Internet’s straight bat attracting new cricket audience
Online coverage of the county championship is unencumbered by fluff – and all the better for it, writes Alan Tyers
It’s everything sports fans want their sport on screen to be. For us, by us
Autumn: season of mists and mellow … whatever it was. The pre-winter interlude needs a new slogan. Suggestions: season of continuous online county cricket coverage. Days of hypnotic fixed-camera drama. Gloaming of browser-based higher state of consciousness.
Nobody can know for sure if the poet Keats would have been captivated by cricket on the internet, but he would have been right in behind it, like Lord Sir Alastair Cook CBE YNWA OMG BBQ slapping a hapless Aussie seamer to the square-leg fence circa 2010-2011. Very patient people with a computer and an internet connection: rise up! Quite slowly, probably.
Nevertheless, this is our time. You can watch every ball of County Championship matches free on the internet, without adverts or yapping. It is everything sports fans want sport on screen to be: immersive. Unfiltered. No nonsense. For us, by us.
When lower-league football clubs found out that the EFL was showing their games during international breaks, there was a to-do. Fans won’t come to our match if they can watch online, said chairmen. Bums on seats, they said. What about all those pies we’ve bought, they said? And while it is true that nature abhors an unscoffed pie more than a Dyson vacuum, county cricket clubs can afford to be more enlightened.
There might have been only 400 at the titleclincher at New Road, Worcester, on Thursday. Even on a busy Champo day at Lord’s, there are, to put it politely, some seats still available, but the online coverage is getting in front of hundreds of thousands a week for clips on social media, highlights and live streaming.
There is no suggestion of cannibalising your own sport, more of bringing it to a different crowd, people for whom the toad work dominates the days on which domestic red-ball cricket is contested. This, in an era when cricket is constantly telling everyone that the sport is on its last legs, is an entirely good thing.
As summer fades, with football not yet totally suffocating all rivals, September is the time to enjoy it. Recent County Championships have given us some of the most exciting finishes of our sporting lives, “Agueroooooo” moments, only with trees and churches. This year, with the sun low, the afternoon skies still respectably burnished (one assumes – the blinds are down to shield the cricket on the computer), a venerable and fiercely contested competition watchable during business hours – for what more could one ask?
And it all takes place without commentary. In silence. Perfection.
Worcestershire’s technical team had set up the single camera at cow corner, so you got a smashing view of the ground, albeit not necessarily the action. For some time on day three, a black flag fluttered across the camera, obscuring the view. Had New Road fallen to Isil? No. It was probably a bit of cagoule or a packet of Kettle Chips. Take that, Isil.
The next day, somebody who looked a bit like Morne Morkel viewed through the wrong end of binoculars clipped the winning runs off his hip a la mode Cook. The players shook hands. The camera showed some guys sweeping the pitch. The race was won.
And life was a quieter, better place.