Cricket's brief time in the spotlight

During the ICC World Twenty20, our esteemed editor was struck by the lack of hoopla as he strolled up to The Oval. There was little sign that a world championship was taking place, and he then went on to suggest that the ECB had concentrated on marketing the Ashes.

Well, maybe, except that if there is an event which the ECB do not have to market at all, it’s the Ashes. In the run-up to a series against anyone else, there are interviews with England players and tourists on the sports pages of the newspapers but as an Ashes series approaches, the features editors and news editors muscle in on the act, the players get interviewed by the same people who interview Hollywood stars and politicians and the results appear in the colour supplements and stories about the build-up appear in the news section. It is not the judgement of the ECB that the Ashes is the most important thing there is, but the view of news editors in what used to be Fleet Street.

The bulk of the English public have the same attitude to cricket that I have to swimming: most of the time I couldn’t care less about it, but when the Olympics come round, I’ll be as glued to the TV as anyone else. And then I forget about it for another four years.

Since I’m not a swimming buff, I just take it for granted that the Olympics is the premier swimming event which deserves my attention. The news desks of the press and broadcasters make a big thing of it, so it must be, mustn’t it?

In fact, all it indicates is that that’s how the news desks think. Not every sporting event which is deemed to be news rather than sport is the premier event to those in the know. There must be more important events in rowing than Oxford v Cambridge, but you would never know that from the newspapers. The Derby and Grand National are the big horse races of the year on the front pages, but they may not be so regarded by real racegoers.

England v Australia was the top cricket clash for nearly a hundred years. The West Indies emerged as challengers in the fifties, South Africa in the sixties, and the rest came later, but by then it was too late. The Ashes had become woven into English culture as an institution, but England v Anyone Else is merely cricket.

It does not really matter what cricket folk think. We all knew in the 1980, 1984 and 1988 that West Indies were the top side and that the Australian teams which came in 1981 and 1985 were pretty moderate lots, but the news editors couldn’t care less. West Indies thrashing England at cricket could not be news in an Olympic year: the public who aren’t fans of particular sports can only swallow one event other than Wimbledon each summer: leap years the Olympics, the following year the Ashes, the next year the FIFA World Cup, and whatever Great Britain or England (depending on which sport) has a chance of winning in the other year. Cricket tried to occupy that other year with the World Cup - held in England in 1975, 1979 and 1983 – but then the rest of the world demanded its slice of the action, and since then it has largely clashed with the football season, which renders it virtually invisible.

Every Ashes series, unlike every other cricket event in England, begins in the glare of national publicity and stays there until England have lost, just as Wimbledon is a big story until the last Brit loses.

It all starts again tomorrow, and I’m hoping that the press will still be interested in writing about it after 24th August