“Just wait til Carey comes out.” The booing began before he even appeared, in fact. They were booing in the Western Terrace from the moment the umpires walked on to the field after tea. Without the benefit of the backstory, you might have supposed an entire stand of passionate England cricket fans were dissing their own team, the soundwaves reaching the fielders long before the Australian batting pair followed them on to the ground. Not unlike a ball leaving Alex Carey’s hands before Jonny Bairstow walked out of his crease.
“He’s not worth booing,” said Nick to his friend Annie. “I’m not wasting my breath.” He saved it for the chants, sung on loop like an only-the-hits radio station. Same old Aussies. That’s all you’re remembered for. Stand up if you hate Carey.
They stood as one, a crowd inflamed with Best Bitter and intense personal antipathy. A shoe was thrust in the air, then five shoes, six shoes, 10 shoes, 100 shoes … an entire stand of trainers, loafers and boots, with a performatively angry man or woman under each, holding it aloft. Shoes off if you hate Carey …
It was 4pm when the lid blew off at Headingley. Until then, the crowd thermometer hadn’t even registered a simmer. For the first two sessions even The Rowdiest Stand In Cricket (with apologies to the Hollies at Edgbaston) had been subdued.
Given the argy-bargy at Lord’s – and lingering resentment at the stumping decision against Yorkshire’s homegrown hero – the Western Terrace should have been primed like a naval cannon. And yet the quiet at the start was almost eerie. There were some boos, of course: lacklustre boos for the Aussie anthem, muted boos for the Australian batsmen as they walked to the crease, a respectful boo as the PA announced that Usman Khawaja would be facing the first ball. England’s early breakthroughs were met with cheers, but for much of the day, the loudest appeal in the crowd came from a man who broke his sunglasses: “Has anyone got a paperclip?” He got one from a nice Aussie a few seats over, so large it dangled beside his face like a pirate’s earring.
At the Football Stand end of the terrace, a pair of fancy-dress crocodiles, Damo and Trizzo, sat with their English friends, Lewo and Paulo. They were on their fifth beers of the day; they had forgotten to eat breakfast, and couldn’t be bothered to have lunch. Lewo was explaining that the 2-0 series scoreline wouldn’t affect their relationship when Steve Smith inside-edged to the keeper. He jumped up and gave Trizzo the middle finger. “Cry on the telly! We saw you cry on the telllll-y …”
Behind them Nick argued that England and Australia are like Batman and The Joker, locked in perpetual enmity because “one can’t exist without the other”. Nick was 12th man here – Annie had tickets for her parents, but her dad needed open-heart surgery at the end of June so was now watching from his recovery bed (get well soon Bill Reed). The pair of them workshopped sledges for any Australian fielder sent to the infamous section of the boundary beneath the scoreboard – although with Mitchell Marsh at the crease, that felt a long way off.
This was the early act of a western, when the black hats have terrorised the townspeople into compliance. Then the fifth wicket went down on the stroke of tea. Just wait til Carey comes out …
An opera singer can shatter a wine glass by singing at its natural resonance. By half past four, the sound in the Western Terrace was oscillating near the frequency of human flesh and somebody’s head exploding seemed a very real possibility. A quartet of Teletubbies appeared in the noisiest part of the stand, as did a fistful of police, whose walkie talkies weren’t props, nor their holstered tasers. A beer snake in the back row grew to enormous proportions, but disintegrated before the stewards could reach it: they retreated empty handed. Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio …
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The hysteria peaked when Mark Wood came on to bowl. “Kill him Woody!” Loosed balloons whipped by overhead. A big man in a red shirt sidled silently to his seat, folding up his Australia cap as small as possible in his hand. “At this point in the day we’re like piranhas,” said Nick. “We’ve smelt blood in the water.”
A few spots of rain seemed to fall, but it was just beer spray. Carey got cheered once, but only because he’d been hit on the head. The atmosphere wasn’t dependent on how many pint cups you had accumulated in your personal stack (the average was nine, with a wobbly 10th balanced in the other hand) but on who was at the crease. “In real life, I’m sure Carey’s a proper bloke,” observed Paulo, “and we’d like to have a drink with him. But in these circumstances we reet hate him.”
England lost two wickets in six overs, and the Western Terrace sat back down.
