Sydney has a live Test, but not an occasion to match

For the first time in many years, I will not be at the Sydney Test on Thursday; nor, chances are, will you.

Crowds queue up to enter the Sydney Cricket Ground ahead of the Ashes Test in 2018 Picture: Brett Costello

For the first time in many years, I will not be at the Sydney Test on Thursday; nor, chances are, will you.

I am precluded mainly by the peculiar cult of Dan Andrews, ever more demented in its incompetent caprice and endless schadenfreude. Should you be in New South Wales, you’ll be lucky to have obtained a ticket given the scaling down of the Sydney Cricket Ground’s capacity to comply with the COVID-safety regime.

Maybe you’re an Indian-Australian who’d been planning to wave your tricolour; maybe you’re a country resident with a time-honoured space in your calendar for this annual rite; maybe you’re from Auburn, Berala, Lidcombe North, Regents Park and Rookwood. Sorry about that; or, actually, not sorry, because a good many think that it shouldn’t be an option for anyone.

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There’s the Australian Medical Association, who will accept nothing but bare terraces. There’s Norman Swan, increasingly spellbound by his reverberating, ex cathedra pronouncements. There’s even old mate Steve Price, who thinks it’s ‘madness’.

Yet there also seem perfectly sound reasons to trust the robustness of the system. Despite their state’s allegedly flamboyant disregard for contagion, New South Wales at the moment has no COVID sufferers in intensive care. The state on Wednesday reported four new local cases. Not deaths; not even hospitalisations; cases.

Perhaps, as do I, you have friends in the UK and US, either in hard lockdown or ever present danger – predicaments worsened by flagrantly incompetent public officials. To deem ours a crisis by comparison, when the entire country has suffered two COVID deaths since the end of October, seems like … well, I was going to say ‘madness’, but let’s leave the hyperbole to others, and call it disproportionate.

The general objection, however, feels less epidemiological than moral, reminiscent of those admonitions of pleasure in wartime – don’t people know that there’s a war on?!

The banning instinct, of course, has always been primal. Remember Mencken’s definition of puritanism? “The secret fear that someone, somewhere, is happy.” And our modern counterparts of the Plymouth Brethren supplicate most willingly before the Great God of Risk.

Now, it is certainly true that justifications of sport can sound absurd in times of extremity. A year ago it was the prime minister, as the nation burned to a cinder, prating about Australians “gathered whether it’s at the SCG or around television sets all around the country and they’ll be inspired by the great feats of our cricketers from both sides of the Tasman and I think they’ll be encouraged by the spirit shown by Australians and the way that people have gone about remembering the terrible things that other Australians are dealing with at the moment….”

A year later it reads back like a third form essay copied from your thickest classmate. With friends like Scott Morrison, the Sydney Test needs no enemies ….

But the cry that “it’s just a game of cricket” jars also. A flag is just a piece of cloth, an anthem just a song. There are ideas in things, and the ideas in an institution sustained almost uninterruptedly for 144 years that has given joy to generations are hardly unwholesome.

To confine ourselves to “the essential” is merely to exist; and life’s communal pleasures and cultural traditions seem ever more valuable after a year in which isolation has been the norm.

In this opinion I differ from my esteemed colleague Malcolm Knox – simultaneously one of Australia’s finest novelists and most perceptive sports columnists – who declared in last Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald that he would be boycotting the Test.

Malcolm described attendance as “fundamentally wrong and selfish” and “an expression of complacency in an isolated country that has been, simply, fortunate.”

A stern reproof – although, in the next breath, Malcolm stated this was a purely “personal decision” and he was “not telling anyone else what to do.” He was just a “conscientious objector.”

Yet has Australia “been, simply, fortunate”? Surely, Australia has not fluked it to a state of comparative COVID stability. It has involved a stupendous effort by health professionals, public servants, police and soldiers, and, certainly in Victoria, immense sacrifice by and suffering among its citizens. For sure, we owe some of this success in containment to our nation’s wealth, comfort, peace and security. But what of it? We’re entitled to draw on what we’ve invested.

In any case, were this simply a personal decision, why write about it at such length and with such rhetorical flourish? Why state that attending the Test is “on the same spectrum as those who went to Trump rallies in November”? Because …. seriously? The rallies were cynically organised by a depraved cause at a time of rampant infection; attendance at a carefully supervised and regulated outdoor cricket match in a city of six million monitoring a few infection clusters is not remotely comparable.

Those who refused to fight in World War I, furthermore, did not say: “Hey, this is a purely personal decision. You want to have a war, go ahead, knock yourselves out. Me, I’d rather lark about with the Bloomsbury Set.” No, they acted out of a deeply felt pacifism they thought it would be better if the world subscribed to. So I’m not sure that, here, purely personal opposition and conscientious objection quite align.

I’m sorry that, for different reasons, Malcolm and I will not be there today, as it would have been enjoyable to discuss this in person. In these increasingly stupid and angry times, any forum where we unite to share fondly, and to differ respectfully, is to be treasured.

So if you are headed for the SCG on Thursday, good for you. I dare say you’ve had a cruddy last year; I reckon you’ve been looking forward to this for a while; you’ve got a “live” Test, in Sydney far from routine, between two closely matched sides. Travel safely, behave prudently, watch keenly and enjoy the cricket. That’s what it’s for.