So yesterday I spent a lovely warm summer day sat on my sofa, passing the hours watching the cricket and a piece of history: The World Cup final at Lord’s between England and New Zealand.
I’d kept track of the tournament results and listened to the radio a little bit, but without a Sky TV subscription I couldn’t watch any of the live action and midnight highlights and bite-sized clips didn’t appeal. However, with England making it into the final for the first time in years and Sky making the public-spirited PR gesture of allowing a simulcast on Channel 4, at ten to eleven on Sunday morning I decided to put the game on (I was always going to, wasn’t I?), with the New Zealand batsmen early into their innings.
Watching sport on TV is one of the most fabulous sedentary pleasures of life. Sitting on your sofa with a cup of tea (or a beer) and enjoying the play without having to go to the trouble of a) turning up somewhere, b) having to sweat and c) (of course) losing. In my school holidays I would watch hours of cricket on the BBC, languidly absorbed in the gently progressing play, happy to sit and watch all day. The England team during those years were often all over the place, but they felt like a rather erratic but endearing friend in their many disasters. Eventually they began to get a lot better, producing such dramatic cricket in those memorable, heady summers of 2000 and 2005 that I would hang off the end of sofa gripped.
So yesterday was rather like being reunited with an old pastime, a deliberate recollection of the occasions for example that I’d tune into a Lord’s county final in the first week in September. An aside: when Sky took over English cricket after 2005 and summarily terminated my addiction with watching the sport on TV, I’d get my armchair sporting fix from snooker and road cycling: the epic two-weeks of the Crucible and the glorious backdrop and grueling demands of the Tour de France each offered slow-burn drama and the possibility of an explosive climax.
Yesterday’s cricket certainly provided an explosive climax. As the tension became more and more intense (and I began to hang over the side of the sofa once again), and England seemed to be doomed once more to bitter failure, the match turned bizarre corners. Reality almost seemed to be ripped away as one freakish moment collided into the next: Boult’s backstep, the throw cannoning off Stokes’ bat, the pair of sacrifice run-outs, Neesham’s incredible six. At once we had to contemplate both England’s miraculous recovery, New Zealand’s rank bad luck and also the complete fluke of a couple of tiebreakers sitting atop of each other.
The parallels with the Champions League victories of Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea (in 1999, 2005 and 2012) came to mind: almost surreal triumphs from seemingly impossible situations with ridiculous moments of drama (Dudek’s point blank save from Shevchenko). Breaking England’s duck in this tournament ultimately did seem to require an event of similar bewildering magnitude and will to win (exemplified by the heroic figure of Ben Stokes).
However all three of the losing teams on those occasions (Bayern twice and AC Milan) did come back within a couple of years to win the competition – the hope certainly will be that New Zealand get their chances for a shot at redemption – they’re certainly good enough to take them. The dignity and bravery of both teams yesterday was a credit to their sport and their countries, particularly for two teams who over the years have often played supporting roles in elite one-day cricket.
So was yesterday’s final the greatest cricket match ever? Certainly to my mind the most dramatic World Cup Final and also the most dramatic finish to any game (the rivals being Brisbane 1961 or Edgbaston 2005). Perhaps the stodgy pitch mitigates against it as a pure game of cricket – I used to think of the 1993 NatWest final between Warwickshire and Sussex as the perfect one-day final – but this momentous day will now certainly sit alongside 1981 and 2005 as English cricket’s finest hour.
And as for myself watching? Well to go back to my story, as the 1990s wore on I eventually moved off the sofa and, overcoming a degree of inertia and shyness started playing recreational cricket in Nottinghamshire. And by the time the game had placed itself in its pay-TV enclosure, I’d become keen enough to start devoting my weekends playing the game. I’m still doing my little bit in the lower reaches and getting a lot of satisfaction and pleasure from it.
But my own story exposes the rub of the ECB’s actions: the link that got thousands of people with no family or educational connections to cricket exposed to the sport no longer exists and as a consequence the game is cloistered away and at risk of losing its wider value to society. Somewhat disaffected by these decisions, I personally have hardly watched the England team in action over the years since that Oval Test of 2005. Although I still follow games on radio – highlights and clips don’t really offer the essence of the game – I am only able to recognise many of the current England team from still photographs in print or websites, not from having watched footage of them playing.
Maybe I’m one of many who feel like this and engage in such a way. I openly admit that my motivations are no less selfish than anyone else’s – I’d like to watch test cricket for free more than anyone. More importantly though, there will be a vast amount of people in this country who are never encouraged to observe the game and engage with it thus (which is quite different from being encouraged to play it); hopefully yesterday will encourage English cricket to have another think about itself.
wanderingstation 