Cricket and Kangaroo

The game of cricket is a major phenomenon in Australia. The biggest thing in cricket is “The Ashes”, a competition between Australia and England approximately every year and a half. A “test match” in cricket is a single cricket game that takes 5 days to play. The Ashes consists of 5 test matches, played across a couple of months. It’s such a big deal here that on certain key playing days, internet usage by office workers increases 20-fold as workers check scores and watch video of key plays on cricket websites. It’s like the world series and super bowl rolled into one and extended across two months or so. It’s being played in Australia this time (it alternates between here and England) and literally 10’s of thousands of English fans have traveled to Australia to watch the matches in person.

The most diehard of them are called the “Barmy Army”. A weekly TV series here right now is about an Aussie who travels around to the matches with the Barmy Army of British fans. Each match is being played in a different Australian city. Baseball is derived from cricket, and cricket fans have the same love as baseball fans of endless statistics and in a game that may feature 500 runs per team, there are lots of stats. Discussion before and after the games takes as much time as the game itself.

So lunch at work these days means beating a path the few meters from the office to Roland’s parents’ place where his mother feeds us lunch while we watch cricket and they discuss the strategies of the game. I’m getting to the place where I can toss in a comment here and there like I know what I’m talking about.

Yesterday’s lunch was a salad and ginger beer (ginger ale with LOTS of real ginger in it. No, it's not like Vernor's, which is still just ginger ale, albeit a good one). The salad was kind of a chef salad, with lettuce, tomatoes, bean sprouts, apples, cheese chunks and meat chunks. The meat looked like medium rare beef steak. It was actually kangaroo steak that Roland’s mother had found on sale at the local grocery store.

My sister Janet once found kangaroo meat at a new grocery store in Dallas. She invited me over, fried it in a skillet and we ate it, or tried to. Roland had previously told me that the best steak he ever ate was a kangaroo steak at a restaurant in Australia. On that recommendation we bit into our fried kangaroo with great anticipation. It was terrible. It tasted like liver or something. We couldn’t finish it. We gave Roland the leftovers and he insisted it tasted fine – nothing like liver.

As a result of that experience, I wasn’t eager to try it again, but this steak in the salad was actually quite good. Roland’s mother said it’s especially important with kangaroo meat not to overcook it, so maybe that had been our mistake.

Kangaroos, by the way, far from being an endangered species, are so common as to be a pest here, apparently. I’m told that Roland’s brother, who lives in a small town several hours into the interior of the country, has hit as many as a half-dozen or so kangaroos on the highway over the course of one drive from there to here. Nearly everyone who lives in rural parts of Australia has a “roo guard” installed on the front of their vehicle to prevent damage to the vehicle when it collides with a kangaroo.

For Texans, think skunk or Armadillo, only 50 times bigger. And tastier.