Waiting and cricket go hand in glove. It is an instruction barked urgently as a defensive push scuttles towards a fielder. It is the next batter, padded up, visualising their fate. It is the commentator’s lament as rain pools on tarpaulin covers.
Cricket does not have a monopoly on waiting in sport, but the duration of a Test provides room for the passage of time to take on great significance, so much so that a contest could be understood almost entirely in the context of waiting. The pitch? How could you know how it’s faring until both sides have batted, or seen how much it turns on days four and five? The ball? At various times it’s waiting to reverse, or soften, or respawn. Captaincy involves applying strategies then waiting long enough to see them bear fruit. Waiting too long before arriving at the crease is even a legitimate mode of dismissal.
Even for cricket, the current lockdown is testing patience. Australia’s men haven’t taken the field since their aborted one-day international series against New Zealand in March. The money-spinning Indian Premier League window has been shut, a tour of Bangladesh scrapped, and an ODI series in England in July now looks wildly optimistic. It is hard to see them taking the field any earlier than October when the T20 World Cup is supposed to be taking place. That’s a long time between drinks.
Waiting is not the sole domain of the athlete. For fans the nerve-shredding seconds before the final siren are what make the release so euphoric. The absence of sport during the off-season primes early-round excitement. The delirium of celebrating a title after a seemingly interminable drought defines generations of support.
Athletes and supporters of all sports are now compelled to wait. Waiting for God knows how long, with no guarantee of a satisfying resolution.
Such uncertainty imbues this period of waiting with a particular character. We are not luxuriating in the extra time on our hands (despite what Barry Homeowner on LinkedIn suggests), we are worrying about the future of the teams and sports we follow. This experience of waiting is not still or contemplative, it is impatient and apprehensive. “Always too eager for the future, we pick up bad habits of expectancy,” reflected Philip Larkin.
There are parallels to be drawn with the experience of queueing – the manifestation of enforced waiting. Queue psychologists (yes, they exist) have identified three key factors in mitigating the experience: alleviating boredom, managing expectations and ensuring fairness of outcome.
The first of those is being achieved, for now, by an avalanche of nostalgia, and the last by authorities, in the main, applying blanket regulations that mean no sport will resume unless all sport can resume. Expectation management is more difficult. Competitions such as the NRL, A-League and AFL need to host matches to survive in their current forms so there is a desperation on the part of administrators that the show must go on. This can be in conflict with broader public information, leading to confusion and mixed messages, shifting timelines, and even the prospect of seasons concluding ahead of schedule or leagues mothballed indefinitely. Or to put it another way, nobody knows where they are in a very long queue, and that’s the stuff of fever dreams.
Keeping calm and carrying on under these circumstances is challenging. Athletes are doing their best to retain fitness and motivation with solitary workout routines, fans can keep the home fires burning by revelling in former glories, just about everyone in the media has started a podcast, while groundskeepers pass the time watching grass grow. All waiting for the phone to ring and the beginning of a new age.
When that new age comes, how it arrives, or more specifically, how the waiting ends, could determine our perception of the entire ordeal. The peak-end rule is a heuristic method whereby people judge an experience on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than some amalgam of the whole. Consequently, with the right spin, we may find ourselves so overjoyed at the return of sporting endeavour that it warps our perception of what preceded it. Considering the doomsday scenarios faced by some competitions this outcome may soon become an aspiration.
But for now the waiting must continue. There is no alternative but to remain in the queue until our window opens, when we can once again celebrate the world of sport and all its oddball waiting games.
