McGrath names his targets for Sydney

Tuesday, 30 December 2008 15:28

Written by BOOM SHANKER

Come rain, come shine. Come win, come loss. Come strike bowler, come retirement, good old Glenn McGrath just cannot stop targeting people. This time, though, he’s set his sights not on the opposition, but his own players.

In an hush-hush, pish-tosh, gush-gush, exclusive interview given to yours truly (in fact, so hush-hush, pish-tosh, gush-gush and private was the nature of the tête-à-tête that even yours truly wasn’t allowed to be present for it) he announced his list of players the Australians should be targeting during the upcoming Test in Sydney.

As ever sticking to the famed and rarely-traversed by the current crop of Australian bowlers corridor of uncertainty just outside the off-stump, he announced “It’s important that we don’t take our foot off the accelerator. The pace of our decline has been stunning and we’ve got to continue  to shock the opposition with more of the same.”

Then, taking the customary Aussie swig from a can of beer and a giant-sized bite out of a portion of lily-livered pork chops, he continued “It’s common knowledge that we Aussies never settle for anything less than a clean sweep. This time should be no different. Only 3-0 will do. It’s not in our wild, sunny and unbelievably aggressive outback-of-the-beyond nature to shut up, shut shop and play defensively. Why change now? Besides, even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t have a clue how to. And so, nothing less than another spectacular loss will do. It’s the only way we can prevent our opponents from coming back to their senses.”

Pained to note how little sense the great man was making and how deeply affected he seemed by the dip in the fortunes of his beloved team, we thought it best to let him yammer on. For all you know this might be just another brand of the famed mental disintegration pill, which he and his captain Steve Waugh used to so insistently ram down everyone’s throat, he was dishing out for public consumption.

Also, it’s quite likely the South Africans themselves could be so floored by their unexpectedly strong performance in Australia that they might be rather suspicious of the current state of the series and working twice as hard to convince themselves that they could still end up losing it 3-0. The many years of mental abuse can leave all the concerned parties with less than a half a brain prone to all sorts of delusions.

In an imperfect world, which we definitely live in, the Aussie and the South African sides could both be finding it so hard to stomach what is happening to them that they’re hard at work constructing elaborate scenarios they’re most familiar with. Such was the influence of Steve Waugh and his great Australian team. Such is the power of mental disintegration. Such was the nature of the terror they unleashed that it outlasted their careers and continues to play havoc with opponents and, even, their own team to this day.

“Come Sydney, I’d target Hayden. The captain is already a marked man and weighed down by matters like unmanageable over-rates and preserving the spirit of cricket. There’s no need to target him. He’s doing a pretty good job of it himself. Not only that, he seems to be constantly targeting Brett Lee and, in the process, has turned his strike bowler into a stressed out one. The last nail in the nearly-closed coffin then would have to be the dismantling of Big Haydos. It’s important that we completely destroy Matty and leave the South Africans shell-shocked with a gift-wrapped 3-0 sweep. A series win of this magnitude will leave them so gobsmacked that they’ll think it’s all a sophisticated heist and go back to South Africa convinced they’ve been had.”

Boy, that was some delivery from McGrath.

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