Summer is for reading Tim Winton novels and watching the cricket, golf and tennis. We’re in luck. Juice is on the shelves. Flannelled fools are everywhere. Cam Smith is about to play the NSW Open out in the boondocks and Alex de Minaur has debuted at the ATP Finals. In Australian sport, summer begins in November. Let that be the lesson for us all.
Let’s start with the cricket. The men’s schedule is what Lassie found in her bowl every morning. A dog’s breakfast. Disrespectful to fans and touring teams. Cheapening the short-form national caps. This week’s T20 series against Pakistan is the most meaningless contest since the one-day series against Pakistan. We have a passing interest but no one really cares. Because Cricket Australia doesn’t even fancy it. Why else would it stage matches while simultaneously telling the best players to give them a miss?
The face, heart and soul of Australian cricket wasn’t playing the ODI series decider in Perth on Sunday. Pat Cummins was at the Coldplay concert in Sydney. I admire what Cummins does for Australian cricket, and the way he does it. He seems a sterling fellow in all regards. But that was a terrible look on Sunday night. While Australia was being picked apart by Pakistan in Perth, the main man was having a night on the town. If the game wasn’t interesting enough for Cummins to watch, let alone play, given the game involved his mates, and his country, and he played the first two games, I’m unsure why anyone else would have bothered.
The Australian cricket team was in action and yet it wasn’t the Australian cricket team at all. It was Australia Lite. Stand-ins. Stop-gaps who played cold while Coldplay played. Anyone who bought a ticket in Perth should be up for Australian of the Year. I wouldn’t pay for a seat for The Music Man on Broadway if Hugh Jackman wasn’t playing Harold Hill. CA deserves to cop some heat for its lunatic scheduling. Australian cricket caps are meant to be steeped in prestige and yet every man and his dog is getting one. Anyone forgoing their hard-earned to watch Australia T20 Lite in Brisbane on Thursday, Sydney on Saturday and Hobart on Monday … I salute you.
Perhaps Cummins had his wires crossed? When he was offered the chance to see Chris Martin, perhaps he thought the New Zealand Test trundler from the early 2000s was in town. When Coldplay were singing Yellow, was it in reference to Australia’s efforts in the last two ODIs? Did it make Cummins think perhaps he should be in a shirt of the same hue? Proper lift-off comes on Friday week, when Australia’s men go from playing cold to running hot in a blockbuster five-Test series against India. God and CA’s schedule will finally give us style, give us grace. Put a smile upon our face.
In the meantime, the WBBL is a winner. Ellyse Perry is playing like she’s in a Paul Simon song. Diamonds are on the soles of her shoes. And yet few of her teammates are lending much assistance and the Sydney Sixers are outside the top four. Sydney Thunder are pacesetters; Adelaide Strikers have fallen from a cliff. One of the most joyful, entertaining and happy-go-lucky players in the tournament, bespectacled South African Lizelle Lee, smoked a joyful, entertaining, happy-go-lucky and unbeaten 150 from 75 balls for the Hobart Hurricanes at the SCG on Sunday. I put down Juice for a while there; Lee’s innings was jumping off the page.
Australia’s golf majors are the Australian PGA at Brisbane’s Royal Queensland from November 21-24 and the Australian Open at Melbourne’s Kingston Heath from November 28-December 1. Before then, Smith, the great Smith, the Claret Jug-winning Smith, will venture out to the Murray Downs Golf and Country Club, all 938km from Sydney, and 360km from Melbourne, and just across the bridge from Swan Hill, and a million miles from care, and a thousand miles from his obligations, because of his devotion to Australian golf.
“When the opportunity arises to play, I want to be there,” Smith says before the equivalent of a Test cricketer returning to grade cricket for the good of the game. “The NSW Open is growing into a major event and I’m excited to be able to play in the tournament this year. It’ll be part of a great summer of Australian golf. It’s fantastic it is being played in a regional area and I can’t wait to see how many fans are at Murray Downs.”
Smith is laid-back enough to pitch a tent on the Murray River and camp out for the week. If he was an Australian cricketer, I reckon he’d play every ODI. There’s something terribly romantic about Smith, the writer, director and producer of one of the all-time great rounds of championship golf at St Andrews, playing out in the sticks. Get me on a flight to Bendigo. Plonk me in a hire car and point it towards Murray Downs. The British Open champion in the boonies … playing cold be damned … it’s enough to make one swoon. And hit the road.
Smith puts his hand up for the NSW Open but Australia’s best cricketers don’t play cricket for Australia. It’s a funny old game. The only bummer of the early start to summer? De Minaur’s opening match at the ATP Finals. At the coin toss in Turin, he looked at Jannik Sinner in the manner of a bloke trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. And who could blame him? Five years after his first match against the Italian, de Minaur hadn’t come close to jagging a win.
Demon would play every ODI, too. He’d played Davis Cup on one leg with a bandage round his head. I think he already has. At the start of Demon versus Sinner I thought … nobody beats Alex de Minaur eight times in a row. Of course, we were stealing one of the all-time great sporting quotes. Fresh from 16 straight losses to Jimmy Connors, Vitas Gerulaitis finally beat the American in 1980 at Madison Square Garden. “And let that be a lesson to you all,” Gerulaitis said. “No one beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row.”
De Minaur was 0-7 against Sinner. Now he’s 0-8. He grabbed an early break before the world No. 1 put his foot down and pulled away like he was in a Ferrari. He unloaded booming forehands that were more powerful, deeper or more acutely angled than anything the scampering, gallant, yet wildly outgunned Demon had in his arsenal. The Australian resembled a battler in an old Toyota Corolla while suffering an emphatic 6-3, 6-4 loss. The scoreboard flattered.
Demon rarely looks disheartened. Against 998 of the world’s top thousand players, his body language is unfailingly optimistic. Against Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, whom he has also never beaten, his shoulders slump. Rally after rally, point after point, Sinner was too powerful, too aggressive, too damn good. His average forehand speed was 127km/h to Demon’s 116km/h. Sinner’s backhand was 119km/h to Demon’s 104km/h. That’s a whopping, ruinous difference. Ferrari, Corolla. Demon kept looking at his courtside entourage with an expression of, “I don’t know what to do”.
He’s in the final lap of a tremendous year. The world No.8’s ambition is to win a major, but it cannot happen unless he solves his Rubik’s cubes, the riddles of Sinner and Alcaraz. Even Winton might struggle to write that sort of plot twist. Good on Demon for turning up … he could have ditched it for the Pink Floyd tribute show in Turin this week … but there remains a vast gap atop men’s tennis. Let that be a lesson to us all before we get caught up in Demon hysteria before the Australian Open. We always warm to the bloke and yet Sinner keeps beating him cold.
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