By Will 2 years ago, at the end of May Leave a comment on this post
Justin Langer was interviewed by the BBC, whose audio production and delivery is peerless, and comments that the Ashes loss in 2005 was (”to a degree”) good for Australian cricket. It probably was, too, in a perverse kind of way.
But the most revealing comments stem from the spiralling, near-fanatical interest in the tickets some five or six months before the series begins.
“This is the moment Australians have been waiting for,” said Cricket Australia chief James Sutherland, who has described the series as “the biggest celebration of cricket in this country in living memory”.
Team captain Ricky Ponting has urged fans to order tickets early.
“The Australian team can’t wait for this Ashes series to start and having a sea of green and gold supporters in the stand will give us a massive boost,” he commented.
Last year’s Ashes series was a sporting triumph, propelling cricket in England to the front and back pages in equal measure. It was unique for many Britons who, certainly in my generation, had never tasted how sweet beating Australia could be. It was like tasting a pudding in a posh restaurant; at first glance it looks perfectly edible, if a little boring. But only when you take a bite do you realise just how impossibly tasty it is. I don’t do posh restaurants, but get the same satisfaction from a sausage roll, if you care to know.
It explained Australia’s euphoric celebrations when they beat us over the past two decades, which pained and confused me because, in all honesty, England were crap for a long time and we knew it. “Why are you so pleased to beat us? You have McGrath, Warne, a couple of Waughs and whole lot more. We have Phil Tufnell and an inferiority complex. We couldn’t beat a panel in a panel-beating garage full of experienced panel beaters,” I used to ask myself.
Perhaps my memory fails me, but it wasn’t until Edgbaston that the country really got behind England - our belief mirrored the team’s. And in winning the Ashes, it seems as though England has stirred a giant hornet’s nest in Australia: they’re buzzing; bubbling with a mixture of anger and pride and are surely going to break some ticket records in Australia.
Don’t underestimate the significance or hype of this Ashes series. If you thought 2005 was big, forget it. This winter’s promises to be positively massive. Incidentally, get preparing! Get your Sky subscriptions (or at the very least, look into the cost). If you can’t get Sky, consider NTL or Cable. If you’re an ex-pat, and I know there are hundreds of you reading, look into watching it online (Cricinfo.com is quite good for that apparently). Buy yourselves a digital radio
Tags: ashes, ashes-tickets, james-sutherland, justin-langer, the-ashes |
Forget Sky/NTL/cable and/or digital radios.
Pack your jobs in, leave your families to fend for themselves and simply fly to Australia!
Even if you can’t get tickets for the all of the Tests, at least you’ll be able to watch them live on telly without having to get up at some godforsaken hour.
Or, of course, watch it in NZ! Where the sympathies probably are closer to the Old Country, it’s still on at a reasonable hour and the climate is much nicer!
And the people are nicer too!
Australians have a love of competition and for the underdog and prior to the Ashes win by England, Aussie cricket challenges revolved around whether they could beat India in India. They were almost unassailable everywhere else.
This is now being reflected in the feeling in Australia for the Ashes tests later this year. Australia as the under dogs, against the team that beat them last time round.
I’ve already had a number of requests from the bush for room on my back deck to lay out their swags for the Brisbane test.
Interestingly enough, us Kiwis find it hard to see the Aussies as underdogs at anything….. ;^]
The Kiwis are to Australians as the Irish are to England; i.e., a pain in the neck!
Hmm, that’ll be why Costello’s trying to bribe us all to come over — to raise the IQ on both sides of the Tasman.
And let’s not bring up the underarm incident.
I’ve one word for those kiwis : beige
( it was going to be 2 words: umanga and handbag; but it was the wrong sport 
)
Easy, chaps. I have New Zealand blood. Leave Kathy alone!
Thankyou, Will. Chivalry is not dead!
And yes, it is amusing that Tana hit someone with a handbag, but Umaga (note spelling please) is a tough guy who also knows when only MINIMUM force is needed — against a tired and emotional teammate, or against one of those hapless Aussie Super 14 sides…
Yes Will, but do you have the Tattoos to prove it?
I have just secured some tickets for Melbourne and Sydney, it took a workmate and i four hours; using 4 phones and 2 computers. Now i’ve got to book some flights!!
Talking about the Ashes,
I bought my tickets for the boxing day test today!!!
And you poms have to wait till the 19th! 
Im going to all five days of the boxing day test! Should be a thrill having 100,000 people there on day 1!
On another note the ticket allocation set aside for Australians for the sydney test sold out in under 2 hours! So there is only a small amount left for the general public!
Go to www.cricket.com.au for more info! 
I didnt read your post before Japaddy,
My dad was having so much trouble on the phone that he come and got me out of school so i could try and do it over the interent. But then i kept getting the
“we are really busy at the moment due to a large event. Click Here to try again”
message. In the end dad got through on the phone after he had taken me back to school. He had started ringing the number at 9 this morning and didn’t get through till 2:30 this arvo! 
Had people here in Brisbane still trying to get through late this afternoon .. the ticket agencies server had a bit of a melt down, as did the phone system.
Had a call tonight from a friend of mine who had organised to share a corporate facility for the duration of the Brisbane test. He said he wasn’t game to mention the dollar cost, just that it was a couple of good sized steers
Got my tickets for the Perth test - only took an hour and a half. I thought that was bad until I saw the news and read some of these posts! I was there the second the Perth tickets came online, but even with two windows open and the phone in my left hand, I still got stuck in the queue. It was a matter of great dexterity, I can tell you, to keep clicking “try again here” with one hand in two windows simultaneously, and redial the phone with the other hand! Had quite a rhythm going there for a while . . .
Are many of the people who got tickets English ex-pats, or are they really Australian? I can’t imagine many Aussies (with apologies to Elliot: present company excluded of course) actually getting this worked up about anything. I thought only us mad ex-pats would be stuck to computers all hours of the day. Anyway . . . I’m happy!
I had the same prosses going for a while too caroline! My mum started in the morning and then i came home from school at resses time to relive her so she could get back to work!
Bush is forever saying that democracies do not invade other countries and start wars. Well, he did just that. He invaded Iraq, started a war, and killed people. What do you think? How does that work in a democracy again? How does being more threatening make us more likeable?Isn’t the country with
the most weapons the biggest threat to the rest of the world? When one country is the biggest threat to the rest of the world, isn’t that likely to be the most hated country?
Are we safer today than we were before?
We have lost friends and influenced no one. No wonder most of the world thinks we suck. Thanks to what george bush has done to our country during the past three years, we do!
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