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July 7, 2009Posted by Mike Holmans on 07/07/2009 in Mike Holmans
Cricket's brief time in the spotlight
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During the ICC World Twenty20, our esteemed editor was struck by the lack of hoopla as he strolled up to The Oval. There was little sign that a world championship was taking place, and he then went on to suggest that the ECB had concentrated on marketing the Ashes.
Well, maybe, except that if there is an event which the ECB do not have to market at all, it’s the Ashes. In the run-up to a series against anyone else, there are interviews with England players and tourists on the sports pages of the newspapers but as an Ashes series approaches, the features editors and news editors muscle in on the act, the players get interviewed by the same people who interview Hollywood stars and politicians and the results appear in the colour supplements and stories about the build-up appear in the news section. It is not the judgement of the ECB that the Ashes is the most important thing there is, but the view of news editors in what used to be Fleet Street.
The bulk of the English public have the same attitude to cricket that I have to swimming: most of the time I couldn’t care less about it, but when the Olympics come round, I’ll be as glued to the TV as anyone else. And then I forget about it for another four years.
Since I’m not a swimming buff, I just take it for granted that the Olympics is the premier swimming event which deserves my attention. The news desks of the press and broadcasters make a big thing of it, so it must be, mustn’t it?
In fact, all it indicates is that that’s how the news desks think. Not every sporting event which is deemed to be news rather than sport is the premier event to those in the know. There must be more important events in rowing than Oxford v Cambridge, but you would never know that from the newspapers. The Derby and Grand National are the big horse races of the year on the front pages, but they may not be so regarded by real racegoers.
England v Australia was the top cricket clash for nearly a hundred years. The West Indies emerged as challengers in the fifties, South Africa in the sixties, and the rest came later, but by then it was too late. The Ashes had become woven into English culture as an institution, but England v Anyone Else is merely cricket.
It does not really matter what cricket folk think. We all knew in the 1980, 1984 and 1988 that West Indies were the top side and that the Australian teams which came in 1981 and 1985 were pretty moderate lots, but the news editors couldn’t care less. West Indies thrashing England at cricket could not be news in an Olympic year: the public who aren’t fans of particular sports can only swallow one event other than Wimbledon each summer: leap years the Olympics, the following year the Ashes, the next year the FIFA World Cup, and whatever Great Britain or England (depending on which sport) has a chance of winning in the other year. Cricket tried to occupy that other year with the World Cup - held in England in 1975, 1979 and 1983 – but then the rest of the world demanded its slice of the action, and since then it has largely clashed with the football season, which renders it virtually invisible.
Every Ashes series, unlike every other cricket event in England, begins in the glare of national publicity and stays there until England have lost, just as Wimbledon is a big story until the last Brit loses.
It all starts again tomorrow, and I’m hoping that the press will still be interested in writing about it after 24th August
Posted by: Neil Bostock at July 7, 2009 11:49 PM
Very interesting points. Here in the US we have a similar situation on a domestic level -- those who care little for sport will get excited precisely three times a year; the World Series, the Superbowl, and College Basketball's "March Madness." And this is the reason cricket will never make inroads in the US, and soccer will probably remain a niche sport here; the fanatics will never abandon their chosen sport, and the non-sporting occasionals have no interest in any event unless it is a cultural touchstone of the larger society. And incidentally, those wishing to see the demise of Test Cricket would do well to heed your comments on the primacy of these old rivalries.
Posted by: Kaushik Lakshman at July 8, 2009 5:10 AM
In India it is an obsession of cricket irrespective of the teams playing..Its cricket, cricket & only cricket. i look forward to watching the Ashes with the same enthu as any Border-Gavaskar trophy, or Indo-Pak series, going online && reading about the ashes through the Guadian.
For us cricket comes 1st, then all other sports... probably EPL comes a close 2nd...
Then all the tennis grand slams, && F1. Its no wonder that broadcasters see a lot of prospect in the Indian market,even in sports like footballl where we hardly see our national team play. Federer, Nadal, Mam United, Gerrard etc. occupy as much as people's talk, passion as Sachin, dravid, dhoni etc. do...
If there is any big event apart from cricket,such as say a Fifa Wc or Olympics, the sport columns are equally distributed between cricket && that. Its never at the expense of cricket....
The kind of coverage && build up the Ashes generates in Indian news is as though India is playing one of the tournaments.
Posted by: Lloyd at July 11, 2009 3:52 AM
I disagree with the finality of saying "cricket will never make inroads in the US".Things and people change very quickly. The American College Cricket Spring Break Championship will draw on school spirit and get mainstream attention.Efforts like the NYC High School Cricket League and the NYPD Cricket League will spread.
- Shanaka Amarasinghe
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Shanaka Amarasinghe Possessing the best disguised googly in Sri Lanka (because no one has ever really seen it), Shanaka is the finest legspinner to never have played top-level cricket. He is a popular cricket analyst and host of The Score, the No. 1-rated, if slightly infamous, sports show on radio in Sri Lanka. While in England playing rugby, he earned his LLM at King’s College and is a lawyer by training if not inclination. He is also an actor, a journalist, a writer, and thinks he is a comedian.
- Mike Holmans
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Mike Holmans, a database consultant by profession, has spent thirty summers (and a few winters) going to the cricket. Brought up in one and working in the other, his dearest wish is for a season to end with Yorkshire winning the county championship by beating runners-up Middlesex by one wicket with five minutes to go. If it’s also a summer when England win the Ashes, so much the better.
- Michael Jeh
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Michael Jeh Born in Colombo, educated at Oxford and now living in Brisbane, Michael Jeh (Fox) is a cricket lover with a global perspective on the game. An Oxford Blue who played first-class cricket, he is a Playing Member of the MCC and still plays grade cricket. Michael now works closely with elite athletes, and is passionate about youth intervention programmes. He still chases his boyhood dream of running a wildlife safari operation called Barefoot in Africa.
- Saad Shafqat
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Saad Shafqat takes special pride that his cricket-watching life began during the three-month interval between Javed Miandad's debut Test in Lahore and Imran Khan's 12-wicket haul at Sydney. Although a practicing neurologist based in Karachi, cricket has never been far from his activities. He has co-authored Javed Miandad’s autobiography Cutting Edge and has been a contributor to Cricinfo since 2005. His regular column Reverse Swing appears fortnightly in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily.
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