Once in a while sport throws up some feat of truly astonishing athleticism. Professional sportspeople operate all the time at a level which most of us could never for a moment attain, but much of the time they make it look easy or at least unremarkable to anyone who has never tried to imitate them. And then something happens like the catch Ben Stokes produced in England’s World Cup cricket match against South Africa, when he leaped like a cat after a bird in flight, twisting in the air to seize a ball that had seemed a certain six. Not only do the spectators understand that they could never do it – it’s hard to believe that any human being could manage it.
Yet in England the sport seems caught in a pattern of slow cultural retreat. Around 8 million people watched the final day of the last Ashes Test broadcast on Channel 4 in 2005; 360,000 watched the climax of last year’s Test series against India on Sky. Football saturates the culture. Millions will watch the match in Madrid on Saturday. Broadcasters pay dizzying sums for it, knowing that the viewers, and advertisers, will follow them. Cricket remains a special interest.
Yet more than most sports, cricket needs television to thrive. This isn’t so much about marketing, though marketing matters. It is because the rhythm of the game alternates between action too fast to see with the naked eye and prolonged inaction, strategic shufflings and reshufflings on a distant field. While the experience of watching cricket live is one of a pleasant transport into a different kind of time, where the urgencies of the outside world are banished, the game on television is one where you can see again and again in slow motion the movements of the ball and bat which actually decide the game.
Most of modern life takes place somewhere between those two extremes of speed and sluggishness, and cricket has a hard time adjusting. The slow tidal rhythms of the four-day county game would be impossible to show on terrestrial television today, except perhaps in Sweden, where state TV live streams a month’s worth of desultory elk migration.
At the same time, the loss of state school playing fields has tended to make playing the sport still more exclusive and class-bound. The overwhelming majority of the England team is privately educated. One private school alone, Dulwich College, has more cricket pitches than the whole of the London borough in which it finds itself. There are valiant efforts made to reintroduce forms of street cricket that can be played almost without equipment and certainly without lavish pitches. The Chance to Shine initiative has successfully attracted girls as well as boys.
Although watching it is important, the joy of playing it is what really kept the sport alive; last year it was claimed that 430,000 men played cricket once a month and 215,000 women. These figures, if accurate, suggest more people are playing the game than watching it, and that’s a sort of health too easy to overlook when the worth of everything is measured in money.
