Cricket mania threatens future of football (10 April 1999)
Is it me, or does the cricket season start earlier each year and finish later
10-Apr-1999
10 April 1999
Cricket mania threatens future of football
Giles Smith
Is it me, or does the cricket season start earlier each year and
finish later? Does it finish at all? The semi-finals of the FA Cup
aren't out of the way, and here comes cricket again, barging its way
onto the front pages, forcibly occupying centre stage, greedily
consuming the spotlight, the way it does. There is no break and no
escape.
This is boom-time for cricket, and no mistaking. Has so much hype and
anticipation ever preceded a county season? Have the people of Essex,
Glamorgan, Gloucestershire etc, ever been so close to frenzy?
Everywhere you look, kids are in replica cricket strip. From the
front of nearly every glossy magazine smiles a cricketer with his
pop-star girlfriend. The cricketing megastores are in overdrive and a
nation is obsessed.
Conversation without cricket? Impossible. Socially, you're nowhere
these days if you don't follow a county and can't produce intimate
knowledge of Glamorgan's bowling figures from the 1997 season. And we
haven't even had the World Cup yet.
Of course, the influx of middle-class, Johnny-come-lately cricket
fans with no real roots in the sport is a source of bitter resentment
for the diehards who followed cricket through the fallow, unglamorous
years before it was fashionable. But those people are a fact of life
now.
Still, you can't help but wonder what the knock-on effects of this
crazy dominance might be for other sports, such as football - starved
of attention, left to wither. Consider the possible impact, at
grass-roots level. Fed an unvarying diet of cricket, cricket,
cricket, what incentive can a schoolchild have to pull on a pair of
boots and kick a ball?
It's clear that, for the good of all sport and for the ideal of a
multi-sporting culture which we all treasure, we need to get cricket
under control. We could do worse than start by putting the county
season back where it belongs: in the football-free months of June and
July. With a fortnight's break for Wimbledon.
Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)