KEY POINTS:
New Zealand in town for an important ODI against Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The visitors up 1-0 in the five-game series; Australia are under the hammer. They've lost their previous four ODIs.
It's early February. Summer. The season of cricket.
So you open the sports section
of one of Melbourne's two morning newspapers to check out the state of play ahead of the game.
Big splash on the back page? Nope. Turn inside for a double-page spread on the whys and wherefores that lie ahead on the day? Forget it.
The first eight pages are devoted to the coming AFL season. The next one is all about the A-League finals series.
Then comes the cricket, a couple of pages primarily on the Australian squad named on Thursday to tour South Africa. The ODI yesterday gets one sentence.
Go to the Melbourne Age, the quality broadsheet newspaper. AFL, golf, soccer all get solid coverage, and the cricket is well spread, but the vast bulk understandably related to the touring squad where Australia hope they have unearthed a fresh batting diamond in New South Wales 20-year-old Philip Hughes.
This comes down to three things: this is Victoria where AFL rules all year round; the forthcoming tour of South Africa, and the prospect of avenging their 2-1 test loss and 4-1 ODI shellacking, has plenty of traction among the cricket observers; and New Zealand in Australia means far more to New Zealanders than Australians.
As New Zealand captain Dan Vettori correctly pointed out this week, the Chappell Hadlee series, or any occasion they play Australia in cricket, gets the public pulse racing.
By contrast, Australia have bigger fish to catch; England and South Africa sit top of their target list.
In 1987 New Zealand played the Boxing Day test at the MCG. On the second morning, after an even but controversial opening day - when Australian wicketkeeper Greg Dyer claimed a catch off Andrew Jones when replays clearly showed the ball sitting on the ground before he reclaimed it - the Melbourne papers' biggest story was about a ruck rover switching AFL clubs.
Nothing has changed, but it raises the question of what is Australia's national sport.
While cricket still holds the summer sway, AFL is streeting rugby and league round the nation.
It is the focal point of life in Melbourne in winter; so too South Australia and Tasmania.
League is big in Queensland and New South Wales, but AFL has an increasing slice of the action through the Brisbane Lions and Sydney Swans. Rugby's patch is in those two states as well, with the Western Force trying to make a statement in Perth, buoyed by strong New Zealand and South African representation among the population in the far west.
Aussie sports fans don't do losers. Right now, even irrespective of last night's result, that's how their cricket team is perceived. The superstars of a couple of years ago have gone, the younger players trying to thrust through are far from convincing.
Yesterday's ODI was just another game at the big park. New Zealanders would find it strange, but that's the way it is in Australia right now. Getting wound up for every contest, especially when your team are ordinary, is simply not an option.
