The Grade Cricketer: To this sport and the fools who play it
- Jan 23, 2018
- 3 min read
It was Dale Barton who introduced me to The Grade Cricketer.
Dale is the father of Josh, my oldest friend. He coached the Panton Hill Redbacks to an Under 14 Grand Final that we lost by a run to Lower Plenty after being 3/109 chasing 124. At the time, Josh was a Diamond Valley Cricket Association rep player. He made the Northern Falcons’ regional team and played sub-district cricket at Plenty Valley by the age of 17. Eventually, the mad hunger and love of cricket as a career was tempered and – oh Lord, stuck in old Lodi again – Josh and I are back together at the Redbacks.
The brain child of Dave Edwards, Sam Perry and Ian Higgins, The Grade Cricketer began life as a Twitter account in October 2012. Its anonymous protagonist chronicles local cricket’s lows and lower lows. It is a bitingly funny and relatable enshrinement to the sport and the fools who dedicate their summers to it.
It is not pretty. It is a self-deprecating, cynical and nigh-on nihilistic commentary replicating your Test cricket dream on a crap suburban oval with 10 equally compromised mates and an old, stinking kit with a box you’ve had since Under 12s and still don’t need to upgrade (that’s all of us, yeah?). There are no highs. According to The Grade Cricketer, the greatest feeling on a cricket field is not winning a premiership but making a century in a losing side. Cricket is a pursuit in which success is an illusion and the player is left with a diminished expectation of everything, especially themselves: my favourite quip is the description of cricket as an activity “where my girlfriend turns up to support me and I sit quietly as my teammates rate her ‘a six, pushing seven’.” Embracing the idiosyncratic world of social media, The Grade Cricketer moves between concise anecdotes that will induce rueful chuckles from anyone who has ever bowled a trundling bumper in anger and incorporations of the news of the day: a photo of Donald Trump moronically beaming up at a solar eclipse is met with the caption, “The key to any dropped catch is to immediately look towards the sky, signalling that it was an impossible chance and you ‘didn't pick it up’.”
Fast-forward five-and-a-bit years and The Grade Cricketer is alchemy. Graduating from viral Twitter superstardom to a podcast and not one but two books as of last Christmas’ Tea and No Sympathy is a rare achievement. And it’s still hilarious, even genuinely upsetting as the narrator tries to negotiate complex and painful father-son relationships, petty alpha-male preening, cricket’s protracted adolescence and realisations that his weedy batting average of 11.64 reflects external existential failure at large.
In the wonderful black magic of social media at its very best, The Grade Cricketer is a phenomenon. SEN 1116’s Andrew Maher, ABC Offsiders panellist Richard Hinds and Test cricketers Ed Cowan and Matt Renshaw have incorporated its vernacular of “champ” and “chop” into regular accredited rotation. Its podcast has hosted former English captain Mike Atherton and fellow cultural savant Clancy Overell, editor of The Betoota Advocate. The Twitter account that commemorates inadequacy, wasted time, missed chances and bitterness is an overwhelming success, surely beyond its creators’ wildest dreams. There’s a beautiful irony to that.
Delightedly raving reviewers have spewed adjectives, analogies and acclaim on The Grade Cricketer. In attempting to define its appeal, I will not do that. Instead, here’s a story. The last time I saw Dale Barton was last Saturday watching the Redbacks’ First XI play Thomastown on our home deck. With an uppish on-drive, Josh made his first half-century of the season. We stood, applauded and gave an off-key chorus of adulation as Josh raised the bat in that carefully indifferent way.
And where was his father? Sitting next to the scorer. Head down. Reading The Grade Cricketer.
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