Regulars

I went to Cricinfo the other day and was slightly taken aback. On the right-hand side, in the little box showing live scores, there was an unfamiliar message: “No matches being played at this time.”

Admittedly it was 6am on a Monday and England’s one-day team were probably still up celebrating their lone victory over Australia in the wretched post-Ashes series the day before but surely there was a game on somewhere in the world.

No. New Zealand had just beaten India at Potchefstroom on the Sunday as teams ‘warmed up’ for the utterly meaningless ICC Champions Trophy. Sri Lanka had won against West Indies in Pretoria and Pakistan had beaten Warriors at Benoni. For now, at least, they had all taken their pads off.

Somewhere up against a fence in a side street in the southern hemisphere, perhaps, small boys were probably hitting a tennis ball into someone’s garden and the bowlers were shouting ‘six and out!’

But that Monday morning the international game had finally stopped for breath. What a blessed relief. What a minor miracle.

Do we not see what’s happening? Will anyone stop this madness? Yes to the first question, highly unlikely just yet to the second.

Sean Morris, the chief executive of the Professional Cricketers’ Association, told the Sunday Times that weekend: “Mentally people are getting into some pretty difficult places.” He was talking about the players and burn-out but he could have been referring to the public who pay at the gate, the journalists who don’t but who have to be there anyway or, worryingly, maybe even the sponsors.

Even those money-mad TV executives and pushers of products who see cricket as nothing more than a commercial vehicle must be a little concerned that we are all getting too much of a good thing. We’re in danger of growing fat and bored on a diet of relentless, non-stop, around-the-clock, around-the-world cricket.

If you are reading this magazine, no doubt you love the game. But what is it you love? For most of us, I think, it is the meaningful contest, the match that will leave us with memories, good and not so good, a game that has significance.

I seriously cannot remember – and I get paid to do this – the results and details of particular international matches from even a couple of years ago. So relentless is the tide I have to look them up and even then I’m not so sure if I’m confusing one Twenty20 bash with another. Or was it 50 overs?

From a players’ perspective Morris summed it up pithily: “At the moment they practically have to drop dead to be given rest.” The reaction of many fans to that might be, well, they shouldn’t take the money. But that is slightly to miss the point. Cricketers play the game for a living and are duty-bound to fulfil contracts. But, like any workers, they are entitled to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment.

So, when Andrew Flintoff’s exhausted and injured body finally gave out on him like some clapped out old banger, he was perfectly right to push it into the nearest garage for a service.

That the garage was a luxurious apartment in sunny Dubai and winter was just about to embrace us all back home led to some indignation and resentment. Fred was seen to be walking away from his obligations, merely patching himself up so he could go off and earn more millions in the IPL. Would he be up for the unappealing tour of Bangladesh? Probably not. But he would drag himself off to the Twenty20 jamboree in India after six months of topping up his tan.

That was the perception. And it was unfair. Flintoff has given plenty (while getting plenty in return) but he is not a machine – even though he gave every impression of turning himself into one. When one part fell off, he would clank along until it was fixed and then go again. It was no mystery when the guys at the garage finally told him the warranty was running out fast.

More important than this, though, is what the merry-go-round is doing to the rest of us. We have become hypnotised by the never-ending expansion of the game and are told that one glorious day in the future cricket will be as big as football.

I do not want it to be as big as football, though. Football is gross. It, too, used to be consumed in bites that did not give you sporting indigestion. Now there is hardly a day when we are not eating ourselves towards obesity on the damn game.

In 1973 – the year Dennis Amiss ran out Geoff Boycott against New Zealand at Nottingham (it is weird what you remember) – Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe hit the smart cinemas of the continent and went on to be a cult hit around the world, a wicked examination of excess that struck a chord at a time when there seemed to be no brakes on materialism. This was The Blow Out, the explosion of our greed as epitomised in an orgiastic weekend of sex and gluttony where Marcello Mastroianni and his pals try to eat themselves to death.

Not much has changed. We are still over-eating, still ignoring the doctor. One morning we might wake up, though, and be quietly pleased that there is nothing on the breakfast table.

Kevin Mitchell is chief writer of Observer Sport Monthly

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