Sporting TV’s silliest documentary series has returned for a second season, and Amazon Prime Video’s The Test, about the Australian men’s cricket team, continues to deliver. I commend it to you, with three caveats.
The first series proved such a treat for the English cricket follower because one could hardly believe what a bunch of berks the old enemy are, with their earnest management speech and elite mateship; their company like the human resources conference from hell.
Once again, there are some laughable, Pooterish moments, including Marnus Labuschagne’s recipe for a toasted sandwich (put in fridge after cooking to cool down) and David Warner’s diary, crayoned by his own hand and full of self-actualisation positivity so dippy that even Prince Harry would blush.
The drawback of season two is that there is not enough Justin Langer in it, because the players and the board have combined to give him the black spot, and the magnificently Brentian ex-head coach thus features but fleetingly. A tantalising taste of what has been lost is provided by one typically intense little scene where “JL” appears to be losing his rag with a pepper grinder.
The Test without Langer is The Supremes without Diana Ross. The team themselves, in this series anyhow, are a curious mixture of guileless and overly self-aware. Langer had by all accounts lost the dressing room; multiple former cricketers and camp followers said the players had undermined him.
And yet here is Mitch Marsh with a very un-Australian, mealy mouthed assessment: “Justin Langer was given feedback from the senior members of the group about areas that they sort of wanted him to improve on as a coach, I guess.” It’s not exactly, “does your husband play cricket as well?”, is it?
Whither the proper Aussie brute of yesteryear, the hardest, most brutal beast in the sporting jungle, calling a spade a bloody shovel and crushing a beer can on his head as he crushes a Pom batsman under his heel?
It might be second season syndrome, an enduring problem with the reality format whereby the subjects are too aware of the camera’s presence, or perhaps it’s all the sports psychology codswallop upon which they have gorged. The third problem is that Pat Cummins, the skipper, seems an eminently likeable, thoughtful fellow.
This is no good at all for the franchise and if The Ashes is going to maintain its place in the British sporting imagination, the Aussies need to find a few horrible sods quick smart.
No shortage of villains in another series also streaming now: Deadline Day: Football’s Transfer Window, which was on Sky Documentaries on Sunday evening and remains viewable on demand. It goes behind the scenes of last summer’s deadline day, meeting players, agents and chairmen as they dance football’s ugly dance.
As Sky’s Kaveh Solhekol says, “there is now a generation more interested in transfers than the actual football.” That’s handy for Sky Sports, of course, and also for all manner of online landfill articles which need nothing more than a headline and a dubious source to capture eyeballs.
Episode one includes the attempts of Fabian Ruiz to move away from Napoli, perchance to Old Trafford, tracking the efforts of his agent Rodolfo Orife, whose surname name my word processor has autocorrected to “Orifice”. This AI writing stuff is getting more sentient all the time.
A battery of sharp-suited, sharp-elbowed fixers, grifters and associated hangers-on explain the murky processes by which football clubs acquire football players; one agent claims “agents are the heart of football, football could not be the same without agents”, which is certainly true, but only in the sense that getting burgled wouldn’t be the same without burglars.
Invited as we are to see the agents as just hard-working guys doing their best to keep the show on the road, much with being invited to warm to the Aussie cricket team, one can’t help but be reminded of Mitchell and Webb’s masterpiece sketch about the Nazi officers and wonder if these reality TV characters might ever come to the game-changing realisation: “Hans… are we the bad guys?”
Series 2 of the Test tries too hard to make Australia look like nice guys
Nearly three years on, the second season on Amazon starts from the 2021-22 Ashes series and finishes with their tour of Sri Lanka