Cassowary Crossing

PITCH BLACK
(Seeing blind cricket is believing in the human spirit)

(c) David Astle

Shut your eyes and listen to the clues around you. The tingle of bells, the rush of air, a wooden crack, the yells and pounding of feet. This is no ordinary clamour.

For those in Category B1 – the totally blind – these are the sounds of a summer weekend, a cricket game on a Melbourne park where the grass is green and the sky is blue though the players neither see nor care.

“Bowler,” yells the bowler.
“Keeper,” yells the keeper.

The bowler adjusts his aim. He’s a genteel bloke in a cable-knit sweater, his eyes like wet pumice. He calls a second time. The keeper responds. “Ready?” asks the bowler and the blind batsman is ready. “Play,” says Ian Walsh, the bowler, releasing the ball in a whippy underarm, rolling an oversized cat-ball rattling down the pitch.

Filled with washers, plus a lead shot for extra weight, the ball bounces once, twice – as it legally must – before settling into a gnarly skid. Mark Curralejo, a “totally” from the Braille XI team, waits to meet the ball.

Not far away, a metre behind the wicketkeeper, stands a giant albino called Chris who “calls” the ball for Curralejo. With B3 vision, between stone-blind and less than 10 per cent sight, Chris Stevens can see enough to call “leg side!” and Curralejo contorts his body accordingly. In one fluid swat he sweeps the ball off his toes, sending it jingling towards the fine-leg boundary.

Cricket is a blind man’s idea of fun, with some 150 registered players across the country, the bulk in Victoria and NSW. An Australian invention, the game was first played more than 80 years ago, behind a blind hostel in Prahran, a handful of stones doing the trick inside a soup can. The rules were coined as the craze gathered momentum. The first official match took place on this very patch of grass – in Kooyong, in Melbourne’s East – in 1928, behind the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind, now dubbed Vision Australia.

Back then, a burlap mat doubled as the pitch. The ball – a wickerwork knot – was loud with bottle caps. Modern times have seen that change into white moulded plastic, with the pitch a strip of fake turf and the stumps fluoro steel. (Fluoro for maximum visibility, steel for maximum noise.) For safety, in-close fielders wear cutaway baseball masks.

“With a few rule changes here and there,” says Alf O’Neill, 49, the game’s Victorian President, “blind cricket is just the same as normal cricket – for want of a better phrase.”

Fours are still fours. A wide is a wide. Umpires – ironically the sole participants with 20/20 vision – signal extras and boundaries in the same Gabba fashion, voicing the gesture in sync with their hands. This is cricket for all intents and purposes, just as Kanga Cricket is cricket, and backyard cricket is cricket….an embodiment of the game’s appeal, with a raft of necessary tweaks.

The biggest crunch comes down to categories. While the 43 blokes (and one girl) charging around Kooyong’s two mini-ovals are all legally blind, some are blinder than others.

Chris Baillie, 23, can’t see a thing. He grew up in Gippsland water-skiing, riding bikes at the velodrome, camping, canoeing … blind. He’s flown a virtual space mission at a NASA camp in Alabama and now he’s a computer science graduate with an IT career in his sights. Blindness, like destiny, is what you make of it.

“I’m lucky my parents had an outgoing attitude.” Baillie bounces his bat in anticipation of the crease. Flint, his Labrador, lies placid below the bench. Cricket is the dream gig for guide dogs.

Other players, like Paul Ravenarki-Little, 36, suffer acute tunnel vision, in his case a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, or RP for short. “I have no field vision but my central vision is still pretty good. I’m earmarked to wicket-keep for Australia as I can see the ball coming in from the boundary.”

Complete with baggy green caps, the Australian squad is flying to Pretoria next year to wage its third World Cup campaign. (The first two were in India, where our strike bowler reckons “you could really smell the poverty”.) As a nation, we’re yet to seize the major prize although Ravenarki-Little and a dozen hopefuls on the Kooyong turf are looking to buck that trend.

Just like a suburban team, the national squad must comprise a balance of “totallys and partials” to ensure a fair contest. “Though at night-time,” laughs Ravenarki-Little, “thanks to my condition, I go from partial to total. All I can see are outlines.”

Proof was the big guy’s spree in Manhattan – a nightclub in outer Melbourne – when a younger Ravenarki-Little spent the best part of 15 minutes chatting up a bikini girl. The girl was a part of a liquor promotion and didn’t bother responding to any of the cricketer’s pick-up lines. Not one. Snooty so-and-so, he thought, and trudged back to his mates, who were rolling on the carpet weeping with laughter. Miss Bikini was a cardboard cutout.

Embarrassment and accidents – blind people don’t see them that way. Mishaps and misinterpretations are part of the journey, the potholes in the road. Chris Bertuch, 25, a middle-order batsman for St Pauls, has lost his front tooth six times – three times from poles and once from a gym teacher who didn’t say Stop in time.

Ian Walsh, 58, the man with pumice eyes, was born blind, though surgery in the 1970s gave the legal receptionist 4 per cent vision on one side. Fresh from hospital, his world went from pitch black to a peephole, only for a cricket ball in 1975 to bang into the socket. “Click.” Walsh snaps his finger. “The light went off. I play now as a totally, just as I started the game.” Nearby a cascade of bells distracts us. Walsh applauds his team-mate’s shot from the boundary before being told what it was. He already knows.

They all do. As spectators, the blind are gifted. Often I’m the one obliged to ask what just happened. Did I miss something? Was it a run-out? No matter the diagnoses (from “no-cones-all-rods” to Stargardt’s Syndrome) and regardless of the optic metaphors (from “looking through a cheese grater” to “looking through a waterfall”), I feel the unenlightened one.

Muffle the ball and the day seems Cricket Ordinaire. You soon forget that “Mannie” (the slow bowler devoid of eyeballs) or Josh Morgan, 23, (who refuses canes and Labradors for reasons of cool) are sightless in the first place. A cute tribe of kids weave around us all day, the cricket a crèche of one extended family. Strangely it takes a sighted girl like Charlotte Ravenarki-Little, 9, playing blindman’s buff with her dad to remind you why the day is remarkable.

“Watching blind people play cricket is the best fun,” says Louise Pas, 49. She sits in the scoring pavilion between the two ovals. Her husband of 27 years, Rienie, has macula degeneration, where vision can diminish from poor to worse in a lifetime. “He can see the TV less and less, even with a magnifying glass. I have to explain the sight gags. Or go on the net and read aloud all his sport stories.”

Janine Atkinson, 31, has just married Ty, a Category B with erratic dress sense. “Anything red to maroon is brown to him and purple looks green,” she says. “I have to be his fashion consultant.”
The other scoring women – the sighted spouses – giggle in agreement. Blind men are essentially men, perhaps even more so, their traits magnified to the nth degree. They can’t find things too well. They look in the wrong places or blame their wives for moving stuff. They’re stubborn to a point of denial. They also love their cricket.

“Looks like we’ve got the close one,” says Strazz, squinting down his monocular at St Pauls versus Burwood, a replay of last season’s grand final.

Every team under the sun has its Strazz. It’s part of the Australian charter. Wanted: one larrikin, must be wiry, smart-mouthed, steady drinker, smoker, with an answer for everything. Chris “Strazz” Strusinski, 43, complete with eye patch, heeded the call 25 years ago. Cricket is one more way for Strazz to seize life, along with tenpin, gardening, blind ping-pong (or Swish) and driving round the Ford Car Testing Track in Geelong at 170kph.

“They have this day for the visually impaired. I drove without hands because the track’s on a curve.” Strazz suffers bloodspots. One eye is glass, while the real one is down to 5 per cent vision. “Obviously blinkies [the blind] can’t get a driving licence but we still have a licence to drive everyone else up the wall.”

Strazz blinks, his grin as fixed as any tattoo. Get them before they get you: the Strazz motto. After cricket, his pet hobby is pinball at the local, where his mad fish-eye – the good one – makes him Tommy of the multi-ball. “Somehow I can see all eight balls at once. It’s handy.” His other trick, parking his glass eye on the pinball machine, guarantees he’s left alone.

The clang of steel is Amy Lee-Archer – the day’s only cricketing girl – losing her leg stump to a noisy
skidder. At 19, with twice as many cranial operations due to a pressured optic nerve, the Taswegian drifts back to the pavilion, lapping the sun as she moves. She doesn’t care for cricket too much. But camaraderie has no price.

David Gordon knows it well. Eight years ago, aged 25, he found himself reading the newspaper with one eye. The squint was an early symptom of Leber’s Optic Atrophy, a hereditary disease that rendered him legally blind inside six months. “It was life-changing,” he says, slipping on a fielder’s mask. “I spent the first two months of blindness getting blind, drinking heavily. It was a mixture of anger, frustration, despair…what am I going to do now?” One big answer was cricket and the social network it creates.

Ben Peacock is another to see cricket as more than a game. Among all the stories across the fields of Koyoong, the 23-year-old perhaps owns the most miraculous. As a cricketer, he knows he’s a great furniture maker but the fact that Peacock is strapping on pads is a medical feat.

“I was three,” he says. “I was sitting in the back seat with my two dogs. Dad was driving. We were going through a place called Lang Lang [south-east of Melbourne] when Dad tried to put a blanket on me without stopping the car. Next thing I was on my head in the middle of the road. Dad was OK. The dogs survived – one ran off into the bush, the other stayed loyal and sat beside me.”

Peacock was in a coma for six weeks and hospital for six months. Losing his sight was the least toll for winning back his life, as he puts it, though half his brain remains clinically dead. “Because I was three my brain hadn’t fully grown. I learnt to walk again and my brain grew back slightly.” Crash – another wicket down. Peacock, whose world is all colour and no focus, marches to face the music.

BOX #1 – CRICKET, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT
Rules and conditions can vary according to the level of contest, from suburban league to the world stage.
Essentially, all blind cricketers are legally blind, yet some have limited vision. Each team is obliged to include a blend of sighted categories, from totally blind (Totally B1) to partially sighted (a climbing grade from Partial B2 to Partial B3.).
In play, a “Totally” cannot be stumped, or bowled by a “partial” – though peer can snare peer. A “totally” is not asked to run between wickets, but relies on a B2 or B3 to do the hard yards. Likewise he can enjoy a caller behind the wicket to announce delivery direction. The potential for muddle in World Cup games is avoided by Category armbands.
Delivery is underarm. Depending on the batsman’s status, the ball must bounce at least once – or twice – in the pitch’s first and second halves. Most common is the venomous lawn-bowl technique met by an uncanny sweep shot.

BOX #2 – BLIND AMBITION
According to the National Health Survey of 2001, there are some 167,000 Australians with little or no sight. Of these, 150 play cricket. Other sports of choice include tenpin bowling, goal ball (a static brand of European handball), swish (modified ping-pong), athletics and golf (with a sighted caddie). After too many broken bones, soccer was abandoned.
The national cricket tournament runs from December 29 to January 11 in Brisbane. Selected from this, the Australian squad will travel to South Africa in December to contest for the third World Cup. We face possibly eight rival countries next year: the usual cricketing suspects with England (annoyingly) the one to beat. [Find out more at www.visionaustralia.org.au]

[Sunday Life, December, 2005]