Nightwatchman Scott Boland Goes To Sleep Dreaming Of Dizzy's Double Century

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

He knows better than most not to get carried away. Fast bowlers are not meant to dream. They are meant to hurt, be sore, to repeat, to do their work quietly and let others keep the numbers.

And yet, on Boxing Day night, Scott Boland allows himself something small.

The day had been brutal in the best possible way. Red ball doing things it shouldn’t. England fraying, as they always seem do here now, until they resembled one of those earnest touring sides from another era. New Bangladesh. Trying hard. Failing honestly. Twenty wickets in a day. A Test match doing what it was designed to do, just really quickly.

Boland had walked out late, the light fading, the MCG still humming. Nightwatchman. A role built on humility. Survival. But history has a way of whispering to men like him when they least expect it.

In bed, the mind wanders. Glenn McGrath raising his bat for fifty. Not a joke. Not irony. Just competence stretched far enough to become legend. Dizzy’s double hundred still sits untouched, not as an invitation, but as a reminder. These things happen once, if ever.

Boland doesn’t imagine cover drives or glory. Just time. Just staying. Just daring to see what might happen if the stumps don’t come out.

There is hope. There is discipline. And there is the quiet understanding that a dream is still only a dream.

But sometimes, that’s enough.

This is a preview excerpt from The Weekend Advocate’s sports lift-out, available in full in this weekend’s print edition across the Diamantina.