London, nineties. At a Cabinet meeting, Trade and Industry Minister Michael Heseltine, alias Tarzan and who still has blood on his shirt after stabbing Margaret Thatcher, watches as Prime Minister John Major and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke meet. they sneak around slips of paper. What are they up to? he wonders suspiciously. In reality, one informed the other of the results of a cricket match of the Ashes (ashes), as the clashes between England and Australia are known.
Tarzan could not have been less interested in that sport, but it is an exception among politicians and the English ruling classes. In fact, Major, having been defeated by Tony Blair not long after that cabinet meeting, took over as chairman of the Surrey Cricket Club. And a Clarke predecessor at the helm of British finance, Nigel Lawson, said goodbye to the world last April watching Indian Premier League matches, and last words to his son, realizing it had reached him. the hour, they were: “My biggest regret is that I am going to miss the Ashes ”.
The series is usually played every two years and, for the English and Australians, it is even more important than the world championship (which in cricket is something relatively new, because the classic format of the sport, with matches lasting four or five days, It was not the most appropriate for a competition of this nature, and an express one detested by purists has been adopted). Those Ashes that Lawson knew he was going to miss are the ones that are being disputed now, throughout the entire English summer, and that have been about to unleash a diplomatic conflict between the two countries. Honduras and El Salvador literally went to war in 1969 over a soccer match at the Azteca Stadium qualifying for the World Cup in Mexico (actually it was the fuze, because the real causes had to do with the exploitation of farmers, immigration and territorial disputes). The Anglo-Saxons, who consider themselves more civilized than the Latin peoples, would never get that far. But there has been a good pique.
The English feel like kings of fair play and see the Australians as cheaters, especially since they have been involved in betting scandals and sanding the ball to have more spin. So they screamed when, in Game 2, one of their batters was thrown out on a pitch on a technicality, the baseball equivalent of a player leaving the base, or as if in football a team believed that the game is stopped due to an injury, and the rival takes the opportunity to score a goal. The wrath of the gentlemen theorists at Lord's, the cathedral of cricket, was such that they behaved like hooligans, cursing and insulting the visitors as they passed through a noble room of the stadium during the lunch break.
Although everyone agrees that the removal of the batsman was correct according to the rules, the English claim that it does not respond to the "spirit of the game" (as much as they have done the same on previous occasions), and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that "we would not like to win like this." His namesake in the antipodes, Anthony Albanese, responded by tweeting, in a mocking plan: "The same Australians as always, the only thing we know is to win."
At the recent Vilnius summit, Sunak and Albanese did not send slips to each other while Ukraine's entry into NATO was being debated. But they did exchange mobile text messages. About cricket. And not entirely friendly.
