Being Captain of the TPE for the millennial season stood, of course, as one of the great challenges of the fin de siecle. After all, as a collection of individuals the TPE exemplify many of the qualities and shortcomings which tell us so much about what it is to be human. The fortunes of the TPE in 1999/2000, it was widely thought, promised to tell us much about the prospects of humanity over the next 1000 years. However, it is as a mythic entity – one which stands for something ‘as against’ the norm, against the banal and mediocre - that the TPE matters so much to so many. As Buddha, sadly in semi-retirement after years of transcendental left-arm swing, succinctly put it to me over a glass of vegetarian Tooheys Old, it is the TPE that, in so many ways, defines the limits of what is acceptable and unacceptable in our society, and that is an enormous responsibility for any Captain. It is with a sense of some satisfaction then, that I report today that the TPE continued to play cricket as it should be, but is so rarely, played - with that sense of the absurd that allows humour, perversion and class A, B, & C narcotics to flourish unrestrained.

I could, in this Captain’s Report, go on to talk about the performance of the TPE throughout the season and our honourable third place. But, I have found, in a team of actors and lawyers rarely are you afforded the opportunity to talk about yourself. So that’s exactly what I propose to do, to take you, my fellow scholars of the arts of leather and willow on a brief but harrowing psycho-sexual trip through the mind of one who has taken on the Everest of his chosen field and lived to tell the tale

On a personal level the season 1999/2000 proved to be something of an Indian summer in my long love affair with our great game. And this was not because just because the honour of following in the line of auspicious skippers of a unique club brought a new enjoyment to the game for me. It was also due to the fact that I inherited a corrupt and amoral squad from my predecessor and stumping wizard Fingers McNamara. Fingers, who had I had personally witnessing placing wagers on the outcome of every delivery with 98/99 leading wicket-taker ‘Jimmy’ James Johnson during his ‘miracle spell’ demolition of Bros Blue, had developed an always enigmatic TPE squad into a wildly unpredictable scattergun – leading the TPE to a premiership (going away without having to pull the whip) one year, but yet on other days capable of performances which could be described as desultory at best.

Clearly such up and down fortunes suggested that the fix was in, or so I thought – and as the season got underway I was seeing Mr Pinkys standing behind every tree at Blackman, setting up on-line books on laptops in the back of Ned’s combi and spiking the Friday night chardonnays of our much vaunted pace attack, Johnson and O’Brien (VFM), both of whom seemed increasingly unable to grip the new cherry sober. I assumed ‘spread betting’ meant plunging on whether it would be the second or third over before I was forced to post men to cow corner, do away with the slips and set a deep, sleepy ring field. I even contacted Hansie Cronje who suggested that in the TPE case Satan was unlikely to be behind our problems, given that he was our Treasurer.

From the outset there were strange off-field anomalies – for example, the team list arrived mysteriously via email and when I sought input into the selection process I received the terse advice that "the Puppetmaster is not on-line". On-field MacNamara, naturally, smote the first ball of the season out of the park. And as the season progressed with the match results staying on the positive side of the ledger I began to relax, cope with the burden of responsibility which I had so far avoided in all other domains of life and find renewed faith in the integrity of my fellow man. Unfortunately all this was undermined in the infamous one-run game at that idyllic oasis-by-the-golf-course, Northbridge. With Da Bridge needing 80 to get and nine down I was strolling and preening in the covers. A mere 79 runs later, having dropped the dolly of all dollies off the VFM, I stood shaking at point with my skirt over my head praying it was all a bad trip or a nightmare. Spitefully, I resolved to bowl the VFM into the ground, reasoning that if this was the last time I set foot on a cricket ground I might as well take someone else out with me. Thankfully however, the courage of Moorhouse in asking for the ball, and the nerves of steel of Juan ‘for the road’ Renshaw in hanging on to a 26-storey flier, combined to secure an epic victory which got me off the hook. I made my first and last post-game speech - an emotional, irrational and incoherent outpouring of relief, which was well-received as "the skipper shat himself" by a team of hardened professionals whose thoughts were already immersed in beer, birds and bets.

This close brush with ostracism taught me the most valuable lesson a captain of the TPE can learn, that is there is little use turning the steering wheel on a car which is somersaulting in flames into a ravine at high speed. I put this theory to leg-spinning cyberpunk Funky Vilensky as we shot out the end of the Harbour Tunnel weaving through traffic at about 140k’s the following Saturday and he explained to me that, luckily, if we were to suffer a high speed collision at that very moment our car would turn upside down, explode, flash three times on and off before reappearing and continuing even faster along the freeway. Although somewhat confused I reasoned that these words must mean something, so I decided that it was a sign that I had to let the TPE run free and captain me. I duly turned off the seismograph I had been using to calibrate the barely perceptible movements of Inzamam Al-bin at midoff, figuring recklessly that he wouldn’t get far before stumps. I had a further spiritual revelation when the VFM confessed that he was God and proved it to me very late one Saturday night by coming off his long run along the top of the bar at Dicks delivering a late swinging packet of cashews at express pace onto our table without so much as knocking a single drop from an honest punter’s beer in the aptly named Family Bar. At last captaining the TPE started to feel like the amyl nitrate assisted orgasm the Committee of the Long Handles had promised me on that fateful night in deepest darkest winter.

Now suitably relaxed, I was able to kick back and enjoy, over the remainder of the season, a wealth of sporting highlights which most cricketers are luckily to pack into an entire career: