C Martin Jenkins: Bread and butter is the game's lifeblood (20 April 1998)

20 April 1998

Bread and butter is the game's lifeblood

Christopher Martin-Jenkins

THE season has duly begun with a return to winter. It has been cold or wet or both, apparently in support of my colleague Michael Parkinson who recently on these pages had another grumble about the season starting with a whimper rather than a bang.

I see eye to eye with our distinguished and award-strewn columnist on eight out of 10 cricketing matters, but on this I believe him to be profoundly wrong for at least two reasons.

The first is that all sport, sacrificed and in hock as it is to the great god of television, is suffering from BES, Big Event Syndrome. True lovers of cricket know, or should know, for Michael is one of them, that there is immense pleasure to be derived from, and great and wide interest in matches which are not on television, with all their attendant hype and sometimes rather sinister commercial exploitation.

The second is that big matches which catch the wider public eye as much as anything because they are on television cannot simply be staged without the performers being properly prepared.

I am sorry but England v Australia at Lord's actually needs Sussex v Lancashire at Hove, Gloucestershire v Glamorgan at Bristol and the other formative contests which our Sports Writer of the Year - brought up in Barnsley for heaven's sake, a Yorkshireman with county cricket in his blood - now apparently sees as petty domestic trivia, unfit for public consumption.

You could argue, of course, that a county versus Oxford or Cambridge on a cold, grey ground with a small audience of diehards, is not essential preparation for Test cricket, and simultaneously, if you must, have the annual swipe about privileged sporting academics.

To do so would be to ignore the facts that a weak Oxford beat the county champions Glamorgan last year, that Cambridge lost only one of eight first-class matches, that their opener, Ed Smith, led the first-class averages for some time, that the highest placed England-qualified player in the final averages, Steve James, was Mike Atherton's Cambridge opening partner etc, etc. The Oxbridge debate, however, is not central to the point.

Sport needs light and shade; big events and small; bread and butter as well as jam. Cricket needs them especially, because it is such a difficult art to learn.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the real issue, the perennial one, of how the structure of professional cricket can best be adapted to give the England side a better chance of competing with more consistent success on the international stage.

That has been addressed so often that there is no need to repeat at length again why the best way to give impetus to the early part of the season would be to have a regional tier of higher quality cricket for the best England-qualified players taking place during May, from which the selectors would choose their national squad for the remainder of the summer.

That is so much more realistic a solution to the main problem than the two-division scheme whose real purpose is commercial, not to improve standards; and whose adoption would (a) marginalise too many talented young cricketers (b) probably eventually put at least some viable county clubs out of business and (c) lead to the kind of club v country clashes which so bedevil rugby union and football, in both cases to the detriment of our international performance.

Whilst indulging myself in a spot of Parky-bashing, incidentally (he can take it judging from the way he hands a bit out himself!) what is this bankrupt sport "dying on its backside" as he puts it? Is it the one which sells its tickets for the Tests and one-day internationals and the big county finals in most cases long before they are played? Which has people arguing in pubs or on trains wherever you go? Which has such a devoted following on radio that when it rained on the last day of the Barbados Test in March and a producer decided to go straight to a play on Radio Four without saying why, 7,000 people - the tip of the real iceberg - rang in to Broadcasting House in fury?

The one, even, which even for poor old moribund county cricket, county membership has risen overall by 35,000 in the last 10 years?

Now, that particular case must not be overstated. The overall figure is small - just under 150,000. I do accept that two divisions would ginger up a wider public interest, albeit at a terrible cost. Also that at the very least there is no room for complacency in the county game and that the standard of the cricket played is what matters most.

But I happen to like the quiet and mildly idiosyncratic start to the cricket season. Are we all so obsessed with television sport and nothing else that we cannot recognise tradition in cricket and a peculiar Britishness in enjoying something that is not trumpeted and trinketed like a whore in a Turkish brothel?

The final truth is that big matches at the start of the season do not work anyway. Experience shows that the attempt to stage major games in April - champion county versus The Rest and the like - usually attracts rain and never attracts a much bigger crowd than go to The Parks and Fenner's anyway.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)