(L-R): Australia players celebrate the win at Adelaide; Usman Khawaja dons the Ron ball shirt. (AP and Instragram)
Travis Head may miss a training session or two ahead of the fourth Ashes Test in Melbourne after the left-hander’s enthusiastic celebration of their Ashes win inside 11 days of cricket.
The Adelaide hometown hero, who played more than his part in the victory with a big second innings hundred that put the target beyond England’s reach, was the party starter after the 82-run win secured the urn for at least another 18 months, Australian media reported.
And a new term entered the cricketing vocabulary in the process, in response to Bazball, the creed that bit the dust in the first three Tests of the series.
After the triumphant Aussie team returned to the dressing room, Head handed each player a fresh white T-shirt. Across the front, in big red letters, was the word ‘Ronball’, accompanied by a cartoon of chief coach Andrew McDonald, nicknamed Ronald.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the term was first noticed during the Adelaide Test against the West Indies in 2022, when a piece of paper bearing the word was seen in the home team’s viewing area.
Head was not done yet. When the players moved to the western side of the Adelaide Oval, the once-makeshift opener who seems to have made the position his own, served jugs of his ‘Headliner Spritz’, an apple and watermelon gin cocktail. The only person not in a ‘Ronball’ T-shirt was the coach himself.
As evening fell, the players returned to the middle of the ground – even the injured Nathan Lyon was there, without the crutches he had to rely on after injuring his hamstring while diving on the boundary on the fifth day of the game.
Wicketkeeper Alex Carey, the team’s designated songmaster, played True Blue on a portable speaker, the song performed live by John Williamson before the first day’s play as a tribute to victims of the shooting attack at Sydney’s Bondi beach last Sunday, which resulted in 15 deaths.
Carey then kissed the turf, as Head had done after reaching his century on the third day of the game. Skipper Pat Cummins and Marnus Labuschagne then sprayed beer and cocktails across Head’s ‘Ronball’ T-shirt, before they all came together to sing the team song: ‘Under the Southern Cross I stand…’, the report said.
Christmas is around the corner and the next game at the MCG starts after a break of only four days, but the team didn’t want to let the “straight-sets” win (Cummins’s words) go uncelebrated, especially after they were called the weakest Australian team since 2010-11.