Fishing, A Chance To Dream Of Innings Past

The Age

Monday January 9, 2006

STEVE STREVENS

A dusty, dry cricket field and 40 degrees of heat. Steve Strevens recalls his big moment

AS A youngster, sandbars in summer were part of life on the Murray River. It meant chairs in the shallows, tiptoeing across the burning sand without wearing thongs and fishing rods stuck in the bank.

To some, fishing is a sport while to others, merely a pastime. How fishing is regarded never bothered me because the elusive Murray cod never came anywhere near my line.

Or if they did, I would not have known as I was always daydreaming. It still happens. Every time I go fishing, I wander off to other times and other sports, leaving the fish in peace.

Most recently it was my first senior cricket game for Swan Hill against Vinifera, a team that boasted Ron Forster, the most frightening bowler in the history of the world. Or at least that's how he appeared to a 13-year-old.

The match was played at Vinifera, a typically barren bush ground where the curator was usually browsing animals, which ate the native grasses and weeds that occasionally grew there. Stuck in the middle of a forest near the river, the only time the ground ever was watered was when it rained, and with an annual rainfall of about 200 millimetres, that was not very often.

The outfield was uneven, dusty and dry with a grey, mudflat-type soil and the ball just wobbled across the ground. Fieldsmen generally carried their smokes either under their shirtsleeve or dropped them at third slip, and anything that beat the field was usually four. You never saw anyone slide to save a boundary.

There were many similar grounds. Most had matting that was dragged out of an old tin shed that doubled as home to the gear - if the captain hadn't chucked the bag in the back of his ute after the last game- and venue for afternoon tea.

The matting would then be secured to the concrete block with large steel valves rescued from some defunct farm motor.

Vinifera's pitch, though, was malthoid. The black substance would stick to the bottom of the Dunlop Volleys when the temperature reached 40-odd degrees, which it often did.

But it didn't worry Ron, who marked his run-up back to where the large red gums hung languidly over the boundary, on the hottest days their leaves barely moving.

Ron wore shorts, sandshoes and an unbuttoned cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbow. He was tanned and angular, his frame worn by years in the sun. He must have been all of 30 years of age.

From memory I went in at No. 8 when we had lost six for not many and Ron had taken six for a few fewer. As I nervously took guard, the field closed in; men who had left their farms and had nothing better to do on Saturday afternoons than to terrorise young boys.

Ron's first ball went past in a blur. I like to think I let it go, a la Bill Lawry, by thrusting my bat towards the heavens. In reality I was more like Lindsay Kline, practising a stroke after the ball was gone.

Ron managed to hit my bat a few times; sometimes in the middle but more often on the edge when the ball would shudder across the outfield to the third-man boundary.

The heat got to Ron after a few overs and my partner and I managed to scrape together a reasonable score before Ron came back on. Refreshed, his run-up was even longer than before. By now he did not pose a threat to me, after all he had done his worst and I was still there.

Then his first ball hit me in the chest and the second whistled past my ears and, panicking, I fell to the ground. The third knocked all three stumps out of the ground. I comforted myself by saying that the stumps always fell out on these pitches as the sand holding them upright was never all that firm.

My father drove me home in his black Morris Minor, both of us happy and proud.

The Vinifera ground is now used as a pony club where youngsters on horseback jump over barrels and posts, and where their horses graze when not being ridden. I drove past the other day on the way to the river where I sat on a sandbar and remembered the day after my clash with Ron Forster . . .

When dad and I went fishing and listened to the rush of the wind through the eucalyptus canopy. When we talked about cricket and football, about life and death, about the taste of oranges warmed in the sun and the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon.

© 2006 The Age

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