Killing us softly . . . with cricket
THE cricket season is dead — long live the cricket season. What used to be the great game of summer has become a vehicle for whichever T20 tournament shakes, rattles and rolls from the 57 channels and nothing on that flicker from yonder television.
Which T20 tournament? Who knows? Who cares? It could be the Indian Premier League, the Bangladesh Premier League, the Caribbean Premier League, the Big Bash League or Peter Piper’s Pack of Pickled Peppers Premier League.
Telling them apart is as difficult as stopping them from rolling off cricket’s conveyor belt and smack bang into our sensory space.
Time was when proper allrounders such as Gerbrand Grobler segued from taking wickets to taking penalties as the leaves gently faded from green to brown. ’Tis no longer a case of the season, turn, turn, turn. Instead it is all about killing us softly with cricket.
The notion of the season as a regular, discernible, inviolate period of time — occasional tours to the other hemisphere notwithstanding — has gone the way of sheep grazing the outfield grass. What we have now is an interminable ooze of cricket that gums up every nook and cranny of its followers’ consciousness with a cheap and nasty confection.
Cue memories, in soft focus sepia, of happier days. In the newsreels of our minds, cricket was what happened in the embrace of long, lazy hours spent feeling the sun on our skin. Cricket smelled of sunscreen and beer and all things nice. The sweat it generated was well earned. The aches it caused were accepted with fondness.
Now it stinks of money and match fixing, and it is beamed to us from pools of fake daylight manufactured by obscene numbers of volts that should be put to better use. It is the preserve of the super-fit, fuelled by high-octane supplements, which does not prevent them from suffering stress fractures.
And all in the cause of feeding the monster that is the industry of what we remember as a game not yet corporatised. Ah, cricket. It was so much better then. Or was it?
The marketability of the T20 and one-day game is the sole reason cricket has not been crowded out of a broadcast bubble crammed with football, tennis, golf and Formula One.
Test cricket is a wonderful thing, but it is not going to keep itself alive. It is also not going to be able to stop other sports from luring away polymaths like AB de Villiers with promises of more lucrative careers. Every purist should be thankful for the bastard formats.
Without the money earned by ODIs and T20s, the domestic game would become too expensive to maintain in its current form. Without a steady supply of players from that level, there would be no international cricket.
A lot is wrong with cricket, from the way it is played to the way it is run. But that a game so determined to entrench itself in a romantic construct of its past should be so firmly established in a garishly liberating present is little short of a miracle.
Some things, though, do not change. Call us hopeless romantics, but we believe the cricket season is over. That means this column takes a break. Stumps drawn.