Best of enemies

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[/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip.

Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope. Thank God I was leaving: those poor buggers from the English cricket press had another six weeks of it. Horror. Deep, visceral horror. For England had lost a Test match after declaring at 551 for six.

Lost a Test match to Australia. Lost a Test match to Australia after looking certain to win: it was too cruel to bear. Losing to Australia is painful in a way that no other sporting defeat is painful.

But beating Australia has a zing no other victory can offer. Beating Australia is champagne: beating anyone else is prosecco. Not least because we know the pain it causes Australians. It’s not enough to succeed, Gore Vidal said: others must fail — a maxim that works a hundred times better when Australia do the failing.

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All of which made that extraordinary morning at Trent Bridge last week one of the great days of a sporting lifetime. Australia bowled out before lunch, with the aperitifs still wet on our lips. Humiliated. England played very well, Australia played very badly: can any sporting joy in the world be greater?

Sure, there are hundreds of national rivalries in sport: England vs France in rugby, England vs Germany or Argentina in football; invasion and warfare recapitulated: Let’s Blitz Fritz, as the Sun said in 1996.