England's rugby players travel to South Africa and endure a humiliation that surprises no one, since most of their best players have been left at home. The cricketers of West Indies arrive in England with no time to prepare properly and bear so little resemblance to their great predecessors that fans who bought tickets expecting a competitive Test series would be justified in demanding refunds. Something very bad is happening to sport when great occasions are systematically devalued.
To play against the Springboks has always been one of rugby's supreme tests. But if you cannot send your best side out against them, then the game is not worth the candle. You are dishonouring not only the present but the past, while putting the future in jeopardy.
Poor Brian Ashton knew he would have to deal with the absence not just of the usual crop of players suffering end-of-season injuries, but of those involved in the season's climactic fixtures. His depleted squad would never be able to do anything other than turn up, put on the white shirts and hope the thrashing would not be too severe. With less than four months to go before England defend the Rugby World Cup, Ashton needs all the preparation time he can get. Give or take the odd example of individual resilience, however, he will arrive back home having learned nothing from an expensive, but futile exercise. And there was never going to be anything he could do about it.
The same goes for the current Test series. Even examining it only from England's perspective, the centuries dropping into the laps of Peter Moores's batsmen are next to worthless. Yes, Kevin Pietersen gets a chance to strut his stuff, Ian Bell can continue the gradual construction of his career and Michael Vaughan can show us what we never doubted, that he is one of the world's best batsmen. But you feel that in the pages of future editions of Wisden these innings should carry asterisks denoting the fact that they were scored against a bowling attack manifestly not fit for purpose.
Television, inevitably, is the reason. In one sense, Rupert Murdoch's need to establish his satellite operation in Britain 20 years ago was a piece of great good fortune for sports such as cricket, rugby and football. His money enabled them to improve their infrastructure and reward the players beyond all imagining. But now we see the cost of the bargain, as calendars are filled up in order to meet television's insatiable appetite. Ultimately, everyone will suffer from the greedy response to Murdoch's overtures. Who wants to tune in to see something as one-sided as the match in Bloemfontein? Who will pay good money to watch the next lot of West Indians if they are no better than the present bunch and are handicapped by a playing schedule allowing them no red-ball cricket for several months before the start of a major Test series?
Thanks to satellite TV, there is too much sport for anyone's good. But no one, of course, will ever say "Enough!" because that would risk upsetting the paymaster. Just look at the ECB's reaction to the recommendations of its own Schofield report. It endorsed a lot of completely anodyne ideas while reserving its position on the one that would make a real difference. Which was, of course, to reduce the amount of cricket played.
Here we might look to America, where the major sports are played according to strict schedules that have no room for junk competitions such as football's Carling Cup or cricket's Pro40 tournament. True, baseball and gridiron football have no international demands to crowd and complicate their calendars. But someone needs to apply some rigorous thinking to the whole business, before it is too late.
