The Baggy Green Cap

Unfortunately, due to spending an afternoon partaking of the golden liquid with a couple of thousand other folk at the local Warley Woods annual picnic yesterday, I missed the conclusion of the First Test Match in Cardiff.
Watching the highlights last night it certainly looked pretty tense in that last hour as Monty and Jimmy hung out for a totally undeserved draw for England. But one thing that struck me in the after match press interviews was…. Ricky Ponting’s cap!
Andrew Strauss and Paul Collingwood were interviewed wearing some garish red baseball-style things with advertising slogans for a mobile phone company all over them. You know, the sort of cap that Willie Hague used to wear when he was unsuccessfully trying to convince us he could “get down with the youth”.
But Ricky did his interviews wearing the famous baggy green cap, the design of which has barely changed for a century. It may have been me, but I think it showed the sort of defiance and pride that have made the Australians so difficult to beat over the last couple of decades. There is a pride in wearing that baggy green cap that I don’t think you can get from wearing some glorified advertising merchandise, and whilst I enjoy us beating the Aussies as much as anyone, or even scraping a barely deserved draw, I couldn’t help but have sneaky feeling of admiration for Ricky’s battered headgear.