To every thing there is a season; a time to bowl, a time to bat, a time to sweep, a time to block, a time to dribble, a time to pass, a time to shoot, a time to knock it over to the big lad in the middle and hope for the best. Or at least that used to be the case, until the cricket and football seasons blended into one and we reached the current sorry situation where the first Ashes Test and the football season started in the same week. Denis Compton, who in an age when the seasons were happily compartmentalised played 78 Tests for England and won the FA Cup with Arsenal, must be spinning in his grave.
The opening salvo in the Ashes battle was fired at Edgbaston on Thursday. More bathetically, the English football season begins on Friday with a championship match between Luton and Middlesbrough. No disrespect to Eric Morecambe’s beloved club, but this is a joke: who wants to spend a balmy evening in early August at Kenilworth Road? There is a full programme of Football League fixtures on Saturday, and Sunday sees the first showpiece match of the season when Manchester City and Liverpool play for the Community Shield. Why? Who decrees that the football season has to start so ridiculously early, just two months after the end of the previous one? Would football fans really mind if it started in early September as the schools went back and temperatures started to drop? And wouldn’t the players benefit from a shorter season, rather than the current bloated, virtually year-round one?
The end of August used to mark the change of the sporting seasons, with cricket giving way to football and an overlap of at most a couple of weeks. Now, the overlap is almost two months, with first-class cricket – thanks to a combination of global heating and the proliferation of identikit midsummer Twenty20 matches – carrying on until 26 September. The final Test at the Oval, which always used to be played at August bank holiday, is not scheduled to end until 16 September – five Ashes Tests crammed into less than seven weeks at the tailend of the summer. The main reason for this odd scheduling is that the Cricket World Cup took up most of June and July, but surely that long-drawn-out event could have been a little shorter. The first, unforgettable tournament in 1975 was done and dusted in a fortnight.
This trend towards gargantuanism, fuelled by television’s pursuit of product and sports administrators’ desire for dosh, must be resisted as much as possible. Ease the sporting bombardment and let spectators and players enjoy both sports, ideally in their traditional seasons. Who knows, perhaps then we will see a successor to CB Fry, who at the turn of the 20th century played both cricket and football for England and still had time to equal the world long jump record. He could also leap from a standing start on to a mantelpiece, which is not a feat that Joe Root or Harry Kane would have time to perfect in this over-specialised, over-stuffed sporting age of ours.
