Bat and ball make a porno

The philosopher Umberto Eco has written thus about pornographic movies, "whose true and sole aim is to stimulate the spectator's desire, from beginning to end, and in such a way that, while his desire is stimulated by scenes of various and varied copulations, the rest of the story counts for nothing. Substitute 'six-hitting' for 'copulations' and you have a pretty accurate description of the Christchurch one-day international.

Thirty one sixes were hit on the day, and cricket, ostensibly a game between bat and ball was reduced to a game between bat and bat. This was cricket as pornography, in the finest traditions (if we can use that word for a format that is so young) of Twenty20.

It was magnificent, they said of the charge of the Light Brigade (cannons to the left of them, etc), but it was not war. Likewise, the one-dayer was magnificent, but it was not cricket. How can it be when bowlers were around merely to play straight men to batsmen who supplied the punch with all the joy of stand-up comics?

I had written (on the ESPN website) before the start of the one-day series that it could see one-day cricket's first-ever double century. This was due to three factors - the size of the grounds, the form of the batsmen, and above all, the influence of Twenty20 where hitting into the stands was part of the fun.

Instead of getting to the pitch of the ball, batsmen had developed the technique of getting the front foot out of the line and swinging through. It meant that straight sixes were hit with across bat, or, as Herschelle Gibbs once showed, batsmen could actually swivel and pull the ball to third man.

Sadly, the bowlers are being taken out of the equation (although it might have been interesting to see how Daniel Vettori might have reacted to the carnage in Christchurch), and that cannot be good for the game.

The one-day game, it has been said often enough, is about batting. And when teams make over 700 runs in a day in perfect batting conditions, with flair and flourish, bringing joy to spectators, it might be churlish to complain.

Wasn't it wonderful to watch Tendulkar and Yuvraj and Raina and Ryder and McCullum? Yes, but as Eco said, a movie in which there was only copulation would be intolerable. Physically for the actors, and economically for the producer.

And it also would be psychologically intolerable for the spectator. For the transgression to work, it must be played out against a background of normality. In porno movies, time is wasted by showing actors commuting or climbing stairs or changing clothes or whatever. In one-day cricket, the wickets, the run outs, the fielding play the same role - that of reminding us of normality.

And then the sex - or the six - takes over.