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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.
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