There are few weeks of such native extremes in Melbourne’s sports calendar as this one. The Sheffield Shield cricket final is being played at the Junction Oval, having been usurped from the Melbourne Cricket Ground by the opening of the football season, perhaps to everyone’s benefit.
Darren Berry put one glove on my frightened shoulder and said, solemnly, ‘‘We’re all here for the same reason. And that’s because we want to play cricket for Victoria.’’ And this is what the Shield final seems to hinge on also; not so much the outcome of the match for a team or its supporters, but rather which of the cricketers should be playing up a grade, for Australia, and perhaps which is already out of his depth.
In fact, it seemed on Friday that at every new Victorian over, trouble was certain for NSW. It was a classical fast bowling display from Victoria, and to be at that little oval for nothing felt like wandering off the street into a theatre where a string quartet was playing Chopin. In some respects it’s tiresome to compare cricket and football cultures in Australia, but this week it feels natural to move between them, from the Junction Oval directly up the road to the MCG. I did so on Thursday to see Collingwood play Richmond, surrounded by an enormous crowd that appeared drunk before the first bounce.
The local cricket enthusiast, by contrast, is a person of greater mystique. There is a small, but highly knowledgeable faction of sports fans attending the Shield final in St Kilda, and among those few perhaps only a handful that bother to vocalise their thoughts towards the players.