Every time I see him on the Australian team sheet I think it’s a weakened team. And it goes back farther than that, when he played for Victoria in the old days I felt the same way.

For years I’d be one of seven people in the G watching him for Victoria and telling the other six people that I didn’t rate him. Only for one of them to point out that he’d taken 4 for 60.

I should love Clint McKay. I should talk him up in random conversations and wear a t-shirt that just has his face on it. Clint McKay grew up 15 minutes from where I did. We should share a Northern Suburbs of Melbourne bond.

Instead of complaining about him I should be worshipping his head-swaying run-up, fetishizing his good lengths and eagerly anticipating his back of the hand slower ball.

A friend of mine had heard McKay might be their team’s overseas player and wanted to know about him. All I had for them was that he was tall and had a good slower ball. I could give them no more information of a guy who I’ve seen bowl probably 40 times.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen McKay not take wickets. But somehow I never seem to remember how he took them. They just appear over and over again.

He’s just one of those bowlers who takes wickets. In 18 ODIs, Mckay has 38 wickets at just under 20. That’s the sort of numbers that make any sort of preconceived perception sort of irrelevant.

And as I was writing this, he was Australia’s only bowler who looked like taking wickets. And then he was the only Australian bowler to be hit on to the cathedral by MS Dhoni, before following up with a waist-high no ball.

I’ve always felt that when someone hits McKay the ball goes further. He doesn’t get hit for small sixes, or gentle fours, people just hit him really hard. That could even be the whole reason I have had this thing against him.

Wickets are good, but everyone remembers the big hits.

That will probably be the case here again. McKay’s three wickets were handy, but I’d think more people will talk about how Dhoni almost killed spectators who were over a hundred metres away to win the game.

People are fickle like that.

It was too weird for me to process, so I just pretended he didn’t exist.

I felt like this when he fell over wickets against India, bowled Sri Lanka into a World T20 final, took a catch that went viral on Youtube and smashed Australia around the G. Now, finally after all these years, I am willing to admit that Angelo Mathews does exist, and he exists well. Really well. Weller than most. Peter Weller, well.

Forget for a minute he looks like he’s been drawn by a Sri Lankan artist trying to make a cool superhero, and that his skin looks so smooth that I sometimes think it’s not actually skin. And just think about the way he fights.
Allrounders usually come in two ways: gifted and lazy, or plucky and up for a fight. Mathews is gifted and up for a fight. He loves a fight. The worse Sri Lanka play, the better he seems to be. Every time I come into some pointless ODI with Sri Lanka already having collapsed to no real chance of a win, there is Mathews, annoyingly stuck at the non-striker’s end, looking frustrated and angry.

Always angry. So very angry.

Mathews really doesn’t like to lose. And I don’t mean that in the clichéd sports way, I mean it in the you can see it in his face way.

When he brought up his half-century tonight at the WACA, he didn’t raise his bat for the crowd’s polite adulation. He just looked angry. Angry that yet again his team was not playing as well as a team that 8 months ago was in a World Cup final.

Players who don’t like to lose are the best to watch up close. Their faces are magnificent. There is a reason fans talk of Ponting face. Players like Mathews and Ponting just despise losing, and don’t really try and hide it.

The last time he had to carry an unworthy side over the line against Australia, his anger turned to joy, when armed with just a plucky tail, he won the game and was uber-heroic. This time he tried to use that anger again and very nearly did, but even without the win this just adds to his character.

The hero can’t win every time, after all.

I now look forward to my future watching of an Angelo Mathews who does exist. Or maybe I was always right, and he doesn’t exist, because it seems he wasn’t given Man of the Match. Which seems odd.

Mushtaq Ahmed had hands of doom.

Shane Warne’s wrists were radioactive.

Anil Kumble could see into the future.

Imran Tahir had a magical alice band.

Tiger Bill O’Reilly was an actual tiger.

And Bryce is the human spreadsheet.

Legspinners aren’t normal.

Rahul Sharma is not normal.

He’s massive, maybe 8 foot 9, or taller.

He doesn’t spin it, but he still deceives, perhaps the hardest skill.

And he has a special legspinning bionic eye.

Some say it’s because he suffered bells’ palsy or something similar when he was a child.

Lies.

The man is just another super human mutant legspinner.

Now this doesn’t mean that Rahul Sharma is going to be the best spinner in the world, or even India’s first choice spinner. But it does mean he has an advantage that no finger spinner could ever have.

The world has been calling out for a tall wrist spinner with a bionic eye for years now, and Rahul could be that man.

If he was in the X-Men, he would be called eye spin, and his super skill would mean that his straight ball would be undetectable to the normal human eye.

He’d kill you while you were still waiting to see whether he’d bowl a leggie or a wrong’un.

His eye would also be silver or gold, which, if I was his manager, I’d have already sorted.

The man is uncanny, this should not be hidden, it should be celebrated like we do for the rest of the legspin freaks.

Legspinners aren’t supposed to be like other people, and Sharma isn’t, he’s better.

You can watch it here, if you feel the need.

I also wrote this.

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Brad Hogg’s comeback and George Bailey’s rise don’t seem to have made people all that angry.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

Australia have picked an oldy and a dude to replace a dude with roughly the same record of the other dude who is slightly older. Where is the disdain, the outrage, the editorial’s sprouting anti-Victorian intent and how Australia are overlooking their future for some old dude the commentators all like?

Australia have picked a player who has been retired for years. I’m not even sure we knew that Justin Bieber was a thing when Brad Hogg last played, and Zach Galifianakis was a fat funny dude starring in such classics as Speed Freaks. Hogg isn’t exactly Bob Simpson, who was dragged from a retirement village to save Australian cricket.

I suppose if your lifestyle-hosting career is working well or you’re dating a famous model/actor/it girl, you don’t need to make a comeback at 40, but for Hogg it makes perfect sense. Statistically you can make an argument for Hogg. His economy rate is 5.4, he takes wickets, and no one has a better strike-rate on twitter abusing Mitchell Marsh. The only number not on his side is his age.

However, if you see Twenty20 as a way of easing young Australian cricketers into the team, then picking a guy who’s been retired four years who is only year younger than your selector is odd.

Then there is Bailey, who I am really glad is being given a chance to captain any Australian XI, but it’s not as if he’s hitting the captaincy with a stellar Twenty20 season behind him.

And age is also quite odd, as he’s a few months younger than Michael Clarke, and only a few months older than Cameron White. There’s no doubt Bailey can captain, he’s won more than his share of silverware, but so has White. Neither White nor Bailey made a cracker in a high class and low performance Melbourne Stars middle order this year.

You’d think that one of these decisions, if not both would be the catalyst for the first vicious attack on the John Inverarity reign as chief selector.

But it’s quite clear that virtually no one cares. Australians may casually enjoy the Big Bash League, and they may even make the trek down to see the odd match, but at the end of the day, you could have a man with a rubber chicken stuck to his head as captain and some bloke’s dog as the spinner and people would still spend more time discussing Shaun Marsh’s form or whether Punter (Ponting) should retire.

For all the hype and concern, Twenty20 is still just that thing people watch

We may make more.

Until people give us money, and then we’ll shut up.

Maybe.

That might still happen.

Although today was funner than seeing a borne film on a roller coaster, the series could still dribble out staid draws and the two teams could end up sitting on the pot and not shitting.

But today England shit a bit.

And so did the rest of the world, with laughter.

Before this England had shown to be a largely robotic team that could capitalise on flaws and had even learnt the hardest art in modern cricket, the un-collapse.

192 is a long way from 51, 47 or 43,  but it’s a cock up.

And England may end up winning this series, and travelling on their next couple of subbie adventures with their pith helmets held high.

Or they could shit themselves and prove to naysayers that they are grass merchants who who frown on brown.

I think both are ideal outcomes.

If England do fight back here, and then beat the Lankans and Indians, they’ll be a number 1 number one.  So cricket will have another great enemy that needs to be brought down.

If England don’t fight back, and they continue to play spin like it’s got herpes, world cricket will have another good ordinary side for the other teams to play awkward teenage sex Tests with.

Today’s English collapse was against a bowler with a career average and strike rate of 30/68.   He’s a bowler that when he has a good day, he has a real good day, when he has a bad day you might as well rent a truck and drive over him.

England aren’t going to come up against too many Ajmal’s in the world, but it’s comforting to know that when they do, their capacity to shit themselves still remains, even if this was a shart my modern Test standards.

So either they fight back and we all marvel at the professional nature of the new England.

Or they fall apart while we all point and laugh.

Cricket can’t lose. England can.

Well, maybe you don’t.  And if you don’t, at least show someone the trailer and help me out.

But if you want to help out with dollars, pounds, pesos or rupees, please give money to us at wefund.

If you like Test Cricket or me, it would be nice.

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Click here for news and photos about the film.

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The scoreboard has a sort of don’t mess with me attitude. The ducks in Queens Park’s look more sinister than most. And the light towers have a violent look to them.

My first memories of the WACA involved Geoff Lawson’s jaw, or what was left of it after Curtly Ambrose tried to decapitate him. For a few years the pitch changed to a PG rating, and the allure of the WACA almost disappeared. Now some of the brutal mystique has returned. The pitch is once again fast and bouncy. Once you’ve worn a few on the hands and chest, like a scene from a bad disaster film the pitch slowly opens up and lets the bowler aim at massive cracks.

Then there is the heat. Perth is hot. I don’t want to get into specifics, but I’m washing undergarments over here more than David Warner hits boundaries. Peter Siddle looked like he was too tired to celebrate a wicket on day one. Siddle and I are from Melbourne, so maybe us handling heat means little, but in Perth even the Indians have been complaining about the heat. I’m counting that as hot.

There is something slightly wrong about the stands too. Any ground with grass hills on both sides should be lovely, but the WACA still feels ominous. The Inverarity is the sort of stand that would be used for a prison football match. The inside seems to have been made to survive a riot. The TV and Radio press are at the top of the Lillee/Marsh stand, with only one disabled toilet – well I hope that is all there is, otherwise someone is playing one hell of a joke on me.

The written press have no room of their own due to their numbers. Cricket grounds in Australia are always surprised at the amount of press India and England have. So at the WACA, almost all of them are dumped out behind the grass bank in a square-of-the-wicket hospitality tent. It’s not bad, unless you’re in the front row in which the heat of the sun and your laptop bring you to a slow boil. They don’t even have their own toilet over there. The punters and the press near the Shepherd gate share a concrete box, which strangely has no urinals and is backed up ably by portaloos, with no humanity at all on a hot Perth day.

The WACA doesn’t even make it easy to commentate. The ABC are commentating standing up, just so they can see the entire ground. They have five cameras stationed directly in front of them. It looks more like a comedy skit about the different way TV and Radio is treated by sport.

The stewards here are scary. They don’t guard, they aggressively patrol waiting for patron or press to roam slightly out of line. If you walk up the wrong hallway, an elderly woman with a name badge will tackle you. Discussions about staircases here are brutal. And if you’re standing where it says no standing, even on a non-match day, you will be moved by any means necessary.

Even the WACA press conference room (which is actually a weight’s room) leaks from a suspicious looking pipe that says waste.

Whether you’re facing Curtly Ambrose, waiting for the one toilet, getting food in the Inverarity dungeon or commentating on your tippy toes, the WACA has a real tough Test feel about it.

It’s kind of harsh and nice at the same time.

But this innings was more than that, even though it was exactly that.

David Warner didn’t just go out there and get his slog on.  He started with sensible shots, worked the ball into gaps, but away the bad balls and then bitch slapped Vinay Kumar the way the rappers talk about doing it.

Warner used thuggish brutality and batting smarts.

It was a top Test attacking innings by a guy who smashes the fuck out of the ball in T20.

It wasn’t Warner’s fault he was playing against a team drawn by unimaginative children.

All Warner did was what any good attacking Test batsman would do, he sensed the opposition were shithouse, and he beat the living fuck out of them.

Sure, he did it with lofted drives, risky pulls and a sweep through mid off, but that’s the tools he has.

He’s not a batting artist; he’s a batting Neanderthal.

Today he clubbed India on the head and dragged it back to his cave for some non-consensual loving, cave man style.

This innings was smackdown.

I mean there was even the moment where his cockiness meant he got hit in the head, but it was all for show, because there is no single substance harder than Warner’s head.

They probably spent most of that delay trying to find a new ball.

I think if I had a dog that was a bit unruly and likely to bite random strangers, I’d name it Warner.

I’d love that dog right up until the government made me put it down.