Surely Aussie fans can come up with something better than Oi Oi Oi to lift the spirits of our cricketers?
It’s bad enough that this Ashes series is being televised, but many Australians have made the terrible mistake of paying good money to go and watch the matches live.
I was among their number on days one and four of the Adelaide Test and had intended to go to the Sydney Test, too, but will now be doing something more entertaining, like scraping my fingernails along a blackboard or watching an Andre Rieu DVD.
By the time I had passed through the bag check at the Adelaide Oval and made it into the ground on day one, Australia was 3-2 and it wasn’t even 10.30am.
When I went back on the Monday, nothing was happening at all.
Michael Hussey was digging around in the middle, forestalling the collapse which would inevitably come on the following, final day.
The truly horrible thing about attending the fourth day was that it showed how, in this series, Australia is not just being completely humiliated on the field, but off it, too.
My parents and I had general admission tickets for the fourth day and ended up stuck in the blaring sun at the long northern boundary, just next to the Barmy Army which was sitting at the bottom of the hill.
Nobody likes a lippy Pom and these blokes were the worst bunch of soap-dodgers I have ever seen.
Not in an offensive or abusive way, but in a genuinely clever and entertaining way which Australian sports fans could only dream of.
The thing which made the experience so irritating was that the comic genius of the Barmy Army, members of whom were rallying around a large inflatable pink swan called Graham (geddit), was mirrored only in reverse by the pathetic and artless behaviour of the Australians.
In a country such as ours, influenced in its own foundation not just by the English but the Irish and to a lesser extent the Welsh, you would think we may have inherited some kind of musical tradition and a love of massed public song.
Instead, all we’ve got is Aussie Aussie Aussie, the second verse to which is Oi Oi Oi, and even that was swiped off the Cornish, so legend has it.
On the fourth day in Adelaide, for a full two hours we endured verse after verse of the reworked God Save (Your) Queen, the irritating Get Your Stupid Stars Off Our Flag (to the tune of He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands), and of course the excellent Barmy Army anthem itself.
Nary a peep from the Australian fans save for a few West End-fuelled bogans on the hill, and the best they could come up with was Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.
It really has become a matter of urgency that we do something about this brain-dead ditty.
It was bad enough when we were winning. When we’re losing and it’s offered in a sense of defiance or as a rallying cry, it just comes off sounding pathetic.
Particularly when its going head-to-head with an entire song book of numbers which are cleverly insulting as well as being actually quite tuneful.
We Australians often describe ourselves as ``laconic’‘.
The dictionary definition of laconic is ``using few words; expressing much in few words; concise: a laconic reply’‘.
It is also defined as ``brief, pithy, terse; succinct’‘.
Say what you like about Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, it certainly uses few words, and is most definitely succinct.
It also has the unfortunate side effect of making us sound like a bunch of morons.
There is something in our self-styled laconic nature which just comes across as stupidity.
In sport it is quite common to hear perfectly well-educated and smart people deliberately misusing the language.
At the end of pretty much every rugby league game you can find at least one player from the winning team who pays tribute to his teammates by saying ``the boys done good’‘.
It’s this weird fear of sounding smart, or affecting a kind of knockabout Chips Rafferty-style macho persona, which results in otherwise sensible people collectively depicting the nation as a bunch of boofheads.
The Poms already think this of us anyway so it’s high time we stopped giving them any more ammo.
At present, we are already suffering enough.
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