Watching the final moments of the fifth Ashes test match, one has to bemoan the death of cricket.
When I was a lad, it was perfectly normal for 100 and more overs to be bowled in a 6 hour day; today, this rarely, if ever, happens. In test matches, the rule is that there have to be 90 overs in a day that now extends to a maximum of 6½ hours, but there appears to be no penalty for missing this target and no way of making up the deficit unless it was caused by bad weather or bad light. Even then, umpires seem to be beset by a plethora of rules and regulations that require them to react in particular ways, usually without the slightest consideration of the paying public. The public are expected to accept a confection that crawls along at a snail's pace and is stopped at a moment's notice for the most bureaucratic of reasons.
The premature end to the final test, albeit at 7:40 pm, was stupid and certainly did not please the paying public; how was it that David Hughes once won a Gillette Cup match at something around 9:00 pm and no one complained about the light ?
Today's cricket is a pale shadow of the wonderful game played by the likes of Grace, Hobbs, Hammond, Bradman, Headley, Compton, Hutton, Gregory and MacDonald, Lindwall and Miller, Trueman and Statham, Hall and Griffiths and the like. Today they play on manicured pitches with so much in the way of helmets and padding, not to mention worries about a few drops of rain or a bit of dodgy light, that it's a wonder that the game has survived at all. How any of today's players can be compared with the greats of the past is a mystery - one or two perhaps but generally speaking any comparison is laughable.
England retained the Ashes by beating one of the worst Australian teams ever to tour this country. They may well repeat this feat by winning again in Australia in the coming winter, but it will be a hollow victory. Cricket, as anyone over the age of 45 ever knew it, is dead; the money men have finally got their claws into it and the future is the crash-bang-wallop rubbish of 20-20, with its accompanying paraphernalia of noise and hype. One of the major consequences of this is the death of real cricket; county, state and test matches that last for more than a day.
Cricket is no longer a game played to entertain the paying public, it's simply a money machine; as such, it has an enormous bureaucracy that determines how it works and that develops rules and regulations for every possible eventuality. As such, it does nothing but serve itself and drive real supporters away while constantly congratulating itself on how well it's doing.
Let's not be fooled. Real cricket is dead but not quite buried yet; I hope to see a bit of the real game in the coming week though I wonder for how many more years it will continue. With luck, it will last longer than I, though I have my doubts.
