The year that kept delivering bouncers
The holiday season is upon us, the cities are empty, the beaches are packed, and there are enough stat holidays to sit around and watch men in white outfits chase a piece of leather around a park for five days.
Test cricket comes from a different era to our modern, digitally-focussed lives, but I haven’t discovered a better form of enforced relaxation than checking out for a few days on a grassy bank or in an empty stadium.
And if, to paraphrase Karl Marx, sport is the opiate of the masses, how badly some of us have needed sedating in 2017.
Watching stick and ball games has been the perfect escapism if, like me, you were suffering from a heightened state of anxiety this past year.
From nuclear brinkmanship to the crumbling world order and the cultural civil war ripping America apart, the mushroom clouds just over the horizon led veteran US newsman Dan Rather to compare 2017 to the darkest depths of World War II.
In 2018, there’s a chance that the sanctuary sport provides may disappear, leaving nowhere left to escape to.
In February, the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, will see Kiwi athletes such as free skier Finn Bilous (see page 8 to read about Finn and our other 2018 up-and-comers) vie for glory. Some 300km to the north, a volatile nuclear power will watch on with its weapons of infinite destruction primed, rockets ready to fly.
Then July will bring the greatest show on Earth – the football World Cup – to a corrupt kleptocracy seemingly fixated on destroying the democratic processes of much of the Western world.
Russia has enacted homophobic laws and waged cyber warfare on the US, England, France, Germany, the Ukraine and others, seemingly in order to deliberately stoke chaos and leapfrog its adversaries.
It’s a country where special forces soldiers attend matches in order to gangbash rival fans; whose athletes have been banned from playing under their country’s banner at the Winter Games because of a state-sponsored doping programme, and whose sports minister – and lead organiser of the World Cup – was banned for life by the International Olympic Committee.
With Russian presidential elections to be held in March, the World Cup will be the greatest reelection parade on earth for Vladimir Putin.
So enjoy your holidays, and catch some cricket if you can. It’s going to be a long year.