A Swann song on the sunny side of the street

WHAT with all the young people planning to leave the country apparently, now’s the time to brush up on those foreign sports.

Not for those of you contemplating Canada of course. As Weird Al Yankovic sang in his parody of Green Day’s American Idiot: “don’t want to be some beer swillin’ hockey nut . . . they treat curling as though it’s a real sport.” Still, there’s always the sled dog racing, or the mush rush as they call it. And good luck with that.

If you’re looking for a spiritual brother to hurling then you will do no better than head off to the Basque country where pelota, with its strong community identity, quasi-religious overtones, and speed (claimed to be the fastest game in the world with the rubber ball, or paleta goma propelled against the fronto at velocities up to 300km an hour) will create some real resonance with GAA followers. They will even recognise it as a distant cousin to gaelic handball.

And if that fails to inspire there’s always the other popular rural pursuits . . . wood chopping, anvil lifting, ram fighting, and my own personal favourite, espadrille tossing (or espadrila jaurtiketa to us aficionados.)

But the event of choice in this deep midwinter of our discontent is along the Tropic of Capricorn where the sun beats down and drives away thoughts of iced-up Dublin streets, abandoned, snow-clogged, journeys, the IMF, bankers’ bonuses and the end of Section 23 property relief.

Yes, the Ashes, played out in those dark hours after the pub has closed and before you have to go to work, is a golden ray of escapism beaming us across to verdant Adelaide and balmy Perth where England will try this week to exploit the famous local wind — the Fremantle Doctor — to take an unbeatable 2-0 lead in the series.

Test matches between Australia and England are testy affairs with the locals liking nothing more than to wind up the old Imperialists.

During the infamous Bodyline Tour of 1932-33 the patrician, win-at-all-costs, ex-Winchester public school captain Douglas Jardine irritated the locals to the point of madness. During one match he was swatting at a troublesome crowd of insects above his head when a voice boomed from the stand: “And leave our flies alone as well, Jardine. They’re the only bloody friends you’ve got out here.”

Nearly 80 years later and there’s still plenty of banter; some of it coming from the vast Barmy Army who seem to have adopted Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as the tour anthem. Among their favourite Baggy Green Hats targets —Ricky Ponting is a given naturally —is the trundling medium-pacer Doug Bollinger of New South Wales Blues and the Chennai Super Kings.

Bollinger is one of the few professional sportsmen in the world unabashed to sport a wig, for which he is universally known as Doug the Rug. When he first revealed it in 2008 he said: “I used to be known as the Bald Eagle, but now I am The Hairy Eagle.” It’s become such a cause celebre that in April the Pakistanis tried to take sledging to a new, more hilarious, level by tugging it off before finding that it had been grafted into place.

But the fun doesn’t end there. With spin bowling in a crisis many Australians have been yearning for Shane Warne — who now dedicates his life to playing poker and TV commentary — to come out of retirement, prompting the great Richie Benaud, now 80, to grumble that he hadn’t received a similar invitation.

Against that backdrop it wasn’t the best moment for the nation’s premier exponent since Warne’s departure, 29-year-old Nathan Hauritz, to organise a garage sale of his cricket gear because “he doesn’t play for the team any more.”

As eccentric gestures go, this was crowded out this week by the extraordinary Fast Show/Monty Pythonesque interview given by Brendan Ventner after the Saracens defeat to Racing Metro (http://tinyurl.com/33fk5hs) but it is still gaining big headlines in Oz.

One department where the tourists have no worries is in spin where Graeme Swann (111,000 followers on Twitter) is underlining his position as the world’s most dangerous bowler and cricket’s leading personality. “Swanny” is not only a devastating attacking force, he is a efficient mimic with a taste for getting into scrapes.

He has been defending a drink-driving charge with a claim that he was only on the roads to purchase a screwdriver so that he could rescue his pet cat which had become wedged under the floorboards of his Nottinghamshire home; his video diaries from Down Under are the main reason for visiting the website of the ECB and an LP from the group of which he is the lead singer — Dr Comfort and the Lurid Revelations, a kind of cross-over between Keane and the Lightning Seeds who tour the pubs and clubs of the English Midlands — have an album out for Christmas.

Swann is the biggest larger-than-life player since the days of Colin Milburn and Ian Botham and tomorrow he, and his wrap-round sun visor, might just bowl England into such a commanding position that Dublin’s Eoin Morgan can confidently expect to get a Test Match before the trophy comes home.

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