Darwin, Bangladesh and My Old Man’s Mower

Musings on the Darwin Test from an anonymous former Australian Test cricketer

There’s nothing more Australian than mowing your own lawn. It’s like feeding Vegemite to a kangaroo on Cup Day, while singing ‘Down Under’ at the top of your lungs, as a magpie takes a run at your skull and the world’s deadliest snake skitters off into the bush.

The best thing my father ever gave me was a two-stroke pull-start Victa Commando. He handed it down when he moved into the assisted living apartment, along with a half-full jerry can, his mowing thongs and a firm handshake. It’s an absolute weapon of a thing that’s been going since before AB led the side. I love it more than anything else I’ve ever been given, and I’ve been fortunate enough to own both a baggy green and a Whispering Jack CD signed by Farnsy’s drummer.

Still, it can be an absolute shit of a thing to start.

Choke out. Prime it. Pull. Nothing. Pull again. Nothing. Third pull it coughs once, like the last days of a mild dose of Covid. By the seventh I’ve got one foot on the deck and I’m hauling on that cord like a panicky skydiver reaching for the emergency chute. By the twelfth I’m saying things in my own driveway that would get me banned from a Blackall shearing shed.

And then it catches. And it goes. And it doesn’t stop going until the job’s done, and the lawn looks like the eighteenth at Augusta, if the eighteenth at Augusta had the common decency to have a Hills Hoist on it.

Anyway, that mower reminds me of this Australian cricket team.

India come out here in 2024 and we get rolled for 104 in the first innings of the series. Bumrah making the top order look like drongos. An absolute bloody shambles. Every man and his dog writes the team off, yet, by the end of the summer, we’d turned it all around and regained the Border-Gavaskar.

Last summer, first day of the Ashes, the Poms work us over. The Poms! Wickets everywhere. Panic in the commentary box. Smug English pricks boasting about a four-pronged pace attack like the 1980s West Indies had never been invented. And yet, by the end of January, we’d won 4-1, urn safely locked away, with the Poms heading home, ready to chuck in their entire fucken philosophical underpinning and the coach it rode in on.

Slow to start each time. But each time, by the end, a beautiful bloody lawn of trophy-winning Test match victories.

So ordinarily I wouldn’t be too fussed about losing in Darwin. Not even to Bangladesh, who’ve just taken a Test from us on home soil for the first time ever. It’s August. It’s the Northern Territory. Worse things can - and do - happen up there.

But these aren’t ordinary times.

Those previous summers were front lawns. A handful of Tests, home conditions, blokes sleeping in their own beds. Nice bit of turf, mow it, stand back, admire it, and sit down with something cold.

What’s in front of us now is not a front lawn. What’s in front of us now is an overgrown back paddock that hasn’t been touched since the last owners left, and is overrun with bindies, lantana and the rusted-out shell of a discarded Kingswood.

One more Test against Bangladesh. Then South Africa away. New Zealand. India away. A one-off at the ’G for the hundred and fiftieth. Another World Test Championship final, no doubt. And then England, in England, where we haven’t technically won a series since Tugga ruled the roost, thanks to Stokes’ Headingley bullshit in 2019 and the Oval ball change in 2023 where Khawaja was sconed by a Mark Wood bouncer and the dozy umpires somehow decided to swap a knackered ball for one with more shine than a hearse at a state funeral, and Punter went on Sky demanding an inquest, which never came, because of course it bloody didn’t, because why would it?

Sorry, where was I?

Ah yes. Twenty-odd Tests in less than a year, on four continents, in every condition the game’s got, with the team earning more Frequent Flyer points than Smudge has Test runs. And we’ve started slower than the NBN in Kununurra.

Now, credit where it’s due. Bangladesh were magnificent. Hasan Mahmud six-fer on day one, Tanzid Hasan with a maiden Test hundred, Mehidy tying up an end on day four like a bloke tightening a tap washer. They were the better side for four days and they ground it out. A team who turned up in Australia with a mower that started first pull, if one wants to continue the metaphor, and I fucken well do.

Whereas we’ve just pulled the cord twelve times in a Darwin lawn locker and got nothing but a busted shoulder for our efforts. Hardly a surprise. Our mower’s been sitting in the shed since January with last season’s fuel still in the tank, and every man, woman and child in this great brown land knows exactly what that does to a two-stroke engine. It goes gummy. It won’t fire. But that’s not the mower’s fault. That’s the fault of whoever put it away without draining it. And I’d love to know who that was. I’d love a name.

Which brings me to the batting.

Because, look. I’m a massive fan of Big Cam Green. Anybody that tall must be doing something right. But it’s a sorry old world when you’re relying on the big fella to set a decent fourth innings target. Where’s Jake Weatherald? Where’s Marnus? Where’s Big Beau Webster? Third exit off the Nowhere Roundabout, that’s where. And even with Big Cam notching up a ton, we still only managed to set The Desh 57 to win. That’s not enough. That’s never enough. You can run down 57 with a broom handle and a half-sozzled uncle in a rented tux. I’ve seen it happen.

So the question I keep coming back to, sitting here with a XXXX Gold in one hand and the second Test at Mackay a week away in the other, looking at this busted-arse lawn mower of a cricket team is this: Do we trade it in?

Because you can. You can walk into any big green shed in this magnificent, sunburnt country and there’s a whole aisle of them. Ride-ons, where you’re getting work done while pretending you’re at Bathurst. Corded electric, where you live in fear of shredding your longest extension cord and electrocuting the shit out of yourself. Hell, there are even fucken robot mowers now that do a little bit every day, never finish anything, and eventually drive themselves through a fence and onto a side road where some little shithead on an e-scooter runs over it, busting up its innards.

Is the robot mower Josh Inglis? Is the corded electric Matt Renshaw? I don’t bloody know. An analogy only goes so fucken far.

Here’s what I do know.

You don’t throw out a mower that works. Especially not one that’s given you beautiful lawns, summer after summer after summer. You’re going to bin it because it chucked a wobbly in August? Stuff that.

No, you drain the tank. You put fresh fuel in it. And you maybe change a spark plug or two, which costs about five dollars, and nine times out of ten is the only thing wrong with it.

So change whatever plug’s the problem, Bailey.

Then restart the bloody thing, and don’t stop until the paddock’s done.