Cricket’s hidden World Cup gives way to nostalgia
With tournament tucked away on pay television, Alan Tyers asks if nation is happier living in the past
If melancholy and a sense things ain’t what they used to be combine, even better
Cricket has forced its way into the national conversation this summer, although most of that has been people asking why its World Cup is taking place hidden from the prying eyes of a wider television audience.
Many well-placed Cassandras have suggested that the lack of coverage on free-to-air television could be condemning the sport to irrelevance. They draw links between lack of terrestrial TV visibility, falling participation numbers and declining interest. The argument can seem irresistible, although top-flight football has, of course, exploded in the Sky era, and perhaps more realistic-sized comparison sports – darts, say, or rugby
league – have been in rude health since a move to pay TV. The BBC gives us two weeks of superb, blanket coverage of Wimbledon each year, and yet British tennis cannot claim to have made much of that in terms of participation, inclusion, or any real evidence that Sir Andy Murray is anything other than a black swan forged from Dunblane grit and the Barcelona clay of his tennis schooling.
ITV does 100-odd days of excellent racing broadcasting a year on free TV, and the viewing figures are pleasing, but one does not overhear young people on the bus discussing the Coraleclipse or an explosion of kids outside racing families desperate to be the new Aidan O’brien or Ruby Walsh. Perhaps people are right that Sky Sports’ high-quality, low-reach coverage of cricket has set the sport on the path to becoming a heritage product.
If the future looks uncertain for interest in cricket, though, one particular aspect of the sport remains buoyant: nostalgia fans have never had it so good. On July 22, a feature film, The Edge, is released, and it examines how England rose to be the best Test side in the world around the start of this decade, and the toll that took on the likes of Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Strauss, Andy Flower and company. And Channel 4 last night put on a highly enjoyable documentary, Ashes 2005: The Greatest Series, in which all the major figures, apart from Andrew Flintoff, discussed that wonderful, and now surely unrepeatable, summer.
The story as told in the hour-long mixture of clips and chats was as familiar and comforting as an old jumper: the fearsome Aussies, Evil Glenn Mcgrath at Lord’s, that same destroyer turning his ankle at Edgbaston. The late great Richie Benaud: “Jones … Bowden … Kasprowicz the man to go.” At Old Trafford, the captains trading big centuries, Simon Jones uprooting Michael’s Clarke off stump and it ending with the Aussie last pair at the crease. Gary Pratt at Nottingham, Pietersen putting it up to Brett Lee at the Oval for a cathartic draw and the biggestever cheer for bad light. A 2-1 win, beery celebrations on the way to Downing Street, sporting immortality.
“Everyone was talking about cricket,” Ashley Giles says. Strauss adds: “We were feted as national sporting heroes. That just doesn’t happen.” Perhaps that can yet be changed: Sky Sports has said it will make the final of this World Cup available to all if England reach it by beating you-know-who.
And who can say, perhaps the Hundred will defy most expectations in converting an indifferent nation to cricket or something like it from next summer. The 2005 series did, after all, prove that the impossible can happen. But do we want it? Do we want to work towards something that exists in its own time, or do we want to wallow in what went before?
As a nation, the English are generally at their happiest when melancholic, and if that can be combined with a sense that things ain’t what they used to be, then so much the better.
Does the sporting nation really want cricket on its telly or anywhere else, or would it be content to see the summer game wither on the vine, our country represented by private schoolchildren and a smattering of mobile grifters from Johannesburg or Christchurch or Kingston? As long as there are regular documentaries about cricket, lovely cricket from years gone by, will there always be an England?
Ashes 2005: The Greatest Series (on Channel 4 catch-up).