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[dhruvdeepak]

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,,1742392,00.html

Freddie's Ring of Fire causes first-degree burns

Mike Selvey
Thursday March 30, 2006
The Guardian

More years ago than it is prudent to mention I had a student flat on the ground floor of a terraced house in Manchester's Withington and next door lived a beautiful smouldering-eyed girl called Gina who liked her music. The walls between our two houses were thinner than the Times cricket correspondent after his recent E coli poisoning and that meant, in the absence of anything else, this was one passion I could share with her.

There was one problem: she had but one record to play on her Dansette and this she spun incessantly. It was there when I went to bed and when I woke; there when I wrestled with the concepts of geostrophic winds and jet streams; there, chipping away like a woodpecker in my head, when I went out. For an entire year, Baby Love by the Supremes provided the soundtrack to my student life so that even as I write this now my toes are curling at the memory of the "plink, plinky, plinky plinky, plink oooooooo baby love" intro. It drove me scatty.

It is a week now since Freddie Flintoff sat victorious in his Mumbai Test press conference and announced that India's sudden irrational post-prandial plummet to defeat had been precipitated by yet another stomping team rendition of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, something which "sent the lads out with a spring in their step". Well we all know it's really a lads' lavatorial joke to do with the repercussions of touring that part of the world and there, under the shamiana behind the dressing rooms at Wankhede Stadium, it should have been laid to rest. But he has created a monster has Fred. Now it's the Ring of Fire that is implanted indelibly and, one week on, it burns, burns, burns in my brain. I may need counselling and I bet I'm not the only one.

Even before the tour I had doubts about Fred's musical tastes after his revelation that he listened to Elton John's Rocket Man throughout the Ashes series. First that and now the Man in Black. Personally I'd rather have Ann Widdecombe stick pins in my eyes than listen to country and western music, but that is a question of choice.

Really, though, are these the sort of songs we should be encouraging this and future generations of our fast bowlers to listen? Bowlers have always represented cricket's underclass and pace bowlers are the underclass's underclass. They are - or ought to be - aggressive by nature when challenged on the field and their choice of inspirational music ought to reflect that, evoking as it should the suffering of their downtrodden forebears. If they could perform heroically on a jolly wheeze like Ring of Fire or Rocket Man then imagine what they might achieve with the Clash ringing in their ears, or the Pistols or Ramones. How about Street Fighting Man? Eton Rifles? Or Rockin' in the Free World (Pearl Jam's live cover version by choice)?

These are the small fractions of percentage points that might make all the difference come next winter, the Ashes hanging in the balance and England needing one last effort from Fred. Can Duncan Fletcher not add a motivational music psychologist in place of the nutritionist when it comes to Oz? You can bet that Sir Clive Woodward, who wanted to paint opposition dressing rooms pink to calm them down, would have thought of it. Perhaps not on the Lions tour, though: that's where it went wrong.

I do believe anyway that we have all missed the point about Ring of Fire. Was there not a hostage incident fairly recently where those holed up were finally persuaded to surrender after continual loud speaker aural bombardment from Abba? Mamma Mia wasn't there to inspire the surrounding forces but to get under the skin of their target. I've played at Wankhede Stadium and, if memory serves, the dressing rooms are adjacent, with walls that if not Withington-thin are pervious to noise. It is the Baby Love syndrome.

Rahul Dravid and his team had taken all they could through the partition and enough was enough. No one, not even Dravid when in the zone, can go through a 40-minute interval with his fingers in his ears and going "la la la" very loudly. Everyone has a breaking point and they reached theirs. So well done England for a psychological masterstroke, but the fall-out from the Ring of Fire is like that of depleted uranium and, sorry, I can't wait a thousand years to get rid of it. Music? "Give me excess of it," wrote the Bard. Well bollocks to that. Bollocks to the Man in Black anyway. And particularly to the bloody Supremes.