Cup will catch on despite fears of undersell (8 May 1999)

8 May 1999

Cup will catch on despite fears of undersell

Giles Smith

Less than a week to go, then. The squads are with their host counties. (Lucky Bangledesh; they got Essex). The 1999 cricket World Cup is set to roll. Anybody interested? Some commentators have already grown querulous about the absence, as yet, of street parties and bunting in the roads outside their houses.

They wonder, has enough been done to advertise the World Cup's presence and whip up some excitment? It would hardly do for the entire world of cricket to arrive on England's doorstep and find nobody at home. Particularly not right now.

Given that schoolchildren here think cricket is some kind of off-shoot of opera and regard it with roughly the same awe and enthusiasm that they muster for cleaning their shoes, England '99 is, for English cricket, a PR opportunity which must not be fluffed. It would be a shame to undersell it, all in all.

It's true that even some of the most well-meaning attempts to talk up the tournament, on its first visit here for 16 years, feel a little muted. In the introduction to a handy paperback, The 1999 Cricket World Cup Essential Stats, the authors state: "Cricket's 'Mardi Gras' begins at Lord's on Friday May 14 and ends there 37 days later on June 20, unless it rains." That sentence seems to me to have a dying fall: Mardi Gras will be in the village hall if wet.

Perhaps the only people who have had the World Cup logo branded onto their foreheads are viewers of Sky Sports. The channel has been carpet-advertising its coverage of the tournament since last November. Or that's what it feels like. The campaign features Ian Botham, David Gower and Bob Willis and has all of the gentle subtlety and eye for nuance which one associates with Sky when it has something to sell.

Botham glowers at the camera and says: "It doesn't get any bigger than this." And we at home are intended to tremble in our chairs with anticipation. Unfortunately, the effect is somewhat undercut by the way that, as they stand there in blue blazers, trying to look hard, Botham, Gower and Willis actually resemble British Airways cabin crew, welcoming you aboard a short-haul flight. And they don't even look the type to brighten things up by stripping.

One detail in particular about England '99 has been waved contemptuously in the faces of its organisers this week: the official song of the World Cup (recorded by Dave Stewart, the bearded one in the Eurythmics) will not be released until half-way through the competition.

This does, indeed, look like a commercial oversight on someone's part. (You wouldn't catch Manchester United failing to wheel out their Cup Final single until half-time at Wembley.)

Yet one, surely, would only complain about this if one was looking for things to complain about. Unless Stewart's piece breaks radically with the tradition of sports-related pop songs, we will wish it had not been released at all.

The only useful measure of the tournament's health at this stage is ticket sales, which are running at a comfortable 85 per cent. And these are people who have bought their tickets without encouragement from loud and probably, in the end, unhelpful hype. Right now, I'd say the 1999 World Cup was a glowing success. In any case, it's probably worth waiting until it starts before trying to write it off.

GEOFFREY Boycott's new book - a collection of polemical essays entitled On Cricket - is sub-titled 'Yorkshire's Greatest Son Hits Out.'

Given Boycott's record on noisy and gaseous emissions (there are countries in Europe where, surely, it would be illegal to drive him), I don't suppose anyone had expected 'I Admit I Was Wrong' or 'Hang On A Minute - You've Got A Point There.'

Anyway, here is Boycott on a clutch of cricketing matters ("I believe that the limit of two shoulder-height deliveries per over is misguided," he writes, from the safety of his study) and also, every now and again, on some tangential social issues ("It's time someone pointed out that school holidays are too long").

The tone, unsurprisingly, is never less than sure of itself. Indeed, the following could probably be accounted the paradigmatic Boycott sentence (the context is irrelevant): "I was convinced from the start that it was a bad decision made for the wrong reasons." With admirable restraint, Boycott waits until the third sentence of the book before he starts slagging people off. After that, though, there's no holding him. Amid a cast of hundreds, Henry Blofeld gets it in the necktie: "there is a fine line between the eccentric and the buffoon." (Blofeld, according to Boycott, would not write Boycott a character reference ahead of the trial over the Margaret Moore incident. Whatever else that business brought Boycott, it has evidently left him with a swift means for categorising acquaintances: those who stood by him and those who stood by.)

Ian Botham, too, takes one up around the shoulder region: "When it comes to rushing in with mouth open and brain in neutral, even David Lloyd cannot equal Ian Botham, who could hardly wait to advertise his own inability to mark, read and inwardly digest anything."

And Brian Close is smacked about all afternoon. "He tended to live in a fantasy world, accepting no personal restraints." (It was Close's belief, Boycott notes, that he could put down Muhammad Ali: "He can dance about all he likes," Close would say, apparently, "but he can't hurt me, and if I hit him once it would be all over"). "Close's record of failure hardly inspired confidence," Boycott says.

So it goes on: page after page of snug-bar score-settling, a 250-page tribute, on the eve of the World Cup, to everything that is depressing about the English game. And perhaps there would be still more, but for the fact that, as Boycott philosophically points out, "Life is too short to waste time in petty squabbles."

IT won't happen at the World Cup, but batsmen could soon be in radio contact with the pavilion via their helmets, in a new deployment of the technology which already links quarterbacks to their coaches in American football.

Bob Woolmer, who may be the next England coach, said this week: "Sometimes the batsmen feel under pressure when they are out there and it's good to tell them they are doing all right." The square is a lonely place. If a batsman could just hear occasionally from his loved ones . . .

Yet, as Woolmer admitted, "you don't want to interrupt their train of thought." And here, surely, the idea founders.

As we know from countless cricketers' tour diaries and autobiographies, a cricket pavilion at any time thrums to the sound of bored blokes with low-rent senses of humour looking for mischief. You could never guarantee that someone wouldn't grab hold of the microphone and make an undecorous noise into it at exactly the wrong moment.

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