Two nostalgia-tinged laments for cricket have been published in the past couple of months: Michael Henderson’s That Will Be England Gone and Duncan Hamilton’s One Long and Beautiful Summer. Their premise was that the 2019 season marked the end of cricket as we know it – long-drawn-out games between county teams half-watched by old blokes nodding off in deckchairs. The Hundred – the whizz-bang tournament designed to revolutionise cricket – would uproot all that and introduce something akin to baseball. The obsequies have, however, proved premature because for the moment at least, the pandemic has seen off cricket’s insurrectionists and the Hundred has been postponed until next season.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that last Friday, on the day the Hundred was due to take centre stage, Dominic Sibley was painstakingly compiling one of the slowest Test centuries ever by an England batsman. We could even, for the first time in 20 years, watch the (very limited) highlights of his innings on BBC TV. The counter-revolution will be televised.
The Test series against West Indies has proved surprisingly compelling and Friday’s deciding match is eagerly anticipated; Ben Stokes is well on his way to becoming a national icon; village cricket is back after vigorous lobbying; the county championship will soon return; and there are small children playing cricket with their parents in packed parks for the first time in years. Is it wishful thinking to suggest we are witnessing a reawakening of the nation’s love for the game after decades in the doldrums? Cricket’s subterranean profile was the reason administrators cooked up the Hundred, but the prospect in the early days of the pandemic of a barren cricketing summer seems to have stirred atavistic passions in the shires, and cricket has not, after all, been crushed by football’s juggernaut rolling on into July.
We will even, if reports are correct, be getting a new cricketing peer soon – Lord Botham of Somerset, England and Brexitshire – though whether this should be welcomed as part of the renaissance is questionable. Botham, the hero of the unforgettable Ashes series of 1981, is one of the sport’s great lions. But if he deserves a place in the House of Lords, itself doubtful as nothing in his career suggests an aptitude for lawmaking, it would be for smashing sixes rather than bashing Brussels.
It is of course a stunt by a prime minister with a superficial interest in cricket and, judging from photographs of him playing, an appalling batting technique. But let’s not complain too much: cricket is in the news again, a well-contested Test series is about to reach its climax and the background hum of an English summer (admittedly artificially generated at crowdless Test grounds) has been restored. Henderson and Hamilton can rest easy in their deckchairs.
