I am not, to be honest with you, entirely sure I’m the right man to be writing this column. I love cricket but, from what I have seen so far, this seems a positive disqualification from enjoying the cricket World Cup (or “England ’99”, as I am told it is called). I can’t improve on Stephen Moss’s excellent observation in last week’s New Statesman: “Cricket wants to be soccer.” How right he was: and how painful for the traditionalists among us.
It was last Saturday morning, with South Africa on 103 for 0 after 20 overs, and Mark Ealham chugging in at the Oval to give them a few more, when I realised that reality had returned to our once great national game. We had beaten Sri Lanka, thanks to a competent display from us and a rather complacent one from them. We had beaten Kenya, too, which is much like saying that James Joyce has, surprisingly, turned out to be a better novelist than Jilly Cooper. And now, faced with a bunch of boys who really know how to do things, we were being stuffed.
I wonder just how many genuine cricket-lovers could have cared less. I wonder how many were secretly hoping for an obliteration of England in this competition, not for reasons of defective patriotism, but because such a result might lead the way to the end of the present obsession with one-day, soccer-style cricket and make people interested in the real, no-pyjamas game that old farts of all ages still recognise as the cricket we thought we loved.
Once in this frame of mind, you can view the proceedings with admirable detachment.
Had it been a Test match, for example, in which the South African captain Hansie Cronje, armed with a James Bond-style earpiece, was having orders barked down the line to him by the coach Bob Woolmer, Fleet Street’s finest – and not just the cricket corps, but leader writers, columnists, even Agony Anne in the Daily Telegraph – would have joined battle over this incredibly sharp practice. But because it wasn’t real cricket – because one-day is a faraway game of which we purists know little – it simply didn’t matter.
Similarly, it seems positively marginal when the Indians complain that they lost to Zimbabwe last week because they were allowed only 46 overs for their innings against the Zimbabweans’ 50, because India took so inordinately long to bowl their overs. As I write this, the Indians are calling for an inquiry, though any restitution of points or even a call for a rematch would throw the whole competition, and the moral basis of cricket generally (that the umpire’s decision, however absurd, is always final), into chaos. On this occasion, the umpires and the match referee were undoubtedly right. It is now compulsory to bowl overs absurdly slowly, partly out of gamesmanship and partly because of the preposterous need to reset the field after every ball. India should have just speeded up.
As in so much of the outside world, from which we used to use cricket as an escape, there is a culture of blame, and the blame is inevitably apportioned anywhere and everywhere except on the truly culpable.
So perhaps we have discovered a use for one-day cricket – not as a money-grabber (though it certainly is that, even if public interest here has fallen woefully short of the expectations that some of the organisers had harboured) but as a safety valve, a sort of alternative cricket where bad behaviour, churlishness, bending of the rules, vulgarity and other atrocities can be perpetrated happily out of sight of those who really love the game.
Talking of proper cricket – and the four Tests England will play against New Zealand once this circus is over – you have to hand it to our Antipodean guests for the way they dealt with Australia. It is no wonder the Aussies, who seemed to be headed for the exit after losing to Pakistan, are tired, since they have had months and months of important, and largely unimportant, national fixtures. New Zealand, on the other hand – a side whom for decades the Australians would not play because it seemed hardly worth the effort – seem to have acquired a hidden agenda for the World Cup. They are certainly out to win it as everyone’s favourite dark horse, and for all I know they may even come close to doing so; but they seem, too, to have their eye on the longer game, knowing that they are here for the whole summer, and really thinking about the celebrated “English conditions” in which they are playing.
It was those conditions that allowed us to beat Sri Lanka on that heady first day of the competition. Had the game taken place at Colombo, or almost anywhere else on the planet for that matter, it is doubtful that we would have won so easily. England have had a much-hyped “laid-back” approach to this tournament, with a celebration in a Kentish country pub the night after they beat Kenya at Canterbury, and no “naughty-boy” nets after the South African humiliation. This easy-going style contrasts with the decision by Scotland’s coach, Jim Love, to implement a sex ban before his side’s game on the grounds, interestingly, that “women are a distraction”. You can tell he used to play for Yorkshire.
Under David Lloyd, though, there seems to be a harking back to the days when Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie would take his Hampshire side out on the razzle every night while they were winning the County Championship.
Men were men in those days: they had been trained in war, national service, the pits, a five-mile walk to school and back, no sponsored car and no elevation to celebrity status just because, once, you took four wickets in an innings against another indifferent international side.
The writer is a political columnist with the “Daily Mail”
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