SPORT
Cricket is not the new football

by Craig Turp
September 2005

England’s cricketers, as I write, look poised to take the Ashes series against their eternal rivals Australia. With one Test match of five left to play, from 8th – 12th September at the Oval, Kennington, England lead the series 2-1. England now needs only to avoid defeat in the final match to regain the Ashes trophy for the first time since 1986. An Australia victory would see the series drawn, and under the traditions that govern Ashes cricket, the tourists would retain the Ashes.

I wrote here four months ago that the series would be the closest fought for a generation. I was not wrong. (I was however way off in my prediction of an Australian victory. For once that pleases me.) For while the quality of the cricket has been patchy, for sheer excitement and unrelenting spectacle, this has been the greatest Test match cricket series in the history of the game. The first Test, when England’s old fears and inconsistencies resurfaced to hand Australia an easy victory, promised little. An effortless Australian series victory looked likely. This though is a very different group of England players. In the second match, making the most of the injury to Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath, England roused themselves to a sensational victory, taking the last Australian wicket with two runs to spare, after Australia had looked like snatching an incredible victory themselves. In the third Test, England were robbed by the weather: a day’s play lost to rain, England still nearly won but were outdone by Australia’s tail-end batsmen, who held out until the end of day five for the most exciting draw ever. The fourth test was almost a reverse of the famous Headingley Test match of 1981.

Then, England became the first team to win a Test after following on. Last month at Trent Bridge, Australia almost did the same, only for England’s lower order batsmen to secure victory.

With one match now to play, cricket is the new rock and roll in England. After England’s victory in the fourth Test every newspaper – from the Sun to the Telegraph –carried the victory on its front page. Football? Hidden inside somewhere. The so-called national game has become invisible. Children no longer take footballs to the park: cricket balls and bats are the must-have items. Wayne Rooney football shirts have been replaced by Freddie Flintoff cricket shirts. The proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus no longer talks of football; cricket dominates every conversation. All five days of the fifth Test at the Oval have sold out.

So, is cricket the new national game? No, it isn’t. The reason is that cricket has always in fact been the national game of England. It was only forty years ago that the football season wasn’t allowed to overlap with the cricket season. Football results rarely appeared in the newspapers. The sports heroes who beamed at the public from advertising hoardings were cricketers, not footballers. It is only since football became infected with money that English cricket was forced into the background, and – for much of the 1980s and 1990s – the doldrums. This summer has been a glorious resurrection of the country’s real nation game. The result at the Oval – though I am certain England will prevail – will not change that. Cricket is not the new football; football however, was for a time the new cricket.

Craig Turp edits Bucharest in your Pocket.