The Barmy Army has become an invasion of unabashed patriotism that cannot be ignored – even if you wanted to

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Barmy Army on this Ashes tour. In a sense, it’s hard to avoid thinking about them, such is their ubiquity in these parts right now. There they are, staying in your hotel. En masse in your local bar. There’s about 20 of them on the tram to the MCG, singing about… well, themselves mostly.

And then of course, once you get to the cricket, it’s impossible to ignore them: taking over an entire section of the ground, bedecking it in St George flags and belting out their songs from morning to evening. In many ways, not being able to ignore them is the point. There is definitely an element of the foreign invasion in the Barmy Army’s tactics: the marking of territory, the unabashed patriotism, the supplanting of a native spectator culture with their own.

The Barmy Army first started to attract attention on the 1994-95 Ashes tour, getting their nickname from the local press for their boundless enthusiasm in the face of certain defeat. Spying an opportunity, they began to print T-shirts, and by the end of the tour had made enough money to trademark the Barmy Army name. These days it is a highly lucrative commercial operation, with a full-time staff, growing profits, and thousands of tour packages sold for the current series.

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And this, ultimately, is the true meaning of the Barmy Army, and its Australian facsimiles, the Richies – who attend Test matches dressed as Richie Benaud, with silver wigs and old-style microphones – and the yellow-clad Fanatics, who pop up anywhere in the world an Australian happens to be doing sport. They may begin as fan clubs, but ultimately they are businesses, representing the commodification of the spectator experience. The Barmy Army’s travel packages for the forthcoming tour of New Zealand start at £2,999, not including flights or match tickets.

Why are they so popular? Perhaps it is because these groups offer something that the traditional spectator experience does not: the chance not simply to watch the action, but to be part of it, not simply to see but to be seen. In a sport as static as cricket, the gaze of the television director, and thus the viewer, is invariably drawn to the loudest, the boldest, the most vivid. You could just turn up, buy a ticket and watch the cricket, but where’s the fun in that? Better by far to start drinking at 9am and sing songs about convict colonies.

These things are intrinsic to football, a sport with its own organic culture of songs and segregation and fierce tribalism. But cricket had none of this when the Barmy Army first started out. Everywhere it went, it essentially created its own culture, its own mythology, its own branding. “Everywhere we go,” runs the famous Barmy Army chant, with each line repeated at deafening volume. “People want to know. Who we are. Where we come from.”

No, they don’t. People couldn’t care less. At least, they didn’t care when you were just Graham, the 48-year-old assistant manager of a Honda dealership from Luton. But when you don the T-shirt and plastic breasts of the Army, you become a legend. You’re a part of something. England players speak of you in hushed tones in press conferences. Ricky Ponting mentions you on commentary. Not you in person, Graham, the Barmy Army in general, but we know he really means you.

Every life is a performance, and this is yours. This is the quasi-fame you’ve dreamed of all those years you spent buffing Civics and Accords and filling out shipping dockets. This is why you paid thousands to come out here. There’s a lull in the cricket, and you’ve got a songsheet in your hand. Now, I want you to sing “Stuart Broad, Stuart Broad, Stuart Broad and his massive pork sword” to the tune of Postman Pat as if your life depended on it.

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There’s plenty to admire about the Barmy Army, of course, from its surprisingly good gender balance to its exhaustive charity work, raising thousands for the PCA Benevolent Fund. The atmosphere generated by a Barmy-flavoured crowd can often be a welcome dash of colour in an occasionally drab setting. And with countries around the world struggling to make Test cricket pay, a tour by England can be a financial lifeline, due in large part to those ubiquitous Barmies with their raging thirsts.

This, in many ways, is the legacy of the Barmy Supremacy: that they have grown and prospered to the extent that they now genuinely shape the global economy of cricket. It’s all a long way from a few dozen backpackers in Australia two decades ago. Now, cricket can’t afford to ignore the Barmy Army, even if it wanted to.