SYDNEY'S CRICKET WORSHIPPERS.

Shannon News, 15 January 1929, Page 4

SYDNEY'S CRICKET WORSHIPPERS.

THE STOICS ON THE HILL.

A Sydneypaper has the following article description of the cricket crowd "on the lull" at a test match:

An independent order of Vermilion Faced Stoics.—

No elaborate ritual marks yo r entrance into this society. All y need is a Gladstone bag of any agb and in any state of deferepitude, an asbestos face, and a fund of .patience tJiat would have made Job look lika a fussy aeurasthenic.

It is a society of men's men, hardbitten men with jaws of leather, men with the stoicism of Spartans, men with vermilion faces, men who carry sun worships almost to ! the point of martyrdom. Its headquarters is out under the canopy ofHieavon on the green slope at the Cricket Ground—on the hill. There the vermilion-faced stoics rip off their coats and collars and repeat defiantly with the Duke in the Forest of Arden:—

Here feel we but .the penalty of Adam, The season's difference. ..... And the season's difference makes little difference to them. Watch 25,000 of these stoics frizzle in the fire of a coppery sun that flares on them hour by hour with never a merciful eclipse. Watch the multitude on the.mountain pick their way among their recumbent fellows with the diffidence of a cat stepping over a puddle. Their faces show white and pink against the brazen flame that percolates the cloud curtain. Gaze on the multitude as the day wears on. Faces turn ruddy. They Shine. The glitter dims in • a mask of dust lucked up by myriad boots. The ruddiness turns to a dull red glow and hen to the vivid vermilion, the pigment of this society of fire-worshippers. B;U it i>, in that magic hour of lunch ..hat the society becomes an awesome thing. There are few women in its ranJc.s. It is essentially a male assemblage. To watch 15,000 men at their food is a sight that sends a shudder through the spine. To see 15,000 mouths munching sandwiches and rrankfurts makes one blanch, xo gaze on probably eight thousand bottles of beer all poised to mouths at the same moment, glimmering under the sun Lke heliographs is a picture of terror. But when this great collective munch and this huge collective gulp takes place on a convex hill, the sight to the imaginative is quite staggering. The clock slips round to half past one..

Ten thousand Gladstone bags and suitcases are opened with a metallic rattle, like a crackle of distant musketry. A seething murmur, the murmur as of light rain on an iron roof, sweeps across that slope paved with the faces of the vermilion stoics. It is not rain on a roof, but the collective rustle of the paper wrappings about a host of sandwiches.

It is the great hour of the stoics. There is a tenseness about the period before lunch, in a Test match that flings a cloak of silence on the stoics on the hill. They do not want to talk of anything but the current play and then only in bated breath. Things often ha ( ppen in a heap before lunch, when the bowlers aie fresh and full of zest, and the batsmen are not. seeing the ball at its proper size. Lunch hour snaps the tension. Batsmen and the hill men breathe again. The floodgates' of reminiscence are opened. Minds begin to voyage back over vistas of cricket history. In no other gaino are fans so saturated in the deeds of former champions. At half past one the invisible speaker of this great open air cricket Parliament seems to take his chair. There are no standing orders. It is an all-in debate. Speakers, who, as G. K. Chesterton would put it, think backwards, are tolerated. Good-humored abuse is quite in order. You may quibble and argue in circles. You may vacillate and hedge; and abandon your points. Nobody will call you to order. You may ramble at will into the dim past, back to the romantic nineties, the stolid eighties, or the roaring seventies. Nobody will cheek you. But dare to make a slip in one numfcral of a Truraper century, or a Barnes bowling average. Look those vermilion faces in the collective eye that is dead and listless, boiled by the pitiless sun. Look at them without a tremor. Take a hold on your nerves Steel the mind to a blow and tell them that Trumpcr in 1912 made 103 instead of 113.

Gusts of excited protest sweep your hat off. Those dead parboiled eyes spring to blazing and baleful life. Vermilion faces pale at such temerity. A hundred of the stoics, sitting in their bath of refined fire, will pelt you with corrections. All round you are grizzled men who were broiled by the sun£ of 1912 and 1903 and 1893, and many another year. They saw that century, every run of it, by gum! And what a century! < No, the first essential to be received into the order of the Vermilion Faced Stoics is an accurate memory stocked chock full of cricket history. To enis fatal. Your fellow stoics at once cease to take the slightest interest in you. They turn to some other sunbaked colleague, and you are ostracised. "Where were you in ninety-nine or ninety-two?" is. the question thatsmites the novice in the teeth from a dozen different directions.

In. this blistered Parliament on the hill feeling- at- lunch time rises in a steady crescendo. Mouths, serried ranks of mouths, snap the end from a frankfurt, and Tebut an aggressive argument with the same action. But never do the disputes lead to anything so crude as physical scrimmages. These stoics who, from their sun-swept hill, follow the fortunes of a Test match,

arc rough, and ready, human, patient, good humored, but not by any means crude. Scrimmages are not cricket; and scrimmages are not countenanced in that vast aociety.

You may open a debate "from any cricket angle you choose, and provided your historical references, are beyond reproach, you get an excellent hearing. It is a friendly, good-hearted, honest crowd up there on the hill, but like all crowds, one of mixed temperament. At lunch-hour yesterday, for example, it was sharply divided into three distinct schools of cricket thought. There were the abject pessimists down [ irl the blackest pit of despair about • Australia's prospects. They refused to be consoled. Their minds were a wild whirl of precedents for the certain defeat of a Test team that scored only 250 runs on the first day.. And they recited them dolefully, almost aggressively, as if intent; on flinging a cold flood on the optimism that. bubbled about them. For in the ranks of the vermilion stoics there are those fine, hearty, optimists, whose very presence is a. tonic. What matter if nine men were out for 250. There had been famous last wicket stands in Test history that have shed lustre oil its page's. Cheery souls, the typo that Dickens drew so faithfully, and then in that vast inclined plane of faces, in that chattering Parliament oh the hill, there was what might be termed a centre party holding the balance between hope and despair. Under their crimson masks of sunburn they sought to look as sage aa it was possible to look with such an affliction. They wagged their heads solemnly, clicked their tongues, and made that cryptic remark that in cricket you could never tell. Sprinkled through this diverse society, too, were the reckless souls. They cared nothing for possibilities or probabilities, but hankered, hungered, year by year, for some batsman to hit a ball that would break the clock on the members'' stand. Scores of mildmannered men on the hill seem to harbor) an insatiable hatred of that inoffensive clock. Why the clock! Why should they not desire the ball to smash a window, or knock down a unit : ini the forest of flagpoles, or even one i of the umpires. But no! They want j the clock smashed, and nothing else. i

The ideal dream of a Vermilion Faced Stoic would be a vision of a corpse of the man who quoted his statistics incorrectly, hanging from a gibbet- in front of the riven face of that historic clock.