I have a question. Do people buy a ticket for a day at the Test match and then dress up as a traffic cone? Or do they dress up as a traffic cone, and wonder where to go for the day? As in: “Hey up, I’ve managed to get hold of half a dozen cone costumes. Anything on at Edgbaston?”
I ask this only because the traffic cones, not to mention the bananas and the bearded schoolgirls, rarely appear to be 100 per cent immersed in the cricket.
So when you leave home dressed as a cone, does it really matter if it’s a Test match you’re off to, or a car boot sale?
The primary criterion, or so it seems, is not whether Bairstow can biff on to his century, or whether the ‘Beard that’s not so feared when he’s purveying off spin’ can do the business on the final day, but whether the venue is licensed to dispense alcoholic beverages.
It helps if there’s a patriotic flavour to proceedings, with each pint that’s consumed prompting extra loud ditties in honour of the Swedish barmaid dispensing them, Miss Inger Lund. But the real clincher is the fact that there’s a good chance they’ll be on the telly.
I’m not privy to the brief given to Sky’s cameramen before a day’s play, but it seems highly likely that once camera one has recorded Cook nurdling a single off his hips, camera two is instructed to hone in on the crowd. And once the massed ranks of vicars, medieval knights, and Elvises realise they’re on the big screen, they all wave to themselves.
Now that’s what you call a day out.
It may well be that when they finally get home that night (unless of course the cones decide to kip down on the M5 near Droitwich and instigate yet another lane closure) they have a perfectly lucid memory of the day’s play. On the other hand, when Mrs Cone says: “Did England win dear?” you can’t entirely rule out a reply of: “Whashat? England? Were they playing today?”
There are, of course, a few groups of hardcore traditionalists who still go to Test matches, although they’re a dying breed. No surprise there. I mean, how would you feel when you’re sitting there quietly in your flat cap, and open the Tupperware container to tuck into the egg and cress sandwiches on the stroke of one o’clock, and some Roman gladiator falls giggling into your lap and slurs: “Go on, I give up. What have you come as then?”
I’m no psychologist, and have no real idea as to when and why a day at the Test match turned into a fancy dress drinkathon, but you’d have to place attention deficit syndrome somewhere near the top of the list.
These days, if you want to hold a conversation with anyone whilst looking them in the eye, as opposed to seeing nothing other than the top of the head while a podgy index finger batters out yet another text message on the smart phone, you really need to find someone older than 40.
Cricket watching, like nostalgia, isn’t what it used to be, and that also goes for the audiences who stay at home and watch it on the TV. Some of us are old enough to remember the days of just a single camera, making it impossible to judge the plausibility of an lbw appeal from one end, and certainly nothing trained on the crowd.
Not even Sky would bother with spectator shots if all they got was some old boy in a duffle coat passing his next door neighbour a coffee flask, and dutifully adjusting the blanket around his wife’s lap.
Silence mostly prevailed, apart from the occasional cry of: “Ave a go yer mug!” And if anyone called Root hit a boundary, there was a smattering of applause rather than a collective chant of “Roooooooooooot”. I’m not quite old enough to remember the days when a really outstanding deed prompted all the males in the ground to throw their hats in the air, but I’ve often wondered – on the back of a Hutton century let’s say – how many spectators returned home wearing someone else’s trilby.
You have to feel a bit sorry for the crowds of 50 years or so ago, not so much because they’d end up watching Boycott and Edrich steering England safely to 23-0 at lunch, but because whenever a batsman was given out, off he went.
None of the DRS drama you get these days, or the stomach-knotting tension of watching a dismissed batsman being asked to wait halfway back to the pavilion while someone checks for a no-ball.
Same for the armchair audience. Every time you think you’ve got a bead on what’s going on in the game, up pops that Sky Winpredictometer, or whatever it’s called, to hit you with a series of wavy lines and restore total confusion. It looks a bit like one of those polygraphs, going along in a uniformly straight line before leaping up and down when the subject tells a porky, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s an essential aid to viewing.
Let’s say England have set Pakistan 700 to win, and the tourists are 12-9 with four sessions left. The Sky gadget will inform you – just in case you’re have trouble working it out for yourself – that England’s percentage chance of winning is quite high. Simple, really, but then again most brainwaves are.
Then there is the analysis of the day’s play, complete with diagrams, studio experts, video clips, and Sky’s resident executioner Bob Willis. In stark contrast to days gone by, when the day’s play would be summed up by a single person sitting on a balcony called EW Swanton. “Jim”, as he was known, didn’t have a sidekick, as his opinion was regarded as akin to a Moses tablet, and not to be argued with.
“Well, I suppose you could say that England have enjoyed a passably satisfactory day,” Jim would say, in a voice you last heard coming from a church pulpit. “Edrich was watchful before lunch, and Graveney played some pleasing drives before the close.” No mention of Hotspot, or those nuns performing a conga after tea.
Somewhere on that balcony in the sky – the ethereal one as opposed to the TV channel – you can picture the bloke who played the Doc in Star Trek taking a slightly bemused Swanton quietly to one side and whispering in his ear: “It’s cricket Jim. But not as we know it.”
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday August 12 2016
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