The Cricket World Cup is, thankfully, over. India has won in an apparently exciting match that avoided any serious crowd disturbance and there were no terrorist attacks. Glory Be.
This competition is an invention of the need for sports to be elevated many strata above their real position of importance in the world. Instead of sports being played for fun and the entertainment of the spectators, they are now essentially about the amount of money that can be attracted to support the grossly overpaid prima donnas who inhabit the largely new and very alien world of modern sporting celebrity.
As a lad of 9 or 10, I was taken to my first matches at Lords, the home of cricket, by my father. I watched Middlesex, which became 'my' team, I saw England, and regularly enjoyed seeing many of the world's greatest players in an amosphere of awe and wonder. Later, I was privileged to be present at a couple of one day Finals, the Gillete in 1971 and the NatWest in 1980, both of which were great games played in front of an appreciative audience. Over a period of years, I saw Australian, West Indian, and Pakistani touring teams; I saw Colin Cowdrey score 155 and Geoff Boycott make 182 (not out, mind you !) and watched as Barry Richards and Mike Proctor showed just how good they were - extraordinary !
Since those heady days, my attendance at matches has dwindled. Test matches are now the province of the inane masses, those who would otherwise be throwing bricks at referees from the football terraces. One day games are frequently the same, often with so much moronic chanting as to destroy the experience of anyone who actually wants to enjoy the skill of the cricketers on the field. Real cricket, the County Championship, has been wholly devalued by the withdrawal of most of the best players, deemed to be needed for the Test side and who mustn't be 'overplayed', and by the stupid introduction of a 4-day format. This is supposed to prepare our younger players for Test cricket but how is yet to be made clear. Attendances at County Championship matches, certainly at Lords, are abysmal; one or two other grounds I've visited possibly fare a little better but it's a losing battle. The Championship, in its current format, is doomed; it will no doubt be replaced by a limited overs event before very long.
There is so much wrong with the current structure of cricket in this country that it's impossible to know where to begin. Our players are feted as being sporting stars when most of them have never been heard of beyond the boundaries of their home grounds. Some of them, far too many, are paid stupid amounts of money on the back of unsustainable sponsorship deals; most of them are nothing like as good as the media makes out. They play little cricket outside of the international merry-go-round of Tests, one-dayers and the egregious 20-20. The game has become a spectacle for the uneducated masses, in which the batsmen are expected to hit every ball for 4 or 6 and the bowler is nothing more than an obliging adjunct. The ball has been doctored to make it as unhelpful to the bowlers as possible, the wickets are as flat as any pancake one can imagine and are covered at the slightest sign of a dewdrop. The game I watched as a youngster no longer exists.
Of course, there are still some good, even great, players who would prosper whatever the type of game and whatever the conditions. It's hard to believe that Sachin Tendulkar or Muttiah Muralitharan would not have found a place in most international sides of the last 100 years, but they are the exception; there are few, if any, English players of recent decades who have reached such heights of brilliance and consistency. This situation will continue for as long as we insist on heaping plaudits on players every time they do anything of note, rather than holding back praise until it is really deserved.
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