Tricky little sessions, daddy hundreds, and getting hit "amidships"

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1:34That is very good. Bold! A team hat-trick! He's off! Sprinting away! He didn't try and hit it too hard. Just caressed it through the field. Spent time at the wicket, played bread and butter shots, keep it safe, took it off his hip and his legs. He's done that. Got him! Why did he do that? Unbelievable! What about that? It wasn't just one of those where it may stick or it may not. Remember the name! There's so much elegance about it. And yet it was quite brutal. Oh, he's over! What a rubber! What a good fish! Hello and welcome back to Cricket Clichés, a podcast you can never accuse of being over-prepared.

2:23Coming up. The Ashes is basically over. Well, a nation mourns, but then which one does? The truly unwinnable war England's leaders face the media. Championing down under how, when and why. What is a tricky little session? And it's bonus time. Bonus runs, that is, with tails a-wagging.

2:56let's say hello to our three guests here one of whom is absolutely smirking the crap out of the week he is loving it all he said that the world is now back in balance it is where he expects it to be with the aussies thrashing the english and i've never seen a man look more happy in the cold miseries of england than dan gallant hello daniel how are you well i'm actually fine apart from the fact that i lost my mic i didn't lose it i left my mic not in a hotel in amsterdam but in a really bizarre airbnb in brisbane which also had a series of violent possums or are they posser charging at the window at two o 'clock in the morning while i was watching pluribus which i really recommend on apple tv plus although we get no money for saying that i'm thoroughly enjoying it uh and yeah i'm staying in there i was staying in airbnb with three cricket writers aren't you not funny you have to work so hard you get there two hours before the broadcasters you leave three hours after the broadcasters and then you tuck yourself up in bed nick miller's back i'm delighted to say and you've been writing about the cricket this week in the athletic quite mournfully we're going to talk about mourning very shortly nick is it easier to write those pieces the mournful pieces uh there is a sort of a twisted side of my personality i think that does find it much easy to kind of write through the tears because you know you should be if you're writing something celebratory then ideally you should be off doing something else rather than writing but now that england are james anderson-less uh england are two nil down in the ashes i'm i've got nothing else to do other than complain about his shoddy treatment that's what the article that uh dan was referring to is about by the way james anderson was ditched 18 months ago denying buying us another 18 months of the bus bowler will probably have a watch for England for this, for this, whatever the hell this is.

4:46Yeah, and unfortunately, Michael Neeser and Brendan Doggett proved that if you can bowl 82 miles an hour in Australia and put it roughly on length, it works. Tickers, you have just been absolutely nailing predictions this week. It's like, you genuinely are some 14th century witch. Been rumbled at last. Fear of burning? Are you concerned you might just be taken away and immolated? immolated i feel like a blessed release at this point

5:13well welcome to the pod everyone's in a some of us are in a really good mood and that some of us is just dan uh because there has been plenty of disappointment in the northern hemisphere at least at how england have flopped in this series so far but not quite compared to the existential anger down under and this is so classically australian that um they do this thing and i genuinely don't know whether to believe them. I know not to believe some of them, but some of them I don't know whether to believe in. Do you know, Dan, the thing that upsets me is, you know, we're really hoping for a good series.

5:47So you actually wanted England to win this test pack, did you? Did you? Did you want to win? We wanted Australia to show, but we wanted a good fight from the Poms. I don't believe it. I'm calling foul. I think they're just being the most evil people possible. Dan? Well, a couple of weeks ago, I claimed to speak on behalf of all South Africans, but at least I am South African. So now if you'll allow me to speak on behalf of all Australians, I don't believe it. Actually, I don't believe it for a second. At least I can't relate to it. Because if South Africa hosted England for five test series in some ultimate universe that I will never live in, and we, the Proteus, stuffed England very comprehensively, I don't think you'd have people complaining that it was too easy.

6:28But then again, I didn't have Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath keep me company during my early childhood. So I obviously have a different psychology to Australians. It's a good point there, Dan, because this is what they always say. They say, look, you don't understand. We've won all the time. So all we want to see is something different. Nick, that's nonsense. They don't want that because you could hear the glee in their voices. I was in the TMS box for this game and listening to Triple M. He said, get out of your way, sword off palm, you've done it again. Shit shot, soft cock. They're reveling in every single moment of it.

7:00I mean, maybe on the part of the, let's say, slim section of the Australian population that does say things like that, is it not just a kind of an extra way of being smug about it to just kind of go, well, not only have we beaten you, but we've beaten you and we haven't really broken sweat and we would like a little bit more of a run out. It makes, not only making, if losing in English fashion wasn't bad enough for the English, it is making us feel even smaller that we've lost and we haven't, again, good Lord, we haven't really put up a fight, have we? Well, we're in Australia A territory soon, aren't we?

7:43That's a thing, where they go, oh, we have to play our B team and then play each other in the final. What I would say is that if you're listening into Australian stuff and if you're listening into cricket cliches you may not be hearing them all that they've got three different radio stations with abc which is like the bbc so they don't have adverts so for them it doesn't really make any difference for them there's no commercial requirement but for sen and triple m it is actually significant so what sen do is they sell their adverts for three and a half days of a test so after the two-day test at perth they were thunderous with rage because actually there is a danger that they weren't going to get as much money and some people it may shock you to learn get paid by the day so the aussies that are getting paid by the day i can kind of believe it because they're getting two-fifths of what they might have hoped to get when they were playing in perth and the etienne commentary where commercials are a really significant thing i would say that the tone of their commentary has been a bit more like really pissed off with england at the way they've behaved as if they've gone there deliberately to kneecap sen and break their entire commercial model which i mean if that was ben stokes's plan it was it's strange one because they seem quite nice at sen and they don't deserve it but at the same time it's i suppose it is a way of getting your own back.

9:12But I've got to come to you, Tickers, because amidst all this, amidst all this sadness that the Australians, I don't believe, are having, it's sort of deeply sad, isn't it, because of the predictability of it. Yes. Well, I say the predictability of it. Not all of us predicted it. I am out here on a shoestring because I predicted that England might actually put up a fight. But you, you quite correctly have identified. Written down on my notes, I've got you down as David Rodney Ian thing. let's go with that i think this is a whole new name for you i prefer this one it's my favorite new version david rodney ian tickner you wrote before the second test regarding ash's grief next will be someone like a vaughn or a swan saying these lads should get their holidays refunded as if england losing to australia at cricket is an unexpected unforeseeable part of the trip hey presto who came in and said exactly that tickers beefy do you know what if i was an England supporter and had paid the money to come here I'll be asking the ECB rather I should say they'd be asking them for a refund he was furious that England were unprepared for a tour and to be fair when it comes from someone like Beefy who was such a such such a careful preparer for a tour I mean it's one thing to be unprepared for a tour these lads haven't even been in panto come on I I mean, yeah, the hypocrisy is quite staggering.

10:35You also said there would definitely be a clamour for a Bethel or Jax or anyone getting runs in the paintball game while the main lads go golfing. It was Jax who did get some runs. And on the back of that, you also said if anybody gets any runs in this, there'll be a clamour for them to move up to number three. Well, I was in the TMS box when Michael Vaughan said exactly that. And he said it half an hour into Will Jax's marathon innings. All he had to see was five forward defences, three leaves. And he was saying, you know what, tell you, could do worse than ever. Will Jax at three is the best technique of the team.

11:10Always the best technique of the team is someone who can play a forward defence, isn't it, Tickers? It's just like there's nowhere where you can get runs now and not immediately be suggested as a number three. He looks good there because that's much easier. It's harder to bat at three. We're obsessed with number threes. But yeah, that is another easy one. As soon as England are struggling and someone gets run down the order, they're the answer at number three. Ben Stokes has been the answer to number three his entire career without ever actually ending up there. There was a time just before Baz Ball when Jonathan Agnew called for him to open.

11:45Actually, my favourite one of those was George DeBell, who said that, this was about 10 years ago, he said the batter with the best technique in the Warwickshire team wasn't Ian Bell, it was Chris Wokes. and he should bat at number three. Chris Wokes. Chris Wokes. He did it in the World Cup. And all the time, there's a man with 13 ,700 runs knocking about who refuses to bat at number three. Who's the obvious solution? And also, when he does bat at three, makes all his big scores there, and when he bats at four, he's in after three and a half overs anyway. It can't be that different. It's no different at all, Tickers, and it drives us all bad.

12:18And the last one of yours, which is another absolute beauty, and I'm pretty sure that within three days of the Adelaide test, I'm going to be on a selection panel for this. Moving through the series, you'll get increasingly wild selection ideas put forward and calls for plans three years in the making to be discarded overnight. And it's true that almost everyone has suggested extra pink ball practice and various other ideas. All of this is true. We've all got various new plans. Barney Rone, I think, has said that Passport is dead. No, it's Andrew Miller who said that Passport is dead. And he gets to decide, to be fair.

12:55he invented Baz Ball so he gets to kill it off Australia doesn't get to kill off Baz Ball What is this about our obsession with this? So what we're being asked to do and I can feel it coming around the corner is select your Ashes team for four years time Don't select your team for the first test match of the summer Who cares? All we care about is and don't select your Ashes team for a year and a half's time by the way Who cares? We only care about go into a place where we can't win and select the team for that have you heard that conversation happening yet i haven't specifically heard i have to say but it will definitely once it's clear that we're losing in adelaide and then because at the moment there's still this bit of oh it's you know the series is still alive though isn't it yeah because of maths everyone has maths or because two is less than three yeah once it's clear where this one's going I think that's when that will really stop because then they'll stop being you'll start to get there'll be the someone mad will turn up in the fifth test what I'm hoping for is that the mad out there selection for the fifth test ends up being Shoaib Bashir who they backed in the whole way for three years and then he ends up the twist is that he's Scott Borthwick at the end I'd quite like that I quite like the idea that he plays at Sydney takes 12 wickets and it turns out that it does spin at Sydney after all, having been told that none of Australia's pitches are the same because we don't know what we're talking about because they've all changed.

14:30What I'm really looking forward to is how history shows us that when an empire or a regime built on a very strict ideology collapses, society sort of flips the other way, fascism becomes democracies, democracies become fascism. So I'm looking forward to the next coach just going all in on 11 Dom Sibleys and we're going to bat at 1.5 and over and the new x ball whatever it is is a total reverse of basball and feels like the 1950s all over again i mean that'll be a lot of fun 100 percent sibley's name is going to come up there's going to be calls for sibley hamid it's that's they're the names that's the natural it's the natural reaction to the pendulum swinging now too far the other way and then when when they lose another ashes five no about batting too conservative there's going to be clamours for Bears Ball and this is going to be the oscillation for the rest of time that's already happened I think Mark Rabrakash has already written about um how the guys in the county scene the likes of Hasim I mean his name has definitely come up uh Dom Sibby has come up in jokey dispatches but it's becoming increasingly you know serious there's a clamour there is a clamour and it's definitely a clamour like a fans clamour it's absolutely it's it's screaming out for the complete reversal.

15:48Because you're absolutely right, you do get that. And also, you've got the lesson that everyone's learnt, boys, that when you go to Australia, you don't want to go there with really fast bowlers who are really big and hit the pitch at 92 miles. Now, you need your Michael Neesers of this world, don't you? You need someone just to dob it on a length with the keeper standing up. Are we saying that Darren Stevens needs to keep his phone on? Keep her up. Front pad's in danger. Yeah. It's rough to say. That's what we need. Yes. Now, the one thing you didn't predict. Should have done, really. Yeah. I mean, this is going to happen at some point in the series.

16:23The most obvious one. It is the most obvious one. It's Ben Stokes. And where did he get hit? Oh, the dick! The Unmentionables. We could start with that. The Unmentionables has been around for quite a while. Basically, the cock. What's the normal? what's the normal word for a cock bother? Well, the ball is the cock botherer. I've been using that for a little while. So he's bowled another cock botherer. Doesn't always hit the cock, but it's aiming for the cock. Ben Stone's been hit in the cock a lot. Two things. Let's start with why everybody laughs at it. And then why a commentator then says, I don't know why everybody laughs at this.

17:04This is the most disingenuous conversation that ever happens on commentary. Discuss. The answer to the first one is really, because it's funny. Because it's funny. It's playground stuff, isn't it? It's flicking the ears and it is funny. Someone got hit. Never not going to be funny. And it is completely performative. You go, I don't know why. It hurts that. Yeah, it does hurt. That's why it's funny. It's only his dick. He's going to be all right, isn't he? My favourite thing in this is whenever there's a female commentator who's doing the main comms she always makes the point like over to you lads like this one's for you i love i love that little like look i i can comment on every single thing in the game it's 2025 but the one thing i can't comment on is a man getting in the nuts by a cricket ball like that's over to you that that's for you guys i always just find that a cute little uh little flourish i like that but you know the thing is i don't like about myself because i never call it out on air because afterwards i would say to them i say you never been like smacked flush on the minge is that a direct quote yeah yeah and that god yeah it hurts it's really big time i think well you know but i guess you're absolutely right that we get this thing where all the lads then crease up laughing and they're made to feel bad about it and i don't feel remotely bad about it it's hilarious like you know to quote steve coogan's character in the day today when he's the pool attendant no one died they get back up they they feel as we all know a bit sick they they have a drink and then if it's ben stokes you get in it again about 10 minutes later there was a um i can't remember when which series it was i think i think we're pretty sure it was at safari gardens where alistair cook got hit flush in the bollocks joe root was next to him slit you've never seen anyone laugh so hard about anything this was in kind of joe root's innocent sort of pre-captaincy cheeky chappy days when he just he couldn't couldn't contain himself and it was a real kind of because it was obviously at that point it was pretty clear that joe root was going to be the captain at some point when cook jibbed it in so just to see a man laughing uproariously at his you know soon to be predecessor getting hit in the cock was uh it was a glorious thing to see can anything sum it up better though that a man with 13 and a half thousand test runs 40 test hundreds and the happiest he's ever looked on a cricket field was when one of his best mates got hit in the dick there's also a quite a sick pleasure about it because you know i i don't know what it's like to play a joe root cover drive or to bowl like mitchell stock but i've been hitting the balls before there's something very relatable when you see someone at the elite level just keel over because they've copped one um i'll share a slightly embarrassing story but hey it's all content and hopefully you know maybe this helps i once got hit in the balls from an inside edge from a very quick bowler and my box broke and then when i stood up i actually got caught and i couldn't and i and i couldn't take the box off and i remember running around the field screaming while my while i was about 13 and my mother chasing me around trying to help me but making the situation a lot more embarrassing yeah so this is sort of like my my apex of cricket well someone's got someone's got to do it because this is the thing that made david bumble bumble i've asked about the money isn't it when his paint box broke and his cock went through the slit and then it slammed shut yes and he's told that story a million times i don't know you obviously haven't made quite as much money out of this story dan but yes no but uh you know maybe this is the start yes but how eventually is it resolved because how do you prize that apart i Can you bear to tell us?

20:51Well, I'll tell you what. It leaves a scar, is what I will say. That wasn't in the script. Have you got a scarred cock? Slightly. Oh, nice bombshell. Yeah, sorry. I was going to save that for episode six, but I thought I'll... Actually, if we're going to share horrible cock stories, I've got one. A horrible cock. That's for other people to decide. I'm quite attached to it. But I was captaining this team. I think it was a school second team. and I was in love with this girl called Imogen. And so foolishly at the age of 16, I thought, you know, if she can come down and see how brilliant I am at cricket captaincy, she will fall in love with me because once you see that's just the way that I can like order men around.

21:31She was a 16 year old girl studying English, was sitting there reading bloody T.S. Eliot, you know, wasn't even watching. But I caught her attention because having spotted a flaw in this batter's technique, I decided to bring on a slow bowler and I put myself at short leg. And his first ball was a half-tracker. It went predictably straight into my cock. And I screamed the most blood-curdling, high-pitched scream you can imagine, which woke her up from her reveries of, you know, reading the tales of J. Alfred Prufock, only to see me hugely embarrassed clutching my nads. She also laughed. So it's not just men that laugh.

22:11Just like Joe Root. anyway look we i think we've actually established that it's perfectly reasonable to laugh at someone being hit in the cock but what we haven't answered is the name and everybody pussyfoot's around it and unmentionables is a word it's a very vic marxie type word perfectly lovely we all love vic but let's say it's is it a bit prim is it a bit coy people use midriff which is which is just um biologically incorrect yeah midriff is totally midriff is your is your your stomach right your your torso isn't that your midriff yeah yeah amid ships mid ships oh is that a thing amid ships again that's a very big chips is very kind of old style it is tms not the kind of you know thrusting young shaggers who are on tms these days of course with their cop botherers yeah exactly yeah on the minge yeah amid ships is another kind of very it's very radio full oh and uh it's struck Brian Lara midships

23:22well take away the pain but leave the swelling we've got we've got unmentionable we've got midships and we've got that place no one wants to talk about that that's where people use an entire phrase to describe but but actually there has been an attempt to get close to this in an exchange between uh raymond in with a richie better i believe tickers you know all about this yeah i i it's obviously i mean clues in the names there this is going back uh it is another category error but it's one of my favorite bennos was i can't even remember who it is who got hit amid ships and but but uh raymond was going i think he's struck him on the knee roll oh and then the the replay shows exactly where it's hitting he goes oh perhaps a little higher than the knee roll and and benno just comes i think it's hitting between the knee rolls raymond which i thought quite between the knee rolls i mean strictly speaking yes if you're wearing jeff humpage's pads from the 1970s where the knee rolls were up near the top of the thighs that might actually work

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26:06White Plains, New York.

26:15Now, thank you all so much. for getting in touch with the programme and hopefully stoking the powers and the fires of our imagination because we, let's face it, we need it. And Ed Thompson-Jones has been in touch. He says, Stokes said they won't let the media storm affect their enjoyment of Australia. Is there anything that an England captain and throat coach can say in this situation that doesn't stoke the ire on both sides of the debate? Is the press conference simply fuel? who was to kick off it would be good if he he just said nothing just sat there and just stared blankly ahead like he was kind of in some kind of catatonic state rather than say accepting the fact that you know whatever i say here it's not going to be it's not going to be any good uh it's only going to make things worse so i'm just going to stare blankly into the um to the middle distance and you know the presser just sat there with the microphones but can you imagine what i would like to see them do is and I know I know both football cliches and quick cliches fans won't like me bringing up rugby but there's a brilliant post-match press conference with the former Saracens coach Brendan Fenter a week after he got in trouble for criticizing the referee and it is just absolute gold what went wrong because you got off to such a wonderful start yeah it's interesting I wonder what went wrong I have to think about it think about it well what did go wrong I have to look look and think about it think about it deeply very deeply did it hinge in the end on a bit of genius from Sreli Bombo?

27:39A bit of genius, a bit of magic. Sreli Bombo, very interesting, very good, yeah. Very good. Three cheers for Sreli Bombo. Very good, very good. What were you happy with about your side? Happy, happy. Everything, everything. Very good. Very happy with my team. But you didn't win, did you, Brendan? Yeah, we didn't win, it's true. Why didn't you win? Good question, that. Very good question. It's important to win. It is important to win. We must try harder, absolutely, yeah. So you think it's a lack of effort? Oh lack of effort, lack of effort. Can't think it's a lack of effort. So what is it Brendan?

28:09What would it be? Let me think. I'm not sure. I'll have to think about that one. Think about it deeply. Okay, thank you Brendan. Thank you very much. I think that's what Stokes needs to do. He needs to watch that press conference. He just needs to do that. And I think they'll just think that this man is having a breakdown and we should actually just lay off him. He needs to do what Walter White did in Breaking Bad. Stokes is green underpants. His famous old green underpants. Walk into the press conference and just act like he's lost it. That's his only answer now. In fairness, they were a bit different after this one.

28:40So Stokes had this amazingly different look on his face because normally he just takes any question like, you're the idiot. But on this occasion, he didn't. He started talking about weak men. But also, I wasn't sure if possibly for the first time he wasn't quite on the same page as the coach because let's listen to what Baz had to say just before we answer Ray's question, Brendan McCullum in conversation with the Australian broadcaster, Channel 7. I think we'll probably have a beer tonight. And then, you know, I think leading into this test match, I actually felt like we overprepared, to be honest.

29:14We had five intense training days. And I think sometimes when you're in the heat of the battle, as we all know, I think sometimes the most important thing is to feel a little bit fresh and make sure your top two inches is completely sound. And I think the boys just need a few days off and probably need to change up a few of the training methods a little bit I'm a horse racing man and you wouldn't just keep doing the same thing with your horse. You'd send it around in figure eights or over the little jumps just to try and switch it on a bit. So we'll look at some alternative methods over the next few days.

29:41We've got a couple of days in Noosa which would be good to spend a bit of time casually and just let things let the dust settle on what's been a pretty intense couple of weeks and start to plot and plan our way back into the series. That was genuinely bold and the thing is he didn't just set it to Channel 7, he then repeated it because when it was first set we thought not sure about that one. And then he's everywhere saying it no i think we're over prepared this is more than getting on the front foot isn't it this is actually just stamping all over the faces of of all the haters there's there's a real football cliches element to that because it's just so reminiscent of if anything he's almost hit that too well if anything we've almost prepared too well i think it might have been ben gardner from wisdom made the point that even if that's true and it could be that in response to all the backlash, they did over-prepare.

30:34That's still on McCollum. He's still the coach and the biggest game of his career. By his own view, he fucked up. So it's still on him anyway. So should he just not have mentioned any kind of preparation at all? I think... Underpants. Yeah, in his underpants, in the desert, I am the one who knocks just to answer every question you think that of me? You don't want to come up with a line for me that is the one and that is already it two tests in, that's the one that is this tour's equivalent of okay we expected this which was Silverwood's four years ago Did he just say that because he knew that they were having a holiday in Noosa coming up and he really didn't want to jeopardise that in which case you know fair play if you wanted to be kind of semi or almost semi rationalize it you could you could argue that he was doing the old and sorry to bring other sports into this again doing the old jersey mourinho thing of making sure that everyone all the kind of iron focuses on him rather than the players i mean it's not going to work but um because people are too furious but it by if you were really kind of over analyzing you could say this was some kind of Machiavellian plot to ensure that he was taking all the heat rather than the players.

32:00I don't think that's true, but if you were kind of really thinking about it, then you could maybe make that argument. Yeah, but it's quite mixed messaging though, Nick, isn't it? When just like five minutes before that, the skipper's gone, my Jane Jerome is no place for weak men. And suddenly, all of these Englishmen are going, am I the weak one? weak is is it not the absolutely biggest insult you can give to a sports person and i've been hearing it in the press box almost entirely from australians but when they say it it comes dripping with contempt and you know i would have been weak it would have been water for ducks back to me i'm weak and i'm a coward it wouldn't bother me but but if you're a professional sportsman or woman and it's particularly as an english cricketer in australia because we weak possibly the worst thing you could say behind maybe ordinary that seems to be the worst thing that an australian can describe you as just a player did you hear that one mark war described ollie pope as he's just a player and the next ball he dragged on off first dark in the first innings and in australia the phrase just a player doesn't sound so bad does it in england it means exactly what you just said ordinary ordinary ordinary if you are an ordinary weak just a player who's ordinary and weak that you can't recover from the weak jive is interesting because i wonder where england are in their in you know the voltaire kind of circle because they seem to be in hard times while wearing slippers so they're weak men in hard times in slippers walking a flat path.

33:40There is no real hill that they're climbing. So I don't really know where this all fits within Voltaire's theory, but it is quite interesting. Let us move on. Michael Moran, he gets in touch to say, not sure if this is cricket cliches content or Aussie cliches content, but a deep dive, please, into champ stroke champion would be great after both Steve Smith and Ricky Ponting champed Joffre Archer in quick succession. I've got a double champing. Let's have a listen. Oh, Steve Smith, he's in a bit of a hurry, I guess. Smith figures if he gets a touch on it. There's a bit of a chat, too, between Smith and Archer.

34:16This series has been far too chummy until now. Jakey, whether it was having a word, too. I've seen a smile on my face, 13. I can see there's not much to be scoffered. Oh, fast when there's nothing going on, champion. Told him to bowl faster, Steve Smith, and he did, and he set him to the rope. Nice bit of scissors. They're at it again. eye to eye Archer and Smith they're still going I like it I like it Joffre's finally come to life six days into the series when the the second test match has gone he starts chirping too late for that champ that's what Smith he said to him as well bowling quick now mate when the game's over good on you too late boys you've had your chance for four days now as we may or may not have referred to earlier I can't remember if I have done.