PL1 v Kelmscott

UWA 9 v Kelmscott 4

09/10/11 - Petrol caught fire on Mount Panorama. Unlike the PR1 game to open the 2011/12 season, this unfolded quickly. Backing into a wall on a bend, petrol quickly spilled onto the track and brewed up, trapping the driver until the quick actions of the ground crew doused the flames, suspended the race and dragged the driver to safety.

This event and its resolution had some similarities to the first game of the season, beyond the obvious links of Vice President Rogerson setting fire to the club barbecue at Thursday night training, prompting the purchase of a replacement over the defeated body of the World's Second Greatest Treasurer, Ryan Eldred, and unquestionably boganite look and feel of the Kelmscott opposition.

Like the Bathurst fire, the game began quickly, with the fast-working Andy McDonough sending down the first pitch before most of his field realised the game had actually begun. The surprise of the lead-off hitter swinging was enough to see the ball scoot by short-stop Eldred before he could really react. Like the Russians in the last pool match against the Wallabies, University seemed surprised at the speed and intensity of the game and the willingness and passion of the Kelmscott players. A couple of scratchy hits and four defensive errors later, and the visitors went into the bottom part of the opening frame with a 3-0 lead.

By this time UWA were ready to play and ready to shrug off the ghosts of last season. Eldred atoned with a lead-off single and steal, and Josh Mikus did what he does best and drove in his club's first run. From there, like the Springboks and Wallabies it became a game of gritty defence and, in some cases, solid tackling. Jeremy Faux ranged well in right field pulling in a number of catches throughout the day, and the infield became steady under fire, with Jurgen Hanekom coolly making a number of plays, Mikus using his bicep to juggle a ball across the field and Eldred recovering his range and giving the firstbaseman an opportunity to muscle it up with a baserunner. The latter's double-play throw to third was nothing short of remarkable.

The slow burning embers of University's bats eventually caught hold, starting up once again through the footspeed of Eldred and consistency of Mikus. Clutch hits from Major, Rogerson and the ever-reliable Ewers broke Kelmscott's back, banishing their starter from the mound but not before he had surrendered the lead. The windmilling reliever held University briefly, but with fresh bats from the bench lining up to join in the gentle haemorrhaging of runs the Umpire needed far too little persuasion to put the men in blue out of their misery, unfortunately taking President Stivey with them, gifting the green machine a 10-3 opening day win.

Box Score

PL1 v Rockingham

UWA 3 v Rockingham 13

06/03/11 - When I made my debut for the University Baseball Club Bob Hawke lived in the Lodge, Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street and George Bush Senior in the White House; the Berlin Wall still stood and Nelson Mandela was still locked on Robben Island; the Russians had just finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan and Chinese students had just been confronted by tanks in Tiananmen Square; Homosexuality had just been legalised in Western Australia and Tim Berners-Lee was beginning to publicly kick around the idea of the World Wide Web; Rain Man had just won Best Picture but Daniel Radcliffe was a little over a week away from being born; Seinfeld, the show about nothing, had premiered five days earlier but the Simpsons was some five months from doing the same; and The Look by Roxette was number one on the Australian Top 40.

My league debut (as opposed to that in Intervarsity in July 1989) was ironically also against Rockingham. As a freshly minted 18 year old, I played left field in the old Minor A and was a bewildered part of narrow victory. The intimidating Larry Mulder was on hill, throwing to his brother Hal. A fellow young IV debutante, Chris Wade played first, with Mike Shanahan (back before he became Mick The Bum) at second and pair of slick-handed Japanese lads with unpronounceable names on the left side of the infield. Mike’s older brother Paul, who won the batting title that year despite disappearing to Berlin in time to see The Wall fall, played centre with the original white-line fever of Paul Wilkins in right. We might have won, but I took the collar with three strikeouts and a nervously dropped catch. I played with Chris Brown, John Phillips and a host of other club legends and life members in B grade (and that’s where the continued use of that term comes from) the following week.

In the intervening years I spent time on the diamond at almost all levels (the majority in A and B grades) playing with more than a third of all the men and women who have ever donned the green, gold, blue and white for this baseball club. From club legends, to life members and on to those better at social than on-field pursuits, I have more memories, shared moments of glory and heartache, and above all laughs with them all than any person could dare hope for. I slogged it out in the wilderness years, played in so many quality teams that caught the Uniwobbles in finals, caught the final out in the club’s first grand final win in 15 seasons, bled on the diamond and been carried off in an ambulance, been on the field and the bench for pennant wins in our glory years, won the odd batting title, and grown older and wiser (but fortunately more flexible as I grew even slower) as the years have passed. Along the way, there have been great games and ones we would all rather forget, there have been days when my bat couldn’t miss and we still lost as well as days where I was a cardboard cut-out but we still won handsomely. Sunday’s game against Rockingham perhaps captures all of those things in one microcosm. At times we were brilliant and at times groaningly terrible; there were moments of offensive brilliance as well as at-bats of mediocrity; there were innings where we were unbeatable and others where we could have been beaten with a rolled up newspaper; and irrespective of the result beers and laughs and camaraderie awaited us all on the hill afterwards.

In the end, though, all I did was keep turning up week after week; not really anything special. Each of the people that I got the privilege of playing with, drinking with, lunching with and hanging out with are the reason that I kept coming back, and each of you are the reason why this club is so special to me after all of these years. The bat that you all signed will become one of my most prized possessions for the rest of my life because of that.

Nearly 22 years later, we lost to Rockingham 13-3. To prove that nothing really has changed since 1989, I went hitless again (albeit with only one strikeout this time) and Aung San Suu Kyi remains in house arrest (something she first entered 10 days after my IV debut for the University Baseball Club).

Box Score

PL1 v Carine

UWA 4 v Carine 6

27/02/11 - The heat of the day may have got Kate Pierson in a haze, but the lazy days of summer were definitely not here; so she suggested we shook it until the butter melts. On the eve of Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill famously had nothing left to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Sunday’s return to Carine by the University PR1 team had all of that but also a little too much of Pierson’s haze. There was an eagerness to do battle once more, the previous surprise victory and the ensuing anonymous comments on the blogs fresh in most memories. Churchill recognised it as an ordeal of the most grievous kind, but he took up his task with buoyancy and hope and in the sure feeling that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men.

I stand with the original leader of the Rough Riders when he said that ”It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” That and the wrong kind of Dry County were the story of the game in the mid-North of the city.

Ryan Eldred singled to begin the game, and Matt Don and Michael Smith combined to give us a two run lead going into the bottom of the first. Two strike outs to Dave Stivey and a predictable but well-executed pick-off meant we achieved our initial goal of winning the first inning. Carine came out harder in the second and wrinkled back three runs while our scoring stalled. Eldred, Don and Smith combined once again to add another brace of runs but it was then that the Churchillian blood and sweat began to take its toll. Jacques Martin twinged a hamstring and bowed out of the game gracefully. Another Mr President, Mostyn McNeil, came onto the field and was blocked in the process of being caught stealing. Other players got on and made promising starts, but each time we threatened to tear the game from Carine’s grasp, the heat and the haze got to us and mental errors proved to be our undoing, mostly running bases. Carine, to their credit, manufactured an additional run to add to their later lead taking the game 6-4. And yet there was a palpable sense that the men in green had not been outplayed rather caught short in the conditions at the wrong time.

Woodrow Wilson suggested “We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.” And perhaps that is how best to look at the lame duck period of a season, and, to paraphrase Van Morrison, games such as this – the foundation and the hope for the seasons to come.

Yogi Berra famously said “it ain’t the heat, it’s the humility”. He was wrong, on days such as this it is both.

Box Score

PL1 v Willetton

UWA 7 v Willetton 6

24/02/11 - ”The one constant through all of the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game... it’s a piece of our past. It reminds us all of what was good. And that could be good again. People will come. People will most definitely come.”

And they did, in drabs and drabs. Family and friends, the idle and the curious, they came to a ballpark raised out of the swampy edge of a railway line long after the ashes of Parry Field were little more than an isolated memory for veterans. In the early day days of this park there was a mural painted on the left-field wall; 8 men in the black and white pinstripes of Chicago fading into an endless field of corn. So there was a certain synchronicity that only 8 of the starters and regulars were ready when warm-ups began. And yet there was a sense of excitement and occasion to the evening , a feeling that even with the season being effectively over this was what the players had been looking forward to all year, a whisper in the sticky air that anything was possible even a hero from the depths of a cornfield.

We looked polished in our pre-game warm-ups. Despite, or perhaps because of, two players being out of position, we were solid and careful with a field we were unfamiliar with. This could not survive the emotion and intensity that the occasion brought upon so many of the players. The batters generally struggled with the off-speed pitching, and the umpire’s extremely tight and then suddenly extremely expansive strike zone proved a much greater challenge, so both offensively and defensively and we were unable to shake off Willetton as we had hoped. Throws went astray uncharacteristically and heat blurred the edges of the memory of the leadership group manufacturing imaginary runs to go with those we begrudgingly gifted Willetton.

Entering the last innings with the scores tied. Clint Leighton was hit and then stole second with two out. The pressure of the play proved too much for their field and two overthrows on a big diamond handed Clint the go-head run. Despite the unflappable hardworking Chris Pascoe on the mound, chances to take outs came and went in the bottom of the last. With a runner on second and one out, a sharp single to right brought our own Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, Alex Pellerano into the game. One game and zero at-bats but a steady under fire approach to the play of the night, a centimetre perfect throw to the cut-off man gave the Rock of Matt Don time to scoop the second errant throw and meet the oncoming runner for the tag-out at the plate. Pascoe struck the next hitter out swinging and the game was University’s; although it would be some time later before they knew it.

... Ray and Mann emerge into the sunlight and walk down the aisle toward the field. The grass is so green you can almost smell it. Looking around the ballpark, they see only twenty or thirty die-hard fans in the stands for batting practice; a half-dozen players are grouped around the batting cage as one player hits to several others in the field. “God this place is so beautiful,” said Ray. Sitting in the stands drinking beer afterwards, I couldn’t agree more.

Box Score

PL1 v Balcatta

UWA 2 v Balcatta 8

20/02/11 - Just three players remained on Sunday from the starting nine that took the field so confidently two weeks earlier against Curtin and had their hearts so cruelly broken on the sand In The Pines. James Freud would have recognised them as the voice left from drinking, the radical barrister John Cooke, the man who prosecuted King Charles I and who became known as the Chief of The Regicides, would have recognised them as the Rump, the remnant of the Long Parliament from the time of Pride’s Purge to Cromwell’s dissolution. With their finals campaign over and the prospect of a long off-season before them without the guilty pleasures or remembrances of a post-season, they were very much the Opposition; Arthur Caldwell’s men, battered and broken by Menzies and split from within over the long shadow of Communism, doomed to stare longingly at the Treasury Benches for decades between the death of the Chifley and the rise of Whitlam.

As such they could perhaps be forgiven for going through the motions. Oppositions are just that, the party without the power, the one more desperate to capture oxygen in the media but so often lacking the skill, strength or charisma to make much of what little they do get. And yet the University PR1 baseball team was not the contemporary State Labor Party, toothless and in the face of a government with very little front-bench talent always more focussed on tearing itself apart and making itself the story rather than the failings of the government. Nor yet was it the contemporary Federal Liberal Party, full of energy, venom and smarts in varying and often unequal doses but with no coherency on bringing itself to a government that it is seriously only one faltering heartbeat away from. Instead, this really was the party of the true believers, the men who survived the fractiousness of Doc Evatt, who clung to Caldwell’s steady hand at the rudder and waited for the winds of political change to blow. Not above honest toil, courage in the face of adversity, a willingness to stake what they believed in even when the odds of victory seemed beyond them yet again, they took the field against Balcatta once more.

Like so many post-election Opposition parties, they knew there was unlikely to be a fairytale victory and yet they still dug in. Dave Stivey assumed the mound once again and blanked the auld enemy in the first. In the reverse of the inning, as combative as ever, Clint Leighton used his head to get on but was unable to score. Balcatta golfed a surprise double and took an underserving 3-0 lead after the second was completed. It was there that the rhetoric of an Opposition front bench scenting blood took control. Like the Egyptians and the Tunisians before them, the men of University stood up to be counted. Alex Pellerano, the imported debutante sounding suspiciously like Kristina Kenneally, doubled and then was left on (perhaps a forerunner of the New South Wales election to come – please see my column in the Sydney Morning Herald). Leighton tripled and barrelled his way home through the ribs of the Balcatta pitcher, ire and spite left in his wake. Jacques Martin hustled out an infield ground ball before the Father of the House ripped his own triple to bring the score to only 2-4. Suddenly regime change seemed in the air.

And then our Scott Morrison moment, that seemingly innocuous event that explodes in an opposition’s face and so thoroughly derails their campaign. The pitch count limit that may or may not have been and an inability to throw strikes in relief gifted Balcatta 4 more runs. Chris Pascoe relieved the mound after doing the same for Tim Stivey behind the dish when the latter’s heart proved stronger than his hamstrings, and neither team was able to score. Just before the game was prorogued for the end of that parliamentary session an extraordinary and unparalleled event occurred; a Stranger entered the House. With the blessing of the Leader of the Opposition, but perhaps not that of the Speaker, energy drinks were distributed by a promotions girl mid-at bat much to the visual delight of both sides of the house. At least there was something to celebrate at the end.

Box Score

PL1 v Curtin

UWA 6 v Curtin 19

06/02/11 - As a result of their Tour of Australia, REM triggered MTV’s “surprise” discovery of the Perth local music scene in the mid 1990’s. This was hardly news to locals, with an amazing list of bands and musicians originating in Perth over the previous twenty years or more. There may very well be something in the water, but traditionally for an emerging band to make it big they needed to leave the shores of the most isolated capital city in the world. The journey of The Triffids, early eighties escapees first to Sydney and then to London, in many ways mirrors the finals campaign of the University PR1 Baseball team in 2010/11. From the odd but with potential My Baby Thinks She’s a Train from an early Triple J Live at the Wireless record, to the collection of EPs bundled together as Beautiful Waste but with only 3 songs that would make the final cut; from the definitive classic Born Sandy Devotional with songs that would become anthems and define the story of the band (as David McComb said “Up until now we've been making records of collections of accumulated songs - this will instead be songs written FOR an LP record with a theme NOT a hotch potch of historically compiled songs. The theme will be unrequited love but the language will reach way above and beyond that.”), through the rough but ready In The Pines (the live essence of the band) to Calenture where the band was on the verge of making it big, signing with a major label and then being accused by loyal fans of selling out and losing the soul of the indie scene. And then came The Black Swan, the last studio album.

The band had grown by this stage, recalling former band members from their early days as well as bringing in musicians of all shades and abilities. McComb was writing prodigiously in any number of styles. He was reading voraciously, staying up late, forming various working relationships with like minded collaborators inside the band and out, and turning it all into something from his own mold. Hip hop, tango, country, pop, epic soft rock ballad, 30 second haiku. If he was trying to impress he was doing very well, but I somehow suspect it was for his own benefit. There were more than enough songs for a couple of albums but it was a world away from Born Sandy Devotional. These new songs seemed almost designed to clash, fizz and spit when placed in close proximity and the album proved a nightmare with which to programme a running order. Despite all of the smorgasbord of songs and plethora of talent on display, the album was a commercial and loyal fan-base failure and the sad end of a band that could still stand the world on its head when it reformed nearly twenty years later to mourn the passing of McComb, a writer extraordinaire who would continue to breathe music as he vainly tried to capture the magic that was in his mind before his health failed him in 1999 at age 37.

Like McComb and the Triffids, there were many moments of individual and team brilliance in the finals campaign that ended on the sandy plain at Curtin University this Sunday. There were sublime moments when a game captured the essence of what the team was about and left players and spectators alike in no doubt about what the team was capable of. Equally there were many misfires and bewildering moments along the wide open road, moments when it would not go right or when the beautifully thought through plans would not quite come together as they had been envisaged. In the end, like The Black Swan, we stood at the brink of our own future, blessed with more players than we could fit onto the diamond and so many songs that we could have played, and yet we could not bring that last sprawling, messy epic together and take the next step to greatness. Or at least the finals. Like McComb, our season is not over, and there will be more songs to write and stories to tell before then and with friendships maintained. Sadly, though, it will not be with a major label bound for the post-season.

Box Score

PL1 v Kelmscott

UWA 21 v Kelmscott 1

30/01/11 - A storm is a sudden and violent event. In this part of the world at least, it is generally not of great duration. Instead, storms that hit the city at the edge of forever tend to make up for their lack of life with compressed savagery and violence. The day after the clash of thunder, lightning, humidity and destructive winds, Kelmscott could be forgiven for thinking that storm had not actually ended. To extend an analogy from much earlier in the season, Berlin was a city that was familiar with the need to ask forgiveness so it perhaps should not be that much of a surprise. And yet this is a city that has not witnessed carnage of Sunday’s like in more than sixty years. The end of the Sturm Und Drang, the Storm and the Urge, washed upon the very bones of the city confined to history for its better days as the Red Army fought its way to the very centre crushing the life out of the 1000 Year Reich. Ronald Regan may have stood before the Gate through which armies marched and simply said “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall” but the echo of those words, the tragedy and the carnage they brought forth, could only be imagined on that grey morning in 1987. The Berlin Wall would indeed fall, and in sudden and dramatic fashion. Without fanfare, with little bloodshed and with much chaos and bewilderment the moment too quickly became hollow.

The impact of the University Provincial Reserves 1 Baseball team in the first innings of their game against Kelmscott provoked similar feelings and emotions to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Above all there was an air of unreality. After Michael Smith eased a goose-egg out of the first innings the storm broke in the heat of a north-easterly over the top of the hapless Kelmscott. The Green Army batted for 40 minutes and seemed to be unable to get themselves out, piling on 12 unanswered runs. Not unlike their Red namesakes, patience, discipline and offensive grunt were scattered liberally throughout the line-up, with the rock-solid Matt Don and the muscular Dale Blackman leading the charge and crushing the life out of the defenders. In later innings each time Kelmscott threatened to gather some momentum, University would clinically snatch it from them with key catches in the outfield to Clint Leighton, Justin Mann and Blackman and a pick-off to Smith.

The game could have descended from tragedy into farce had University let their guard down at all. Impulsive and at times far too immature; reminiscent of a young Romeo, Smith remained in control on the mound and dispatched Kelmscott much as the Russians did the Wermacht some six decades earlier. A Shakespearean tragedy, though, is never played out until the final act; who lives and dies can never be truly known until the final scene. Does Juliet die, is Gotterdammerung revealed, does Tristan survive love Isolde’s potion, does the University season continue? Is the rest of the season to be Shakespeare, Underworld or Nena - Liessen keinen Platz fuer Sieger, Kriegsminister gibt es nicht mehr, Und auch keine Duesenflieger, Heute zieh ich meine Runden, Seh die Welt in Truemmern liegen, Hab' nen Luftballon gefunden, Denk' an Dich und lass' ihn fliegen?

Box Score

PL1 v Willetton

UWA 7 v Willetton 5

23/01/11 - With a narrow 7-5 win over Willetton, the PR1 fairy tale continues. The Oxford defines a fairy tale as “a story about fairies or other mythical beings” or as “a highly improbably account”. Not only do both definitions that fit well with the University team, they are highly appropriate in a week where a club member trod the boards in Alice In Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s much loved 1865 literary nonsense novel of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole and into a fantasy world full of peculiar creatures is far too fine an analogy for the team, characters and indeed game from Sunday. From:

- the man on the hill, Dave Stivey, who presents as a slimmed down version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum (you’re not always sure which pitcher you’re going to get - the one that frustrates you or the one that frustrates the opposition; thankfully we have seen more of the latter in the second half of the season);

- the man in plastic, Matt Don, who maintained his Cheshire cat grin and words of wisdom throughout the game despite sweating his bodyweight out;

- the tallest relief firstbaseman in the league, Nathan Rogerson, who was far more laid back than the White Rabbit but always as present;

- the font of wisdom, especially as injuries are concerned, Andrew Symes, whose knowledge and concern for his own form rivals that of the Caterpillar;

- the recycled Mark Shirley, who got to play two unfamiliar positions and be blamed for a range of errors, much like the Knave of Hearts;

- Ryan Eldred who is always late for a very important date (as well as the unimportant ones) and who also survived an attempted chopping off of his head while umpiring the previous game;

- The player of many parts, Harry-sorry-Jacques Martin, who has such a striking resemblance to another fictional character that you wonder how he got mixed up in the looking glass in the first place and who displayed enough heroism with three hits to justify this;

- Clint Leighton who was hungover enough to have dreamed it all in Carroll’s place;

- The full game debutante, Kyle Oppelaar, who looked as confused and as lost as Alice confronted with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, yet who seemed as divorced from concentration as the Dormouse; to

- The angriest pinch-hitter on the field who entertained the idea of being Kirk Gibson, but despite collecting an RBI single would cheerfully have taken Milfy’s head during the game and must therefore be the Queen of Hearts (with apologies to his daughter’s second favourite actor – Kate.)

We grafted runs, effortlessly held down an opposition only to watch them suddenly morph into something else, watched a lead evaporate completely into sand, saw an injury to our sole short-stop become a game-ending balloon, saw the majority of our bench become invisible (big ups to Alex who redonned his uniform with no notice); and then did what we had once always done and came back from the dead and then throttled the opposition’s runflow.

Like all good fairy stories, Carroll did not stop with Wonderland, but sent Alice through the Looking Glass as well. He also composed the verse Jabberwock, whose teeth and claws all were to beware. The University PR1 season is yet to reach those heights, yet, but like the movie series of Harry-sorry-Jacques facesake it shows no sign of ending yet. And who knows how it will finish, glory or bloody violence and tragedy . Regardless, it will continue to be a hell of a ride and a highly improbable account to spin words around.

Box Score

PL1 v Rockingham

UWA 3 v Rockingham 7

16/01/11 - In his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying Irishman Oscar Wilde (writer, poet, aesthete, convictee of gross indecency as it was then termed) wrote that “life imitates art far more often than art imitates life”. Wilde’s passion in the decade that was to follow was about the supremacy of art above all other things; the themes that ran through his writing in the years that followed were combinations of decadence, duplicity and beauty. He died before the end of 1900, relatively young and even more relatively destitute.

The Sporting News famously wrote that “Baseball is life, the rest is just details.” Wilde toured America and Canada in 1882, principally to make money, but recorded no words on the great American past-time. He may have struggled to see the connection between life, art and baseball, but the irony of a week off the field imitating a team in the field would not have been lost on one of the greatest wits of the nineteenth century. (Wilde himself once said “quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit” so I am a little relieved.) One of the oldest clubs in the League, UWA is one of the few without even a minimal junior base. Players come to the club from many places: returning to the game after many years’ break, from other junior clubs upon starting University, from interstate or overseas, or even with the perverse idea of taking up one of the hardest sports from scratch. They stay; while for diverse reasons there are threads that run through this: the camaraderie with team-mates old and new, a love of the game, the ground, the history, the not unattractive softball club, and a bar with magnificent views. Many themes must run through a club of this age to keep players coming back: wit (which Wilde would have appreciated), grit and determination (even in the face of seemingly impossible odds), friendship and support on and off the field for those with whom your opinion differs as well as those with whom you are tight, enjoyment of the elation as well as the fleetingness of success, buoyancy in the face of failure or the “Uniwobbles” of years gone past, and pride and an unswerving knowledge that this is the best club to play for irrespective of the vagaries of each week’s results.

In a week where poorly chosen words were uttered off the field, and PR1 lost narrowly on the field it is worth remembering the things that bring us together as a club and that set us apart from the rest of the league; those features of club, team and individual character that were shown on and off the field between those two week-markers. Spoken and cloud-scattered positives overwhelmingly counterbalanced the words that had gone before; plans being hatched over beers and chicken parmagiana in the Lucky Shag sun; a depleted line-up taking the diamond at Rockingham determined to carry forward the momentum of the previous week’s breakthrough win; and the dice being rolled and a surprise veteran starting pitcher being unveiled. Despite toiling manfully, two swings proved the difference between the two teams. And yet the courage, the passion, the grit (and the wit) did not fade. UWA scratched out runs, held their nerve in the field and displayed crucial courage in decision-making. The heat did not slay them and their pride was still on display as the team fought to keep the game alive into the eighth inning. Despite going down 7-3, that is the reason that I keep coming back to play with this club.

Wilde also said that “comparisons are odious”, and he was right. There is no other club that compares to ours. It is too easy to let your behaviour betray that you have forgotten this. Thankfully the men of PR1 have not.

Box Score

PL1 v Carine

UWA 14 v Carine 3

09/01/11 - The yeomanry were the backbone and the lion's share of Henry V's army. Foot soldiers and bowman, they were traditionally freemen and the owners of small plots or even servants to the noble men-at-arms. There were few of the latter, though, that rode at the head of the English King's depleted and ravaged army desperately searching for a safe passage across the Somme River as they marched to Calais and safety in October 1415.

When the two armies eventually found each other, the 5,900 Englishmen found themselves vastly outnumbered by some 40-50,000 French across a muddy gap between two thick woods. Though they had little reason to be, the English were very confident. The French commanders were ill-disciplined and their attacks were badly coordinated and quickly got out of control. Within the first hour of the battle near the small village of Agincourt two of the Divisions were immobilised by overcrowding and the muddy ground and thus found themselves defenceless against the storm of arrows and the more athletic English. It was a massacre, with more than 6,000 French falling, including the flower of French chivalry and some of the greatest leaders of their nation. The English, by contrast, lost some 300 men and not only marched triumphantly to Calais but set the foundations for Henry to audaciously seize the French throne.

The parallels to Sunday's PR1 demolition of the much fancied Carine at the hands of UWA are obvious. The University men, three games adrift of the final four, were coming off two heavy morale-sapping defeats, to Curtin and Balcatta, while their opponents were fighting for outright top place. However the confidence of the men in green was palpable from the first innings. Dave Stivey threw a goose-egg and then a Clint Leighton HPB and steal in conjunction with a Jacques Martin ground out gave UWA their first lead in weeks.

Scott Barrell, Josh Mikus and Shaun Major combined to drive in 2 more to set the score at 3-0 after the first innings. Carine added 1 in the second. While UWA failed to score the constant probing and pressing was already evident and starting to take effect, and in the third innings this came to the fore. Disciplined batting (crucial clutch hits to reliable catcher AJ Ewers and Andrew Symes), aggressive baserunning (including the loping Mikus) and poor decision-making in Carine's field saw UWA pile on another 5 runs.

Carine responded with 2 of their own as Stivey starting to dig his heels in on the mound, but a further 6 to UWA in the bottom of the fourth put paid to Carine's aspirations. Another goose-egg at the top of the fifth, with Stivey very much in charge, sealed a famous victory, the team's first against a top 4 opponent all season and their first against Carine in several years. The road to Calais, and perhaps the crown, stands open ...

Box Score