Mark Burgess's tea cup

Even as an eleven-year-old shame burned in me as I watched.
The television flickered in the summer heat,
"The old man" grunted from his armchair, shaking his head.
Mum, indifferent to all things cricket,
Paused in the kitchen just long enough to mutter,
"Well, that’s not very sporting, is it?"

The score read six needed from one.
The game teetered, fragile as a porcelain teacup—
The kind Mark Burgess would later launch at a dressing room wall.
Greg Chappell, sunburned and spent,
Turned to his brother Trevor with the casual cruelty
Of an older sibling about to prove a point.

"How’s your underarm?"
"No, Greg, no, you can't do that!"
Ian Chappell, aghast in the commentary box,
Like a priest witnessing blasphemy at the altar.
Rod Marsh, behind the stumps, pleading,
"Don’t do it, mate!"—
A man begging the tide to turn back.

And yet, down it rolled, slow as a funeral procession,
A cricket ball stripped of its dignity,
Rolling feebly toward Brian McKechnie,
Who stared at it as one might stare
At an unexpected turd in a swimming pool.
Bat dropped. Arms out. A curse swallowed whole.

The world gasped as Richie Benaud
Gave his verdict with the surgical precision of a coroner:
"Disgraceful. One of the worst things I have ever seen."
And then, silence—
The awful silence of a crowd realizing
They have witnessed something
That will never be forgotten.

A little girl tugged at Greg’s sleeve,
Her voice small but true:
"You cheated."
And in that moment, the mighty Australian captain
Was reduced to a schoolboy
Caught copying in a math test.

In the New Zealand dressing room,
Rage simmered beneath quiet disgust,
Until a teacup shattered against the wall—
A punctuation mark of fury,
A ceramic obituary for the spirit of the game.

Meanwhile, across the Tasman,
Piggy Muldoon, wry and righteous,
Declares it fitting the Australians wore yellow.
A nation, red-faced with anger,
Murmurs a new cricketing phrase:
"Hitler was a bastard, but he never bowled underarm."

Back in the backyard,
Beneath the scorching Aussie sun,
We replayed the moment in mockery.
The underarm delivery, now folklore,
A crime so shameful, even kids understood.
The Kiwi kids would yell out—
"Stop cheating Aussies"
We'd laugh, but somewhere deep down,
We knew this time, they weren’t wrong.
Even the dog looked disappointed.

FSF