personal life has trended from the flaccid (“I shine the ball suspiciously close to my groin because I haven’t had sex in 7 months and I yearn for the touch of our tea lady”) to the downright shrivelled (“As a boy, I honed my signature hoping one day I’d be asked to autograph a mini bat. Doesn’t have the same impact on child support cheques.”)

The persona of the book, the “autobiography of a failed cricketer”, was a different matter. Warwick Todd and Dave Podmore had been done. The wannabe alpha male had to become a beta man. All the collaborators really knew, as they sat down one day with a Melbourne University CC second-grade match in the background for atmospheric purposes, was how the book would end: “Maybe I will go round again next season.” But that decision had to be convincingly arrived at.

In this they’ve largely succeeded. TGC between covers cuts a more sympathetic figure. He is still basically selfish, often morose, physically self-conscious, desperate to be taken seriously. But he has a droll perspective on his lonely younger self: “I dreamt of one day meeting a girl that liked cricket. Mainly, I just wanted somebody to give me throwdowns.”

The younger cricketers with whom TGC now competes he regards with chagrin and pathos: “There’s nothing that makes me feel more alive than sledging a fifteen-year-old all day and getting into my 1991 Nissan Pulsar and driving to my parents’ house. Absolutely nothing.”

TGC describes the institution of the evening “circuit” — alcohol-fuelled bonding with female enticements — in anthropological detail. Bad sex and bad cricket prove to have a good deal in common: “A few minutes of bumbling foreplay ensued. This was no different to the way I usually start all my innings: scratchy at the start and never really ‘in’.”

But he also starts a real relationship with a girl in a book club whose easygoing normality causes him to question his own “delicate equilibrium”: “If I got out twice during a net session, it’d take me days to get over it. Likewise, if I smashed the lst ball of my net 120 metres, I’d dine out on that for weeks. F..king weeks.’

The Grade Cricketer, then, offers the redemption @thegradecricketer is afraid to seek, which reflects the authors themselves achieving a detachment from youthful ambition.

Perry was a very earnest young cricketer. “I didn’t take a gap year because I was sure I’d play for Australia,” he admits. “I never felt in grade cricket that there was much sense of enjoying the game for the game’s sake. I felt that everyone was competing very hard to be as high up in that pyramid as possible, as part of this feudal system.”

Edwards was serious enough that he can’t quite get over how his world expanded when he stopped playing: “I was suddenly able to go to brunch on a Saturday with my girlfriend. I’d never done that. Smashed avocado and feta … I mean, I’d never heard of that dish.”

Higgins is sort of in recovery. “Writing this book has been a healthy experience,” he says. “I enjoy cricket from a different perspective, because I’m outside and playing the sport with my mates. Whereas before, it was because I loved the battle and I was trying to be as good as I could possibly be.”

Higgins senses that grade cricket culture is now in a phase of accelerated change. “It’s certainly a lot different to when I started, probably for the better,” he says. “There was a lot more drinking then because I think there were a lot more older guys playing.”

“I reckon about 80 per cent of grade cricketers now give it away when they finish uni, around 22 or 23, and start work — when they realise that getting to training and giving up the whole of Saturday is hard. Even the circuit is different. I’m the oldest in my team by six or so years, and my guys are going to 21sts and house parties rather than coming back to the clubrooms and heading out as a group.”

Some parts of cricket, of course, remain unaltered, such as the ritual of Boxing Day, to which The Grade Cricketer pays tribute in its dedication: “For all those who ever dreamed that one day they’d play for Australia.” But given that only 11 fulfil that dream every Boxing Day, the “autobiography of a failed cricketer” seems the ideal reading accompaniment.