London, nineties. At a Cabinet meeting, the head of Trade and Industry Michael Heseltine, aka Tarzan, who still has blood on his shirt after stabbing Margaret Thatcher, watches as Prime Minister John Major and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke sneaks papers. What must they be plotting?, he wonders full of suspicion. In reality, one was informing the other of the results of a cricket match of The Ashes (Les cendres), as the clashes between England and Australia are known.
Tarzan could not be less interested in sport, but he is an exception among politicians and the English ruling classes. In fact, Major, after being defeated by Tony Blair not long after that Cabinet, assumed the presidency of the Surrey Cricket Club. And Clarke’s predecessor at the helm of British finance, Nigel Lawson, said goodbye to the world in April while watching Indian Premier League matches, and his last words to his son when he realized he had when the time came, they were: “What hurts me the most is that I will miss The Ashes”.
The series is usually played every two years and, for the English and Australians, is even more important than the World Cup (which in cricket is a relatively new thing, because the classic format of the sport, with matches lasting four or five days, was not the most appropriate for a competition of this kind, and an express one has been adopted which the purists detest). The Ashes that Lawson knew he was going to lose are the ones that are being contested now, throughout the entire English summer, and which have been about to trigger a diplomatic conflict between the two countries. Honduras and El Salvador literally went to war in 1969 over a soccer match at Mexico’s World Cup qualifier Azteca Stadium (actually, it was the trigger, because the real causes had to do with the exploitation of farmers, immigration and territorial disputes). The Anglo-Saxons, who consider themselves more civilized than the Latin peoples, would never reach that level. But there has been a good catch.
The English feel they are kings of the fair game and see the Australians as cheaters, especially since they have been involved in betting scandals and polishing the ball for more effect. So they screamed to heaven when, in the second game, one of the batters was thrown out on a decisive play by a technicality, the baseball equivalent of a player leaving the base, or as if in football a team think that the game is stopped due to an injury and the opponent takes the opportunity to score a goal. The anger of the theoretical gentlemen of Lord’s, the cathedral of cricket, was so great that they behaved like real hooligans, cursing and insulting the visitors in a noble room of the stadium during the lunch break.
Although everyone agrees that the dismissal of the batsman was correct according to the rules, the English claim that it does not correspond to the “spirit of the game” (as much as they have done the same at other times), and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that “we would not like to win like this”. The namesake in the antipodes, Anthony Albanese, responded with a tweet, in a mocking tone: “The same Australians as always, the only thing we know is to win”.
At the recent summit in Vilnius, Sunak and Albanese did not send papers to each other while debating whether or not Ukraine should join NATO. But they did exchange text messages on the cell phone. About cricket And they weren’t exactly friendly.
