In praise of … counter-cultural sport

Well that’s a ridiculous title. Is there a field of endeavour less counter-cultural than sport? By its very definition it habitually elevates to ridiculous levels of acclaim and fame the young, the physically disproportionately able and the (often) atypically beautiful. Elevating the cult of personality; a seemingly endless lust for more attention, more money, more everything; ultimately utterly pointless in the eternal scheme of things yet to so many taking on an unnatural level of importance. Counter-cultural?

Yes, it can be and often is. It may be in the burgeoning and increasingly respected paralympic movement; it may be the sports club run by volunteers in inner-cities; it may be the romantic stories of winning against the odds. Sometimes, often, sport is and can be beautiful and life-enhancing.

For now, let me talk about test match cricket in that context. Strip cricket down to bare essentials and it is a ridiculous sport. All sports are ridiculous in essence; but cricket is so absurdly contrived, so littered with a history of English colonialism, so often rooted in class privilege, as to stand out as especially absurd. It’s suffered recently and has adapted in response. Dwindling audiences for domestic cricket around the world; the one-day 50 over format suffering; the seeming ubiquity of the instant thrills of Twenty20 versions of the game bringing in attention, coverage, money and even glamour to a game sometimes seemingly teetering on the brink of irrelevance.

Yet ultimately the highest level of the sport – international test match cricket – remains gloriously, essentially counter-cultural. A test match is the name given to an international cricket match played between two teams over 5 days. If the game runs to full-length with no weather interruptions, that’s 30 hours of sport. 30 hours. There are only 9 teams playing it globally at the top-level. They won’t just play one test match – they will play a series of occasionally two, often three, sometimes 4 and between certain opponents 5, matches. That’s a long time. Often a winner will emerge. Sometimes it won’t, and therein lies the format’s counter-cultural beauty.

As I write, a three-match series has just concluded in New Zealand. It should have been straightforward. An eighth-placed New Zealand team in turmoil hosted the number-two England team. England were widely expected to romp to victory, weather permitting by an overall score of 3-0. In the first match weather saved England from losing a match New Zealand deserved to win; the result was a draw. In the second match weather prevented England from completing a victory they had just about earned; again, a draw. In this third match, New Zealand totally dominated for 4 days. On the fifth, New Zealand threw everything at England. One English player stayed on a score of zero for well over an hour. By all rights New Zealand should have won. Somehow, miraculously, England clung on – for a draw – in a match in which they were indisputably inferior. Thus at the end of a 3 match series, 15 days, a possible 150 hours of sport, the score was 0-0. Yet it was breathtaking, nerve-shredding, emotion-draining, gripping. A five match series  – such as is played out between England and Australia known as The Ashes – is all those things, multiplied exponentially. 0-0 after 150 hours Ridiculous. Yet in an age of the instant answer, when some church cultures promise solution and resolution, when politicians think of short-term vote-winners, this tells us something vital about not always getting what we want or even deserve and yet how that is somehow more right than getting what you think you should get.

Ahh the Ashes. I’ve been to a lot of live sport – world cup football, my beloved Arsenal football club, the Olympics, American Football, golf, rugby … so much I have been privileged to see. The Ashes – especially live – is unlike everything for suffocating tension and intensity. Years of colonialism, years of history, of tactics developed to achieve the ‘mental disintegration’ of the opponent; of other tactics to physically damage the opponent; all that and more erupts into a five-match series which captivates and entrances two nations and international fans. For England and for many others this reached a peak in the English summer of 2005 which became the most intense, tightly fought, but also fairly contested, sporting occasion most of us have ever or will ever see. Click that last link for an article hinting at that summer’s excruciating beauty.

But none of this still quite does justice. I could talk about the rich tradition of cricket writing which this post can’t touch; I could talk about the high levels of depression and suicide amongst professional cricketers; I could talk about broadcasters who can fill hours of air-time during rain delays with riveting, infuriating, moving discussions. In the end, for all these truths, its deeply personal. I love sport. I watch a lot of it, lots of different sports, and get passionate about it. It means much to me; sometimes too much. My football club Arsenal is mine, for better or worse. It’s part of me and my family. But put a gun to my head and give me only one sport, and it would have to be test match cricket. When I grew up in a sports-loving house, cricket was on network television and football wasn’t. So cricket was the sound of our summers, on television and radio during long car journeys. It was in trips to London grounds on summer-holidays. I was soaked, earthed, bought up with cricket in the blood and bones of my being as deeply as my own DNA. I can’t forget it, can’t get rid of it.

In my memory. when a Test match would start, something would happen. Traditionally in England that was a Thursday at 11 a.m., though sometimes that now changes. What would happen, in my mind anyway, was that my Mum would make some good coffee, and we’d sit down, sip our coffee and eat some shortbread. And the day would drift on, the summer would burble by with the cricket ever-present. I’m just old enough to remember an absurdly improbable series known as Botham’s Ashes in 1981, which cemented cricketing heroes, myths and legends in my eight-year old psyche.

That’s what it is for me. So when I’m having a bad day, something cricket related will do something to and for me. The languid, slow, intense rhythms of the game can be a strange agent of healing in my head in ways I can’t explain. It worms into my psyche and does something. If a test match, especially an England one, is starting and I’m able to watch, I will make coffee and grab a biscuit (ideally shortbread), and I’ll be connected to my family even though my Mum has died and I’m physically absent from the rest.

I, we, will always need the strange and alien beast that is test cricket. It takes time to learn to love it. Like all time spent, it profoundly, endlessly repays you.