Who or what am I?

Smirk. Smirk. The oh-so-absurd title. How did a recurring bout of self-awareness (or is it self-doubt) find its way to my cricket blog? Well actually, the title should read "What is this Blog all about, anyway?"

God gave me everything, except conviction. That hard fact makes itself apparent in whatever I do. If you asked me to join you for lunch, I probably wouldn't be able to decide whether or not I wanted to come along. Ask me about my family, friends, college, career, passions, sleep and mental health and you never get a straight answer. It makes me seem rather amenable and detached, but even if I wanted to change I wouldn't have the conviction to do so.

That ambivalence and indecisiveness has spilled onto this blog. If you've actually read a bit of this blog (and I doubt you have), you might be tempted to ask, what is the blog all about? More importantly, what do I want the Blog to be about? Oh yes, it's about cricket. Which is a bit like saying exams are about questions and answers. The truth is(cringe if you must), it's a battle between three sides of me. The bad, the worse and the ugly. Which is why it stands as an incoherent mess, much like I am, inside and out. But life goes on, and so does the blog.

If you've ever talked cricket with me, I would have told you I'm a New Zealand fan, the long haul, for-better-or-worse kind. It's been fifteen years and I've seen it all; the best team of the '92 World Cup, to being ranked lower than Zimbabwe in tests, to almost beating Australia on their own turf. Naive childhood obsession, or passive role in a bittersweet relationship, take your pick. I am here to stay. Two days ago, I bought Nick Hornby's Fever pitch . I had only heard of the book very recently, and on flipping through it I thought to myself "This is exactly what i had wanted my blog to be." Hornby has documented, diary style, those matches involving Arsenal juxtaposed with his personal life at the time. I tried to cover the New Zealand games in Australia earlier in the year with a similar purpose in mind; create personal bookmarks which would be best revisited by relating them to the kiwi games taking place at the same time. Ten years from now, I might look at all this and think "I remember that day! Bond got a five-for and I was battling through my upset stomach trying to celebrate it in the hospital room" or "We lost by one run, I skipped the last two chapters in favour of watching the finish, and I just about cleared the Networks paper next day." The forgotten and the forgiven, the maligned and the magical, Shane Thomson and Shane Bond, Daryl Tuffey and Daniel Vettori, we're all in this together. Or so I like to believe.

Notice I used the word "we". A second part of me wanted this blog to be about the bellowing and ranting of a passionate fan. A way of professing my love for New Zealand Cricket, of being the trumpeting supporter, the fool on the hill. An outlet for my partisanship. Again, my lack of conviction makes me unable to be outwardly brazen in my support, no matter what. "Giving it back", Aussie style, has never been my thing. It makes the apparent no-brainer of supporting your team seem like an an exercise in self-consciousness. I am not an exhibitionist; nor do I wear my beliefs on my sleeve. I am unwavering in my support, but I can hardly carry it off. Self deprecation, irony and (for better or worse) humility seem to be traits I am stuck with. This lack of bloody mindedness may tell its own story.

A third angle manages to further undermine the 'passion' I had just talked about. Often, I have this desire to make the blog cricket-centric, as opposed to New Zealand-specific. I love the game, and this is where my streak of goddamn political correctness takes over. Sometimes I think it's for the best if I just go ahead writing opinionated yet objective articles on cricket around the world. Enough of playing the supporter, I am merely an observer of both beauty and beast. The paradox of such a statement is that I am trying to widen the scope of my blog and it therefore becomes more ambitious. This is probably a mansifestation of the pseudo-intellectual in me. Maybe I had envisioned a potential audience for this blog, and the fact that I sometimes write for other and not myself is starting to influence the course of events on it. Confused? Quite simply, the author is the blog's own worst enemy. But it is no use wishing the blog and its author are anything but what they are.

Look again at the opening line of this post. Despite (or because of) my lack of conviction, I hope the blog will roll on. Moral of the story? It ain't easy supporting your team. It ain't easy being a cricket fan. It ain't easy having a blog. It ain't easy having too much time on your hands.