Last summer, that heady season where hot day followed hot day until heat became an expectation then a belief, there was a World Cup in Russia. In front of largely disbelieving eyes back home Gareth Southgate’s men tossed away the burden of low hope and through a purring repertoire of set pieces got all the way to the semi-finals, where they were finally outrun by Croatia in extra time.
A year on we hit another World Cup, the men’s Cricket World Cup – with the Women’s Football and Netball World Cups nipping at its heels. England this time pull on the unfamiliar shiny shoes of favourites, which they wore with style in their first game on Thursday, soundly thrashing South Africa at the Oval.
I didn’t see a ball, because we were on holiday, 36 hours on the Pembrokeshire coast idly watching gannets bomb into the chilly granite waters of Cardigan Bay and seals turn their lollopy burnished bodies through the waves, while in the hedgerows of the single-track lanes cowslips and elderflower pushed blowsily forward, everything on the brink, days stretching still longer for another month.
But such is the sometimes-wonder of modern technology that a smartphone meant we could stay in touch with what was happening on the cricket pitches of south London and Nottingham. Stumble upon a serene Neolithic burial chamber, untethered by anything as remotely commercial as a signpost, as Jos Buttler had a kind-of-failure with the bat. Tuck into coffee and ice creams in the sun after climbing around Dinas Head, while Eoin Morgan and Ben Stokes made whoopee; navigate the skinny roads back home, as Pakistan did a full-Pakistan in the face of a short-pitched demolition job by a euphoric West Indies.
All to the soundtrack of familiar voices – here admitting a soft spot for the stoically hyperbole-free Simon Mann – and welcome ones from abroad, a timely reminder of how much bigger the game is than the obsessions of home, the call of the Hundred for now dimly distant. What a treat to hear the former West Indies fast bowler Curtly Ambrose doing a turn, reminiscing about his spell on Australia’s Dancing with the Stars, “a full Test tour” of ballroom, while Ramiz Raja despaired over the rashness of his countrymen and Natalie Germanos mused wisely as South Africa creaked in the face of England’s powder‑blue powerhouse.
As with the BBC radio coverage, as with the Guardian’s over-by-over updates and similar on Cricinfo and others, there are ways to follow the competition that don’t require the finances to cough up for a Sky subscription. Does any of it have the reach of terrestrial television – the 26.5 million who tuned into ITV for that England semi-final last year or the 27 million who turned on the BBC for Danny Boyle’s London 2012 opening ceremony to empty the streets seven summers ago? Not a chance.
Scratch the surface and the interest is there – 2.1m requests for the BBC World Cup video clips on England’s game on Thursday, on the same day that Test Match Special had five times more online listener requests than any other BBC Radio programme. Not forgetting the upcoming India v Pakistan group game at Old Trafford, which was the most oversubscribed sports event since the London Olympics, with 450,000 ticket requests.
None of which makes anything perfect. The minnows gnashing their teeth at home with their wall-planners and plotting for the next time can still feel unjustly treated by a competition that included 10 teams and excluded so many others. The planet, too, has been shoved to one side, a chance to try to match competitions such as the French Open or London 2012 shunned, a sustainability plan written but ditched by those at the ICC reluctant to set a precedent for future Word Cups. Match tickets were too expensive for many to contemplate. And, of course, no children will stumble on live coverage on terrestrial TV.
Can the competition bring the country together? It’s an unfair quest, it doesn’t have a chance – not even Morgan, Steph Houghton and Serena Guthrie simultaneously lifting glittering trophies could come close to uniting the 48 and the 52. Some things are just too far apart, even for sport.
Cricket is a joy and the more people who discover its distinctive, awkward ways, its slow-building charms, the better. But it would not be a failure for the ECB to accept that permanent growth isn’t always possible, or even desirable, that cricket isn’t for everyone. That for some it will always happen too far away, be too obscure, too other, and that’s OK.
Now the Cricket World Cup is here, and what’s done is done, cricket should just stop worrying for a month, stop desperately shaking its tail feathers – while wholeheartedly embracing any new fans that fall in love.
Instead, it should dedicate itself to those who hang on in there against the tide, who have chiselled off bits of their lives to play long games in wet Aprils, coach children on Friday evenings straight after work, score when they weren’t sure what they were doing, volunteer behind the bar handing out endless packets of cheese and onion, trim the outfield on a spare Tuesday or find themselves up a ladder putting up a nest box or two for feathery visitors. The people who, all round the world, make cricket tick and tock its distinctive way along. This World Cup is the soundtrack to their summer.
