Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Melbourne
SHANE Warne stood smirking with his arms folded and ball in hand, not 22 yards away from me. We were surrounded by the monotonously straight lines of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). Us, that is, as well as untold numbers in the stands, who burbled expectantly as they waited for the game to start.
Warne asked if I was ready. “Yes.” Then he turned on his heel and ran off to his mark to prepare to bowl. That’s right - to me. In front of a full house at the MCG ...
Was I nervous? Damn straight. But only because the gizmo in my hands felt nothing like a bat. Because it was not a bat. It was an oblong plastic box about two-thirds of the length of a bat handle. And that was it - no comfortingly grippy feel in the hands, no reassuringly weighty blade to thump into the pitch. Just a small black box.
And here, too soon, was Warne, looming large as he passed the stumps at his end. I saw him - his animated avatar, actually - on the video screen inside the goggles strapped snugly to my head. They must have made me look like some giant, left-handed insect standing at an imaginary batting crease in front of an imaginary set of stumps holding an imaginary bat waiting for an imaginary bowler to deliver an imaginary ball.
Warne bowled. I saw the ball approaching, swung my little black box, and missed. And so on and so forth, for two overs - by the end of which I had scored a solitary single, been bowled three times, and knocked over my stumps once.
“Come on mate, is that the best you can do,” Warne asked. Lucky for him he was imaginary.
The MCG, however, is as concrete as concrete can get, and my desperate duel with Warne went down under many tons of the hard, grey stuff in the museum of Australian sport that is housed in bowels of a place too unpretty for cricket.
It is a rigid ring of steel, glass and concrete that is too stark and sterile to soak up the subtlety of a game that offers as much nuanced pleasure as it does nuclear appeal.
Not that the MCG was anything of the sort when the first test ever was played there in March, 1877, when it was ringed by trees and the most of the crowd wore breaches, coats and top hats.
But it was also the scene of the first one-day international - in January, 1971 - as well as the place where the scoreboard showed a batsman’s name and his mode of dismissal for the first time, the first ground to boast a full colour scoreboard, and the first to use a super sopper to dry the outfield.
You can see where this is going. Decades from now, every major cricket ground will be a facsimile of the MCG: butt ugly.
Not, however, in the eyes of one beholder. “It is a beautiful stadium in which to play cricket,” AB de Villiers said yesterday.
And, no, he was not wearing goggles.
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