Channelling Dennis

Forty summers ago in Adelaide, a gusty wind flapping from the south, Dennis Lillee took the new ball for Australia. From that day on he never willingly let it go. Occasionally a captain tried prising the new ball off him. That made Dennis cross enough to bite the ears off a kitten. The first time it happened, in 1975–76, Dennis was doing his warm-ups when Greg Chappell tossed the ball to Gary Gilmour instead. This insult to his manliness brought out the little boy in Dennis. With a pout on his lips and lead in his shoes, he ambled in first change and served up half an hour’s crap on a platter – only to realise, after a word from his mate Bacchus Marsh, that in doing so he was proving the skipper right all along.

When it happened again eight summers later he took the opposite approach – and again proved his captain correct. Fine, huffed Dennis, if bloody Kim Hughes preferred Geoff Lawson, Rod Hogg and Carl Rackemann to him, then he, Dennis, would bowl so super-amazingly as to put a couple of extra z’s in amazing. The result, he confessed, was “the biggest load of rubbish ever seen at the Gabba… I bowled with stupid emotion instead of my head”.

Today at the Gabba it took about 10 minutes to suspect that England’s opening batsmen were not for unsticking. So we sat and waited for Mitchell Johnson to be given the ball. Johnson – in theory, and in talent – is Australia’s match-winner. So we sat. And we waited. Dennis, upon being denied the new cherry, was furious about not being warned in advance and even furiouser that, well, that it had happened at all. No noticeable fury simmered in Johnson during his long wait today. No fire came out of his left arm once the wait was over.

Johnson’s attitude went more like this: he was oh so polite and whatever-you-think-Ricky about it all. That same gentle deference was extended to the batsmen. He began from the Stanley Street End with a bouncer at Andrew Strauss’s head and seemed thereafter reluctant to veer near the batsmen’s toes. Full balls were not full enough to hurry anyone. Short balls were not short enough to unnerve anyone. Only half the time was anyone required to produce an actual stroke. And seldom were three consecutive deliveries alike. Johnson’s fifth over was typical: one straight, one wide of leg, another very wide of off, two straight, one a foot outside off. If this was over-thinking things, it was just as much a case of under-thinking. Had Johnson not succeeded the great Glenn McGrath as Australia’s enforcer? Why not give the McGrath way a try?

Perhaps the best ball of his opening spell was the 36th and last one. Slung from around the wicket, it pitched on middle and had a hint of away-wobble, and it made Alastair Cook wince. He was dragged the very next over and consigned to mid-off, where Strauss promptly sent a high catch floating his way. Johnson stuttered towards it; he jumped at, juggled and dropped it. It was, perhaps, a little window into his mind – a mind not furious like Dennis’, but not exactly cloudless either.

Lunch came and went with England still no wicket down, and we sat and we waited, through four different bowlers and an hour and a half of nothing much happening, for Johnson to be handed the ball again. Then everyone went off for tea, and the new ball was due, and we sat and we… Well, the pattern of this day we knew now by heart.

When Johnson did come back, one last time, you still thought him as likely as anyone to take a wicket. You thought, too, that here is a bowler in need of a month or two’s Sheffield Shield cricket, and the freedoms that brings: to try an over of yorkers, an over of bouncers, an over where five balls don’t do a lot but are all the same. To run in and bowl fast and not think. A little less politeness, a little more of what a wise and grumpy man would call “stupid emotion”, might help too