The vile bile of Edgbaston fans

They call it comedy but the bile emanating from the stands at Edgbaston sounds a lot like hate.

England fans whip themselves into a frenzy whenever Australia are playing

What ho! Those dashed colonials will cop a tongue-lashing at good old Edgbaston, the English Eggs and Beans have been chortling over Drones Club cocktails all week.

Won’t know what hit ’em. Our lads are waiting with their famous “switched-on wit”, as a Barmy Army sar-major said this morning.

“They’re going to get it full throttle,” he told ABC radio’s AM program.

Good old Edgbaston hey, that bastion of British comedy.

How puzzling that the nation that gave us Wodehouse, Waugh and a belly laugh at Field Marshal Montgomery’s inability to pronounce his Rs — ‘poor old General Wommel’ — thinks the bile belched from the Edgbaston terraces constitutes wit.

In the 2017 Champions Trophy a group of journalists had the misfortune of being seated among the Edgbaston hoi polloi.

(Yes, yes, I know. About time you journos got out of your ivory press boxes with all your free gourmet food, piping hot coffee and infallible Wi-Fi.)

The experience was as illuminating as it was intimidating.

We were surrounded by ‘fans’ as full as a Joe Root, each possessed by a manic desire to abuse Australians.

Their side wasn’t even playing, Australia were pitted against the Kiwis, but the comedians flooded through the turnstiles to spit invective at those from the larger island.

A year before Sandpapergate, Dave Warner was their chief target. The punters in our vicinity had a song-sheet that centred on a single, hilarious, comic device.

That Warner was short. My sides.

Never mind that many of the choir were considerably shorter than Joel Garner, how they laughed at their own cleverness every time they belted out a song belittling Warner’s apparent littleness.

And this wasn’t good-natured, Ronnie-Barker-making-fun-of-Ronnie Corbett-type humour. As they sang and spat, there was hatred in their booze-addled eyes.

Warner, stationed metres away at long-off, ignored it. His only reaction to the unceasing abuse was to lift the ball in their direction after holding a catch.

Others might not have been so restrained. Eric Cantona, for example.

Warner copped it again whenever he dared draw near the drooling masses during the World Cup semi-final last month.

“Each time a spectator leaps out of his seat and sprints down to the boundary to hurl more abuse,” ESPN Cricinfo’s Daniel Brettig reported.

“Warner smiles back at the hostility while collecting the ball.”

The Edgbaston narrative this week has focused on how the crowd will seize upon the Cape Town three.

But abuse at the ground is nothing new. It’s de rigueur, and dismissed by many of the English as just the way it is in Edgbaston.

Anyway, they say, you Aussies do the same to us at the Gabba. Na-na-na-na-na-na.

No. Spectators carrying on like that at the Gabba would be quickly ejected. As the English cricket writers well know; for they are prone to complain, with some justification, about Australian over-regulation.

The loudest and funniest crowd noise at a Gabba Ashes Test comes from the Barmy Army. (OK, the ‘God save YOUR Queen’ thing isn’t all that funny, but we have only ourselves to blame for that.)

Barrack all you like. Boo if you wish. Hiss and jeer. But personal abuse is uncalled for and, in any case, what’s wrong with watching the cricket?

For it appears we’re about to be treated with an Ashes series worth watching.