NYSD regular Ian West has spent the last five winters in Melbourne, where he has played club cricket. He writes for The Northern Echo from Australia.

WHAT an experience this last six weeks has been and I can’t wait to get to my club’s league game later today to ‘explain’ things to my teammates.

Being in a dressing room with nine or ten Aussies was torture four years ago as England were thumped. It’s payback time.

One newspaper carried a picture of the Australian team yesterday – it covered the whole back page and simply asked – “Is this our worst ever team?” There never seems to be any middle ground with the press here.

The scent of blood was in the air well before the final Test with abrasive exchanges between the two press strongholds of Melbourne and Sydney.

The rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire is the stuff of legend, but it is just as fierce between the neighbouring states of Victoria and New South Wales. Cries of anguish emanated from Melbourne when the team for the fifth Test included just one Victorian, even though they are the current state champions having won back-to-back Sheffield Shields.

However, six NSW players turned out, and the Sydney press responded to Melbourne’s outrage by suggesting that it was only NSW that was holding the Test team together.

LOOKING at the current first-class averages here it’s hard to know just where Australia can turn now – on first-class stats Nathan Hauritz, discarded before the series began, is the leading all-rounder, and once you have got past Alastair Cook and Ian Bell in the batting averages Michael Hussey is next up, closely followed by Mark Cosgrove, someone well known to NYSD followers.

He played for Redcar as a 16-year-old when he impressed as a fast bowling all-rounder. He has filled out a little since then and now mainly bats.

But he does that to great effect and he has been rattling up the runs for Tasmania this season, just as he did for Glamorgan in the English summer.

USMAN Khawaja’s Test debut at least provoked positive feedback as the youngster shone in a first innings cameo, but perhaps this just goes to show how the Aussie’s are desperate for something positive.

I came across Khawaja last year when net bowling at the MCG for the NSW team ahead of their State game against Victoria. All I can say is that he was certainly a confident young man, his favourite shot a savage pull of anything short, as he demonstrated in Sydney.

That session also included current Steven Smith and Phil Hughes, but the man who really took the breath away was the pocket battleship that is David Warner, who turned out for Durham in T20 cricket.

Because of his prowess in the short format, Warner was in the history books as being the first man since 1877 to walk out for Australia before he’d played any first-class cricket.

And boy, did he hit the ball hard. He was so ferocious in the nets that after the ball whistled back past my head for about the sixth time I asked him to lend me his helmet so I could bowl in that.

LAST week in Sydney could not have started any better.

Whatever you say about the Aussies, they certainly know how to throw a party, and 1.5 million turned up for the New Year’s Eve shindig.

Almost unbelievably among this heaving mass I came across Chris Ward from East Harlsey CC who helps me out with Langbaurgh League reports back home, and we camped down for six hours at the foot of one of the harbour bridge pillars to get the most spectacular views of the midnight celebrations.

The landmark, known in Sydney as the ‘old coat hanger’, was built by Dorman Long, so it was a proud talking point with our Aussie friends that we came from the same place as most of their world famous bridge.

And when midnight arrived the long wait proved so worthwhile.

Television can only convey so much – the buzz, colour, noise, smell, atmosphere and spectacle made for the most remarkable of evenings.

As the display finally ended and the skies darkened again we had a good natured dig at our hosts by congratulating them and pointing out that the Aussies do fireworks far better than they do cricket!

THAT reminds me of the text that Paul Collingwood sent to a few people after close of play on the first day of the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne when England had made 157-0 in reply to Australia’s 98 all out.

It simply read ‘If Carlsberg did Boxing Days....’.