cricket
"Would it not be wonderful for a gentleman to have no concerns, other
than whether any more wickets had fallen since tea at Hove."
HWLG Murchison, 1951
on reading the cricket scores
(Feb 2006 : this page is now part of an archived web site. I have been unable, or too lazy, to update this web site for 18 months)
I have only ever watched a handful of days play of English County Cricket, yet if the English County game was ever scrapped - and there are always people who threaten this - I would be mortified. I suspect I would be joined in my outrage by thousands of other men, for whom the cricket scores are a constant pillar of stability and good sense in a world going insane. I believe that one of the basic tenets of being a civilised Englishman is to be able read the cricket scores daily during the summer months. It is even more important that this privilege is available whilst visiting foreign climes.
Cricket - or at least the English County game - is perhaps the only game that survives purely by the fact that it creates masses of statistics. For a game watched by so few it garners an amazing amount of newspaper space. The rules of the game, the way that scores are recorded, all the arcane language attached to it - the slips, the fine legs, overs, maidens, ducks, googlies and chinamens - these abstractions mean more than the game itself (by which I mean one bloke chucking a ball at another bloke who try's to hit it).
Although I hardly ever go to watch live County Cricket, I feel that the fact that I could if I wanted to, is very important. The elements of cricket: the square, the pavilion, the deck chairs, the sandwiches, the sound of leather and willow, all these are deeply ingrained within me. I don't necessarily need to go to be a cricket follower.
But should English County cricket be were abandoned completely, then the 'game' could still continue if someone were prepared to make up the scores on a daily basis, write the bulletins from each ground, read out the scores on radio 4 every evening, and compile the averages. It would not be necessary for people to actually play. The important thing would be that we could still read about it.
The Daily Telegraph certainly has the most thorough cricket coverage, although all the broadsheets have a good stab at it. I suspect the DT has the largest readership of ex-colonels for whom the cricket scores are an essential part of life. Of course, the world wide web could have been made for cricket: one can access an amazing store of information or follow the games ball-by-ball. The BBC and Channel4 both have great cricket sites, but the doyen of them all is cricinfo, purely for the fact that it's coverage is so wide and so comprehensive. Many a day is made more bearable by knowing that I can always check whether any more wickets have gone down at Arundel. One has to forgive cricinfo the fact that their site is often slow. But then, so is cricket.