How boring is boring cricket?

Cricket, complete strangers are often wont to tell me, is a dreadfully boring sport. "I've tried but I don't get it all," said an otherwise kindly lady at the counter of a charity shop in which I bought Geoff Boycott's 1981 West Indies tour diary a few weeks ago. "It's just so… so boring."

To many, she was probably correct in that assessment. Even cricket fans themselves often complain that the game is boring. Twitter, the historical high-water mark of mass whingeing, is now basically an overflowing repository of personal cricket boredom updates. I've read loads of them in between overs as Younis Khan and his team-mates have batted Australia into submission in the last week and a bit.

"Hang on a minute, you're bored by watching Younis Khan?" I find myself asking. What I would argue in response to this boredom accusation is not that cricket is never boring, because we all know there's the odd dreary session befouled by glacial over rates and defensive play, but that when it boring it's still not actually that bad compared to the equivalent boring patches of play in other sports.

Boring rugby, on the other hand, is worse than nearly any other sport. When rugby is boring it's just an endless grind of utter pointlessness, and I generally don't mind the game otherwise. Boring Australian Rules football will actually make me leave the stadium with half an hour left in the game. Boring tennis, and I mean a real baseline slugathon between two mid-tier players making piles of unforced errors, actually makes me feel sad. I never feel sad or angry when cricket is boring.

This same issue has also become a concern for football in recent years, ones in which Spain's tiki-taka style has been the most noteworthy trigger for angst. A staggering number of fans claim that their predominant feeling while watching games in which the style features is boredom. Fan reactions to the ways in which soccer's strategists have sought to overcome it also says something about this new boredom reflex of ours.

The Guardian's Jonathan Wilson pointed to it earlier in the year when he concluded, "People, over the last fortnight, have declared themselves bored by - and opposed to - both proactive and reactive football." Do only boring people get bored, or is modern sport, with its often cut-throat stakes, just destined to conjure more boring moments than beautiful ones either way?

This is all terribly subjective stuff, of course, but every time the boredom factor is mentioned in the context of cricket - particularly in this constant and unnecessary push to make the game appealing to people who will never like it anyway - I wonder how honestly people are viewing the flat patches of other sports. Each and every one has the capacity to be tedious, but perhaps it's deep in these moments that we learn things about it and ourselves. Why do I enjoy boring cricket at a level not drastically removed from that I reach watching as exciting cricket?

I think the answer is probably in the element of danger. Cycling fans would say that a hill climb is fraught with danger, or golf lovers that a dreary tournament might be enlivened at any point by a spectacular player meltdown or a miraculous retrieval of form. In cricket that danger element mostly plays out on account of the expectation that any batsman, no matter how well set, could perish at any minute to even the rankest of long hops.

My fiancé will often remark that she mostly likes it when I have cricket on as opposed to most other sports: she can read in peace because "nothing much happens". This is basically in reference to noise and the subtler rhythms of play as opposed to the various football codes, but as I watched Younis bat the other night and she sat reading again, I looked across and realised how untrue it was to say that nothing was happening.

By this point Younis was accumulating runs and easily absorbing the Australian pressure, but Steve Smith had been brought on to bowl. On TV this translated into a pattern of sound that was no different to my fiancé as that at any point in the hour that had preceded it, but I knew that along with the assorted cream pies he'd dish up, Smith had a potential wicket ball in him too. Danger still lurked and the tone had changed to mild apprehension, and almost a hope that Younis wouldn't perish to a howler. It was many things but boring was not one of them.

Smith tossed them up and then he dragged them short. The likelihood that Michael Clarke could pinch the vital wicket by deploying Smith reminded me of the scene in the Adam Sandler film Billy Madison, where Chris Farley's bus-driver character claims to Sandler's aforementioned Billy that a nameless friend of his had been intimate with Madison's love interest. Sandler's character rejects the suggestion as preposterous. "No," concedes Farley with a guilty and comi-tragic shake of the head, "but you could imagine if they did, right?"