The Seven Hours In Between

At some point, maybe twenty minutes after he'd begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle—with an ongoing, affectless, humourless realisation that his day ‘was over’—he noticed with confusion, having thought it was AM, that it was 4:46PM.

—Tao Lin, Taipei

“Have you seriously been on the couch all day,” is the first thing I hear my mum say at 5:30pm on her way home from work. 

Leaning over the armrest, I reply, “It’s summer, mum. Of course I am. I’m watching the cricket.”

The answer is acknowledged but doesn’t seem satisfactory. Some qualification is needed. “It’s the Ashes,” I inform her, but she has already disappeared to her bedroom.

I

10:35am 

From where I’m sitting, summer starts with the slow clap from the stands. At first, the punters match the rhythm of the bowler’s step. By that tenth pace it’s an audible mess of varying speeds and volumes, releasing a collective exhale when the ball is pitched into the turf. 

The first ball is bowled. 

On the couch I am nervous and excited, beginning the five-day shift in front of the TV. I am worried that we could lose and even more worried that the game will only get to day three. If summer love is real, it’s a breezy evening at the beach, downing cold beers and cutting open burrata in open-toe shoes, drinking Aperol Spritz and sharing small plates. Summer heartbreak, on the other hand, is an early batting collapse. You can never look at love the same way after you experience an opening partnership that lasts two overs.

Seated with my homemade iced latte, I think of that old saying about batting first. It is one of the great lessons my dad has taught me, “When you win the toss, bat. If you are in doubt, think about it, then bat. If you have very big doubts, consult a colleague, then bat.” Maybe it’s a sign of my new-gen sensibilities, but I don’t really mind if we bowl first. This is largely because of Mitchell Starc’s first over left arm yorkers, that have swung the hope that the bails fly off the stumps into an inevitability. 

At the conclusion of the over I scheme my breaks for the day. Downtime in cricket is high—the three second bursts of action are broken up by 30 second pauses between balls, followed by a minute break at the over mark and then a five-minute drinks break halfway between the twenty-to-forty-minute session breaks. And so, next to me is a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads (2021), a book I’ve owned for a couple years and have finally decided that this summer I will have enough pockets of time to read. 

Test cricket, I suppose, is like the big book, the 500 pager, the multi-generational dysfunctional family story told from five different points of view, the three-part saga with religion and history folded in, the IFKYK brick of a thing, the book you read to stun your non-literary bro at the pub. And, Crossroads is this type of book. 

II

11:00am

In the drinks break, I always visit the FoxCricket and 7Cricket Instagram pages, rewatching the same dismissals with different voices. Two of my favourite images of the summer come to mind. The first is that clip of Stuart Broad closing his eyes after witnessing the same mistake from an English batter. There’s a darkness to his silence and tilt back of the head. 

The other image is a Kerry O’Keeffe innuendo turned hysterical laughter. O’Keeffe is 76 and regularly rolls out one-liners in his commentary that are so absurd and witty, sometimes dark and crude, but always polished with a delivery that could heal the nation. You know a great quip is coming in the urgency of his voice, a laugh imprisoned at the back of the throat, spewed out like the stomach remnants of a night drinking cheap piss. In both, are reactions so intense and theatrical, fluctuating at the extremes in response to the repetitive contests of bat and ball. 

As play resumes, I check the comments to a compilation of a Travis Head blitz attack—the one that ended the first test match on the evening of day two—and I notice some guy has written that test cricket is romantic. There aren’t many things you will hear grown men call romantic. 

III

1:00pm

The game is at a stage of consolidation, with the English partnership starting to settle in. We’ve moved from the honeymoon phase of the first session and entered an awkward boundary setting exercise for the teams, with lots of blocks and rejections mixed in with a few moments of “flirtation” and “nibbles” at the ball. 

After another play and miss, I am beginning to think that cricket is a sport of disguise. Personal ambitions for a big score are neatly packaged as a component of team success. The game functions through solitary acts that attach themselves to the collective. In some ways, it is like the literary world, where reading and writing are private acts that are understood and connected to a social community. 

The batter is told to wait for the ball in their zone and resist the impulse for extravagance. The bowler has a secret plan in action, theorising the perfect combination of line and length. Ball by ball, over by over, session by session, day by day, test by test. Maybe part of the romance is temptation. 

Ultimately, as if it is some unwritten law in the universe, patience will always triumph. The waiting game, the slow tease, the chase, the burn. Catching eye contact, brushing past their shoulder, nervously fiddling in the crease. Gaining courage, running through the risk, making your move. When it happens, it will happen. And when it happens, it will be glorious. 

It’s not a very attractive kind of patience, is it?

For as much as we could talk about the beauty of a cover drive, we could think of the war-like game of attrition that is unfolding before us. Players are trapped in the heat, weighed down by heavy pads and the heavy expectations of upholding a mythology of national character.

Although a different level of pressure, my favourite character from Crossroads, Perry, is tormented by the notion of being ‘good’. Perry, a tween with a genius level IQ, “liquidates his assets” (guilt-trips his mate into buying his weed) to buy his younger brother a camera for Christmas. In this moment Franzen describes a pausing of time:

Snow had started falling from the Illinois sky, white crystallizations of water as pure as he felt, himself, for having parted with the asset. His thoughts had slowed to a happy medium, no slower than that, not yet. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, amid the melting snowflakes, and wished the world could just stand still.

The scene represents the movement of time in the novel, where the first 300 pages follow a single day from different perspectives. In slowing the pacing of the novel, Franzen unravels the years of history for each character that led to their specific actions. Digression and pause draw attention to the happenings in between, loading each tiny decision with a gravity, the micro only understood in the macro, a significance that lives longer than the seconds it took to…

SMACK! 

The ball has just been launched into the crowd, bobbled in the hands of eager teens, while one, I notice, has pulled out his phone for the moment. Another man, two rows behind, is sitting comfortably, clutching his mobile like it is a beer resting on his thigh. Looking down, I’m in the exact same pose. 

IV

2:30pm

By the middle session, where a partnership has formed and the fast bowlers have rotated out of the attack, I’m on my phone every three balls. It’s a doomscrolling sport. With all the talk of test cricket dying, surely the antidote is somewhere in the algorithm. I think we should just admit it. A dot ball is a good ball, and a good ball is rewarded with one reel. Maybe slow over rates aren’t even a problem at all. (I am not bored from cricket though, how dare you think that!)

I notice that one of the slip fielders has moved towards the boundary, reminding me of a commentary segment from a couple years ago, where they were talking about how the slip cordon stays focussed. It was probably Mark Taylor or Mark Waugh, and one mentioned something about switching off while the ball is dead, before regaining your position, crouched, like one of those line umpires at tennis, with your palms briefly resting on your knees to be ready for when the bowler reaches their mark. The flickering of attention. 

There is this moment in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (1964) where the narrator, a woman who upon crushing a cockroach enters a state of spiritual flux, contemplates the infinite space between one and two. She writes:

A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses—in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.

Indeed, a space exists between each ball, where the mystery and fire of pills past and future reside. The anticipation of cricket is like no other sport. In football or rugby, the play is continuous; there is no silence. 

In the silences of cricket, the scoreboard is still, there is no change in the material total of either team. Like that small moment of rest and anticipation when you turn the page. You have a burning feeling inside. There is some sort of fuel that is driving the passion, restricting you to one chair all day. I can’t speak of what happens during those small breaks that add up to a lifetime. What happens between ball one and ball two will remain a secret for you and for me. All I can say is that I am sure it is spectacular. 

V

4:30pm

The Baz-ball is boring me. I wish I was watching Steve Smith bat right now. The addition of new wrist swings after the ball has zipped through has added more flare to the existing routine of mannerisms before each ball. Walks back towards the crease, taps left pad, taps right pad, taps the box, comforts the thigh pad, one knock of the bat in between the feet, a bend of the knees, gaze at the bowler, look back down, two knocks behind the right foot, a second gaze, one tap, ready. 

I am discovering my own version of this in spectatorship. The ball has been bowled, left outside the fifth stump line for no run, and I am triggered into a routine. My left hand taps my pocket, feels for the phone and places it in in the left palm, left index finger presses the power button, left thumb rests on the volume button, right index finger scrolls up, eyebrows raise to focus the facial recognition, a moment passes as the home screen appears, the index finger searches somewhere to pressure. An instinctual habit, connecting the hand to the mind.

This anticipatory tendency of mine, however, has detached itself from the possibility of hidden machinations. Unlike the novel, in which moments might seem insignificant, and cricket, where a ball might result in nothing, the algorithm does not reward patient solitude. Without gaps in between scrolls, you have no chance to build faith or hope that something amazing could happen next. There is no mystery or fire or possibility.

VI

5:30pm

The day goes by towards dinner. Over four hundred balls have been bowled. Two and a half sessions of cricket. It’s like watching the price of an ETF rise and fall over the course of a trading day. Deep down, I know that I am not supposed to sell for at least another seven years. Yet I compulsively check, watching the 0.03% changes in value. In that basket of more than two hundred companies, so much has happened in the course of a day and all you can see are those imperceptible fluctuations, synthesising the mood of a market into a spiking line graph, each point a tentative step towards the peak. As I zoom out of the price graph—magnifying the window of time from day to week, week to month, month to years, years to all time—I feel like one of those random days on a market trendline. Where everything and nothing has happened. 

Towards the backend of Tao Lin’s Taipei, the main character, a 20-something Taiwanese American writer living in New York, is driving through a street with electronic billboards: 

Paul stared at the lighted signs, some of which were animated and repeating like GIF files, attached to almost every building to face oncoming traffic—from two-square rectangles like tiny wings to long stripes like impressive Scrabble words but with each square a word, maybe too much information to convey to drivers—and sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been.

Lin’s 2013 version of a 20-something year old, interested in and vaguely optimistic for a creative career, is nauseatingly described spending their day on a MacBook patrolling Twitter and Facebook and Gmail. In the summer of 2025–26, that person has further customised, streamlined, and optimised a multi-dimensional wall of content into its most efficient and claustrophobic form. 

Cricket is a game that rolls on 30 second intervals. Therefore, it is no wonder what has consumed my life in those brackets in between. There is something romantic in that attraction, I suppose.

The last ball carries through to the keeper. The umpire calls stumps, lifting the bails away.