Konstas lights up the MCG on Boxing Day
“Rasputin and Raspberry Jam” Vol.6
“Konstas lights up the MCG on Boxing Day” acts as the first chapter within the third and final Act inside my latest self-published book “Rasputin and Raspberry Jam”, a day-by-day and match-by-match breakdown of England’s 2024 overseas tours to Pakistan and New Zealand and as an added extra in Act 3, the 5 Test Match series between Australia and India too.
Released in paperback and hardback on 7th January 2025 and free to read if you have an Amazon Kindle “Unlimited” membership, but please consider supporting an indie author by purchasing the physical, tangible book (reasonably priced on both formats and it looks FAR better in paper published form than the Kindle version!) if you are financially able.
Thanks.
Here follows a larger version of the front cover (rather than the cropped image to fit the article headline here) as well as a link to the book in paperback, a link to my original article (26th December 2024) and the original article in full:
"Rasputin and Raspberry Jam" - link to Amazon
Well I tried to get some sleep ahead of the Christmas/Boxing Day Test Match but try as I might I failed. Oh for the excitement of the Boxing Day Test at the MCG! I spent my Christmas Day alternating between preparing yet another book for self-publishing in the New Year and reading “Better Than Sex” by the master. It was the only Christmas present I loosely asked for and now with my Hunter S Thompson collection complete, I couldn’t resist diving straight into his early 1990’s political madness before retreating once more into my own. I found out mere minutes ago that my beautiful son also spent some time yesterday writing and it would seem that the apple hasn’t fallen far from my own particular Christmas tree and I couldn’t be more proud of him. OK he was no doubt writing his weird and wonderful fan fiction as a means of a Christmas Day escape from an overly fussy if loving Grandma and an Uncle and Auntie who dote on him, but he was writing on Christmas Day and you couldn’t wipe the smile currently spread wide on my face if you tried.
My goodness what a start to this article!
Childish excitement? Hunter S Thompson and writing on Christmas Day? Where were we?
Oh yes, the MCG and the Boxing Day Test Match!
With sleep evading my grasp I tuned into FOX TV’s brilliant coverage (and because I could avoid the adverts that plague the UK channel coverage every 5 blooming minutes) and there she was, the Melbourne Cricket Ground or more simply, “The G”, quickly filling toward an expected capacity and sell out crowd of well over 80,000. Australian captain Pat Cummins had won the toss and decided he wanted his team to have a first dig on a wicket that as ever looked a patchwork of live green grass atop a hard, fast and bouncy straw coloured strip and as past greats of the game such as Mark Waugh described the day ahead as “sensational” and Ravi Shastri as “massive”, it was left to the ever excitable Adam “Gilly” Gilchrist to sum up my own childish excitement by describing the MCG as a “fantastic theatre on the greatest stage of them all”.
Stage left, or right depending on where you were sitting in this magnificent Australian Coliseum of sports you’d find the “Shane Warne Stand” and the great man and “King of Spin” was referenced early and often and how I and the rest of the larger cricketing world miss that rogue and rapscallion who grabbed life by the tail and refused to let go until a very cruel and early end. There was a beautiful “Welcome to Country” and two of my favourite national anthems before the start of my favourite Test Match and a 19 year old who would light up this grand old game with skills and tricks for the 21st Century age, skills “Warnie” would have marvelled at and approved through the smiles of a champion and so before we embrace the present we must travel back to the future of the past, and just some of the reasons why I adore this Test Match with so much childish glee and pleasure.
Although, and strictly speaking, my fandom of the grandest of all games began in the famous summer of 1981, it wasn’t until The Ashes of 1987 that I became fully acquainted with “The G” as Mike Gatting’s team that “Can’t Bat. Can’t Bowl. Can’t Field” returned with the smallest trophy in all sports and I presented my dear old Mum and main reason for my love of the game with handwritten scorecards of the overnight action from down under. Live on free to air terrestrial television or listened to avidly on the radio with the TV highlights the following day filling in the missing gaps on my lovingly prepared scraps of cricketing paper, these memories are as fondly retained as those four years later as now watching via a somewhat illegal satellite dish, my dear old Mum worried for the rapping on the door from the council and their constant demands for the removal of said satellite dish that went ignored, by me anyway, for month upon tedious month. How I miss that grand old lady who, as regular as clockwork, would telephone me during English summers with a conversation that would go as following:
“Stephen, it’s Mum. I’m watching the cricket and the umpire has just made this funny hand signal, waving his hands in a cross around his knees. Silly man! What does that mean?”
“It means a dead ball Mum”
A month later…
“Stephen, it’s Mum. I’m watching the cricket and the umpire has just made this funny hand signal…….”
I miss talking cricket with that beautiful grand old lady.
Where were we? Oh yes, watching cricket through the night like a madman.
So it was that I’d irk my beautiful girlfriend of the time in the first house I owned by watching a boring England struggle to a draw with an equally uninspiring New Zealand in the mid 1990’s (not Australia or The Ashes this time, that returns shortly) before the 1998/1999 Ashes (and a Darren Gough hat-trick in Sydney I watched live) in my last house in my home city and the move north to the English midlands where I still reside to this very day, and still watch every single possible game of Test Match cricket “through the night” I can. There were the summer Ashes of 2005 and 2009 and memories made with my new family and young son, a son now writing like his dear old Dad but back then, waking me from my slumbers on the sofa on Boxing Day morning after a Christmas night at the Melbourne Cricket Ground by holding out his Thomas the Tank Engine train set in front of my bleary eyes and simply saying “Play Trains Daddy!”.
But this still omits a large swathe of my fondest memories watching this grand old game we all adore, of ushering family, old and new, occasionally borrowed, and often blue, to bed on Christmas night so I could have the Melbourne Cricket Ground all to myself. Cold leftover turkey, pigs in blankets galore and sat beside a roaring fire in my sister and brother-in-law’s magnificent home as England capitulated to Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, camped in my own little cricketing world and never feeling happier, a grand old lady asleep upstairs and awaiting her son’s breakdown of play when she awakens in the morning and the smiles to greet a young grandson who was always wanted to “Play Trains Daddy!”.
My oh My. Tangents everywhere we look. Memories for a lifetime, and all because of a silly game of cricket!
So where were we?
Act One: “This young man has lit up Test Match cricket in 35 minutes!”
The morning session belonged in sensational style to 19 year old debutant Sam Konstas and the 4th youngest to ever debut in a Test Match for Australia. For 20 or so minutes and an equally numerical 20 balls received from arguably the greatest bowler in world cricket Jasprit Bumrah, the teenager tentatively played and missed as his opening partner Usman Khawaja, exactly twice his age at the other end, struggled likewise against the brilliant seam and swing bowling from a fired up Mohammed Siraj.
Then the kid ramped or reverse scooped Bumrah (yes, Jasprit Bumrah!) for boundary 4’s and boundary clearing 6’s before dancing down the wicket and crashing him out of the attack to the utter bemusement of the fast bowler, Virat Kohli standing at slip, the FOX TV commentary team, a raucous MCG crowd cheering his every shot and even a mad dog Englishman nesting beneath a mound of duvets with a hot water bottle and lashings of raspberry jam on toast for company! It was an “extraordinary debut” according to Mark “Howie” Howard on FOX TV commentary but even his excitable nature was eclipsed by the always brilliantly eccentric Kerry “Skull” O’Keeffe who couldn’t wait to join in with the acclaim as he gushed “This young man has lit up Test Match cricket in 35 minutes!”.
That he had, even ignoring an ugly and ridiculous mid-wicket shoulder barge from Virat Kohli (“what happens on the field stays on the field” said the teenager mid-innings to FOX TV) and although one hopes Kohli is severely reprimanded even if he offers his profuse apologies for his unsporting and shitty behaviour, two facts must be acknowledged before we continue (1) This teenage kid had the time of his young life and rattled the Indian team beyond comprehension and (2) He raced to a 52 ball half-century, the third fastest in the entire history of the game for a debutant, crashing six boundary 4’s and two boundary clearing 6’s on his way to a priceless 60 inside an opening partnership for the first wicket of 89.
Quite extraordinary indeed.
Well batted kid.
Meanwhile, 38 year old Usman Khawaja had found a semblance of form to rest at the Lunch Break on 38 not out, Marnus Labuschagne 12 not out, and after a whirlwind 2 hours in the cauldron of the MCG on Boxing Day, Australia were 112–1 and the kid was last seen signing autographs and taking selfies with all and sundry on the boundary edge!
I made another round of raspberry jam on toast and couldn’t stop shaking my head in disbelief at what I’d just witnessed.
Act Two: After the Lord Mayor’s Show
Following an extraordinary morning, the afternoon session was rather akin to the old school maxim of “After the Lord Mayor’s Show” as Australia only added a further 64 runs to their pre-Lunch total of 112 and for the loss of Usman Khawaja for a well made 57, his 27th Test Match half century. He finally fell to a loosener of a delivery from a returning Jasprit Bumrah late in the session from the toe end of his bat that surprised and bemused all concerned, the veteran batsman, an embarrassed bowler and even KL Rahul taking the simple catch. His dismissal reunited the self-titled “Chuckle Brothers” of Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith, but not before Labuschagne was hit not once, or even twice (the second one was obviously the more painful!) but three times in the gentlemen area protected by a “box” guarding the familial jewels! Doubled over in agony and raising much mirth within the FOX TV commentary booth, Aussie Ladies Captain Alyssa Healy naturally threw the comments wide open to her male colleagues Michael Vaughan (who regaled us all with a tale of similar pain inflicted upon David “Bumble” Lloyd in the 1970’s) before Kerry O’Keeffe could only exclaim, through his infectious laughter:
“3 strikes and you’re out Marnie!”
Labuschagne recovered, presumably after counting his balls, to rest at the Tea Break 44 not out, Steve Smith 10 not out, and although India had bowled brilliantly during the session, particularly Akash Deep and a forever competitive Mohammed Siraj, Australia were dominating the day at 176–2 at the break.
Act Three: The first Christmas sighting of “Daddles the Duck”. Hooray!
Without a dog in the fight and only watching because I’m a forever teenager who loves watching cricket through the night, here’s how I interpret the position at the day ending Stumps at “The G”
India — Although conceding the thick end of 130 runs in the final session of the day, India claimed 4 priceless wickets and especially so Travis Head for a 7 ball duck (thus we had the very pleasing sight of “Daddles the Duck” for the first time in this Boxing Day Test Match) and Mitchell Marsh for just 4. Although Steve Smith returns in the morning 68 not out, 4 of India’s 6 bowlers each claimed a wicket, Jasprit Bumrah, suffice to say, claiming 3 and both Head and Marsh alongside his scalp of Khawaja earlier, and at a day ending 311–6 if they can mop up Smith and the batting “tail” for no more than 50 more, they’ll see this as a job well done.
Australia — All hopes rest on Steve Smith securing yet another Melbourne Test Match hundred and should he do so accompanied by some lusty blows from his captain Pat Cummins (8 not out) and Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon in particular, then 400 and maybe even 450+ could be in their collective sights by the beginnings of an afternoon session where Messrs Cummins, Starc and the unrequited love of my cricket life Scott Boland will come out to play with a brand new cherry in their hands.
Game on. Can’t wait.
Shall I rustle up some extra raspberry jam on toast for you?
Say, 11.30pm?
Excellent!
See you then.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.