Do we really like cricket?

Briefly moving over England “new era” of global dominance, I’m going talk about something else. Cricket.

Cricket fans are hard to please. It’s normally raining, one-sided hammering or ponced-up yammering so we do have a lot to complain about.

The fans love the thrill of it all. The sixes, the wickets and the drama of sport. And yet, when any of these things happen, we tend to moan.

Too many runs: boring. Too many wickets: no value for money. Excitement of any sort: not pure cricket.

There were too many World Cup games. Too many matches. It’s all too much. There’s too much cricket these days. This commonly accepted truth is witlessly repeated ad nauseum, but the case against players re-weighting their schedule away from lackadaisical domestic games to high intensity international matches has never been successfully made to me.

All we know is that, as cricket fans, we fear change and must ruthlessly defend the status quo while Francis and Rick still have air in their lungs.

Those lazy thinkers of older generations carelessly assume that the world, like them, is in decay and that modernity equates immorality and decline. Cricket fans, naturally being cantankerous octogenarians in their outlook, ape this mentality.

Yet still, older elements of the game still infuriate some. Here’s a quote from today’s cricinfo OBO doodle-ma-whatsit:

“I love these middle-overs. This may be my last time on commentary, but by heck - these middling overs are nothing less than a fantastic waste of everybody's time.”

I suppose the commentator is correct. Cricket is a fantastic waste of time. I have wasted hours watching a group of men work themselves into a lather over the relatively small movement of leather and wooden objects. I have wasted hours travelling to see these non-events. If I aggregated the sum total of these hours, I could have done one of the following:

- Learnt French;
- Written an unsuccessful yet worthy novella;
- Traversed the perimeter of Mongolia twelve times on racing yak;
- Understood long division;
- Saved the children of Belgium from the whatever baddies they battle;
- Forgotten any German.

And I suppose I could have cured a few pigeons of mange in the time it took me to write this post. But I didn’t. I WASTED MY TIME. And am now responsible for the DEATH OF UNTOLD QUANTITES OF DISGUSTING PIGEONS.

Perhaps our idea of a perfect cricket match consists of a single delivery, which is defended after which we can hurry off to the pub.

I rather feel like those far-right Americans that condemn anyone thinking that public healthcare as an un-American socialist, but I honestly don’t know what people’s problem with cricket it.

It’s alright, you know. I quite enjoy it.

And that makes me better than all of you.