Thursday, October 27, 2005

Any Excuse to Drink

A couple of weeks ago, some fellow cricketers from the Universities Women's club and I attended day two of a six-day test cricket match at the Sydney Cricket Grounds. Australia was playing the World XI, eleven of the world's best players, from India, England, the West Indies and South Africa.

We arrived in time for the first drinks break. A 'drinks break' officially is when a little man carrying several water bottles and orange slices runs onto the field for the players, and should not be confused with the tea break or lunch. Unofficially, a 'drinks break' is when the fans line up to buy beer. Actually, the Aussies line up to buy beer constantly throughout the match. As I waited to buy a round of drinks, the taps to the kegs never closed, the servers just kept pushing empty cups underneath. The rate limiting step was how fast the beer could flow.

From the starting time of 10:30 a.m. until the last over is over, any man, woman or child (over 18) can purchase 4 beers for $3.25US each, and a carry tray for $0.25US. The consequences of the 'drink early and drink often' philosophy are many fold. First, everyone gets totally pissed -- that is drunk to you Americans. This in turn leads to the obvious, many fights and a few streakers. It is a strange that grown men actually fight over a sport where the players wear v-neck sweaters.

Many, many beers also mean many, many empty cups. A dull cricket match means lots of time to sit and think. Beer adds the ingenuity. One of the most crowd pleasing events was the creation of a 15-foot tall cup tower, made entirely of stacks of empty beer cups. The tower would sway, but the architects stood on one another's shoulders to keep the tower from collapsing. Additions of more cups from nearby sections made it taller. (Our stack of eight cups did not add much!). People were cheering, and I think that the cricket players actually looked into our section to admire the creation. Then the fun police came and shut down the operation. Too bad. We didn't have anything to watch except the cricket match until the next streaker came along. We did learn, however, that if a match is going slowly, the crowd cheers "boring, boring, boring" in a vain attempt to get something, anything, to happen on the field.

For some reason, cricket is a lot more fun to play than to watch! Perhaps we should have had some more beer.

posted by Peggy C. at 3:56 PM