Ashes 2017/18: The series isn’t only for cricket fans – as I discovered at the MCG

The English might have invented cricket but it’s the Aussies who have made the game a perennial, loud part of their national conversation. I first visited Australia three years ago, over Christmas in 2014, a year after the 5-0 whitewash of Alastair Cook’s side and seven months before England won back the urn in 2015. I was in the Whitsundays, a long way from a cricket pitch, and a woman serving me ice cream heard my accent and said, apropos of nothing: “I hope you’re having a better time out here than your cricket team usually do.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that most of us “whinging Poms” don’t actually care about the fortunes of our national side.

It’s the Ashes that really ramps up the volume, though, and this time I was in Melbourne for the fourth test of the 2017/18 series to see what all the fuss was about. It was officially a “dead rubber” – we lost 3-0 back in Perth – but that didn’t stop what felt like every other person saying “there’s no such thing as a dead rubber”, with over 250,000 going to the series to watch the eventual draw. The SCG (capacity 48,000) has sold-out for the first three days of the fifth test.

There’s no mistaking the partisan vibe. Cricket Australia’s official campaign for the 2017/18 season is #BeatEngland. Yep, the sport’s national governing body encourages people to share disparaging remarks about England on social media, not just for the Ashes but for the upcoming one day internationals and T20 tests.

“Nothing brings our nation together like the prospect of beating the old enemy on home soil,” it says on the website. Advertisers are in on the act too. An ad for Ashes sponsor Hardy’s Wine shown in the first four tests read: “Why can’t the Poms open a bottle of wine? Because they don’t have any openers.”

It’s the sort of jingoistic stuff we usually associate with our red-tops after an England-Germany football fixture. This might irk the true cricket fans, but for an unsavvy observer like me, the sledging element makes the whole thing more fun. Spectators heading to the SCG can expect #BeatEngland posters in lurid yellow and green, shades more-in-your face than the traditional forest green and gold Aussie colours. There will also be the “Buckethead Army” out in force. Those are the fans wearing green and gold cardboard buckets on their heads. It’s an ad campaign by KFC to get Aussies to support their national team and to take on our own Barmy Army (of which more later). They look, frankly, ridiculous, and the buckets don’t even protect necks from the sun. In the press accreditation office at the MCG, they were using them as bins.

The buckets do at least make the opposition easy to spot in the massive mixed crowds. The MCG is the biggest of the five host stadia with more than 100,000 capacity (over 88,000 packed in on Boxing Day). All except Perth’s WACA Ground have more seating than our own largest arena, Lord’s, which makes watching cricket a different proposition here. And it’s the Melbourne and Sydney tests that traditionally draw in what the ECB calls “event goers” (that is, clueless spectators like me there as much for the experience as the sport). Prices across the venues are accessible: general admission ranges from $30-$179, with juniors from $10, though the less you pay, the more likely you are to be sitting in the blazing sun. I spent a bit of time in the cheapest seats and was gleefully told by a bar tender that I had “classic Pommie sunburn”.

The atmosphere on the second day of the fourth test was festive and no one seemed to care that the whole thing was pointless. “Every four we get, every six we get, we celebrate it like it actually means something,” said one fan. Imagine that happening at your average Premier League football match if a team was 3-0 down in the 90th minute.

There was a lot of fancy dress, as there will be in Sydney; seas of yellow and green sombreros, superhero costumes, and a group inexplicably dressed as priests in black robes (not conducive to the 35-degree heat). There were plenty of comedy T-shirts, including “Stuart Broad is a S**t Bloke” tees. The slogan’s a hangover from an incident at the 2013/14 series but the Aussie fans love to hate “Broady”. “He looks like Draco Malfoy [the Harry Potter villain] so we like to paint him as a baddie.”

There are also the “Richies”, who congregate on day two of each test, so-called “Richie Day”. You can spot them for their sharp suits and ties, grey wigs and and blow-up microphones, dressed in tribute to legendary Aussie commentator Richie Benaud. “When you heard Richie’s voice, you knew it was summer,” said one first-time Richie at the MCG, sweating sun cream onto his already drenched shirt. There are hundreds signed up on Facebook for Sydney’s Richie day.

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The atmosphere at the “G” reminds me of the time I went to the Rugby Sevens at Twickenham (capacity 82,000): loud, boozy and a bit silly. Cricket Australia has cracked down on anti-social behaviour in recent years, but it’s still boisterous, particularly in the Great Southern Stand that houses the traditional party bays and the Barmy Army. Mexican waves and beer cup “snakes” are commonplace, along with enthusiastic sledging. There’s a crucial difference though: the alcohol everywhere in the stadium apart from the members’ area is mid-strength and the MCG serves piddling 285ml cups. So while at the end of the day at Twickenham, crowds will be lairy, sweary and the sort you would move train carriages to avoid on the way home, here, the atmosphere is more like the early part of a stag do; the five-a-side football or post-go-karting drinks bit, say, rather than the sort of shenanigans you’d get at 3am in the club.

The affects of the boozing are also tempered by Australia’s Red Frog crew handing out water, sun cream and their trademark amphibian-shaped jelly sweets to keep punters hydrated and their blood sugar levels up. Security is tight – anyone doing anything that could be deemed anti-social is chucked out. There were 70-odd evictees on Boxing Day, not bad given there were thousands drinking in the sun for nine hours.

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It might all seem slightly nanny stateish to English fans but Cricket Australia is on an on-going mission to make the game more inclusive and appeal to a wider fan base, particularly women. The SCG gets the most women and children through the door in the whole cricketing calendar on Jane McGrath Day. It’s the third day of the so-called “Pink Test” when fans don pink to raise money for the McGrath foundation, a charity supporting breast cancer sufferers and their families. It was set up by former Australian player Glenn McGrath in memory of his wife Jane who died of the disease in 2008.

Other initiatives to help the series appeal to a wider demographic include the return of the pool deck at the Gabba in Brisbane. It was open during the Ashes for the first time this year. Spectators who turned up in jazzy swimming gear – budgie smugglers and sexy costumes going by the pictures – got picked from the crowd to join the deck, installed in a particularly sunny bay where ticket sales were poor. Food and drink offerings have had gourmet upgrades and this series has seen the return of the fun “Ashes Pashes”, calling for couples to kiss on demand on the big screen. There are dry areas and designated family zones, as well as child-friendly entertainment on offer. The message seems to be: In spite of the cricket, the Ashes makes for a bloody good day out.

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For what it’s worth I didn’t feel the male-heavy crowd affected my experience at all and found the atmosphere relaxed and inclusive. What didn’t help were the dwindling numbers as the test went on. There were fewer than 10,000 rattling around in the G by day 5. The fourth test definitely needed something aside from the play, which while not without highlights – Cook’s double century for one – was uneventful by anyone’s standards. I felt like there were three people in my Ashes experience: Australia, England and the pitch. No conversation with cricket fans went by without a comment on state of the wicket. To paraphrase: it was too flat, too slow, had not enough bounce, there was a lack of deterioration (needed, apparently) and it will ultimately bring about the end of test cricket as it’s all too deathly dull, and difficult for bowlers and batsmen alike. As a draw became increasingly inevitable, criticism was relentless. On 2 January, the International Cricket Council officially rated the pitch “poor”.

Respite from pitchgate came for me in the Barmy Army’s designated bays. For the uninitiated, the Army was borne out of the 1994/5 Ashes test with 30-odd loyal English fans cheering the beleaguered team with songs and banners football-style, even – especially – when they were losing. It has evolved into a large supporters’ club with 29,000 members at home, a travel agency selling tours and songs accompanied by resident musician, “Billy The Trumpet”. He’s a freelancer for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a bloke who can get thousands on their feet singing “Ali Ali Cook , Ali Cook , Ali Ali Cook” to the tune of KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Give it Up”, regardless of the score.

Chris Millard from the Barmy Army estimates 15-20,000 “English foot-soldier cricket fans” will be at the Melbourne and Sydney tests, associating with the group, with about 1,200 on the Army’s official package tours. He tells me about 30 per cent of members are women. That’s not quite the make-up I see at the MCG but there are certainly more women here than in some parts of the crowd.

The Army can’t be choosy about who joins them, it is a commercial operation after all. At the back of its bays in the MCG, there’s a group, almost exclusively male, most under 30, waving football flags, singing chants like: “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, shit, shit, shit.” They may not be officially with the Army, as Millard sees it, but they are still wearing its shirts. I can appreciate why the group is divisive for many, including my colleague and the Independent’s chief sports writer Jonathan Liew.

Millard denies a clash with the expat/backpacker crowd but says they like to disassociate with some of the particularly sweary songs. “We never step over the line,” he insists.

I’m not sure I quite believe him, given the number of chants about Australia’s convict history. That said, the Aussies don’t seem to mind too much and there are plenty from the home side who tell me they sit with the Barmy Army for the atmosphere.

“At the end of the day we are the fans and we realise that, we try and influence the game as much as we can but we never try to become too much about what we are,” says Millard.

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When the Army get stuck on one of their own trumpet-blowing tunes it can be a bit relentless. Sample lyrics: “We are the army, the Barmy Army. And we are mental, and we are mad! We are the loyalist cricket supporters, that the world has ever had.” As one disgruntled England fan put it to me: “I look at them and it’s just cringe, it’s classic Brits abroad. There is nothing mental or mad about 50-year-old men watching cricket.”

But the players sing to a different tune. Current captain Joe Root tweeted his support of the Army in Melbourne, calling them “the best fans in the world,” and posting a picture of the team applauding the crowd at the end of the Boxing Day test. Likewise, former captain Michael Vaughan is consistently vocal on social media about the Army’s ability to lift players when they’re down. It works both ways: Australian bowler Mitchell Johnson has said that he had to sing "Let it Go" from the film Frozen during his bowling run up in the last Ashes to get the Barmy Army chants out of his head. Most joyful are their songs about the individual players – fans can submit their own lyrics for consideration. I’ll admit here that the times I spent with Barmy Army crowd at the G, were the most fun parts of my day. In Sydney, Hampshire leg-spinner Mason Crane is making his Ashes debut, and I’m intrigued to see what they come up with for him.

By all accounts the England squad are hungry for that elusive win (remember, kids, “there’s no such thing as a dead rubber”.) Predictably, the pitch chat is ramping up over Sydney’s ambition to preserve its traditional wicket over a “drop in” (a non-permanent like the MCG’s pitch that has to make way for the juggernaut that is AFL).

For non-cricket aficionados heading to the SCG to support England, my advice is this: ignore all that, don’t worry about the rules too much, just sing when England are winning and sing when we’re losing and you’ll have a ripper time. Oh, and wear suncream.