IT'S THE first day of the first Test of summer, so what does it do at Lord's? Rain of course.
The weather in London had been good for more than a week beforehand. This, however, was always going to be on the cards, as were the predictably Eeyo
re-ish remarks made about it by anyone who was taking the slightest interest in the subject.
But hey, we don't have to take the slightest interest in it, not when we're rationing ourselves to the evening highlights package on Five. Others can sit it out patiently in their straw boaters and read Three Men In A Boat again while waiting for the rain to stop: all we have to do is wait until Mark Nicholas gets to the end of his little preamble and says "Play eventually got under way around 11.20am".
Nicholas, incidentally, is steadily turning into the Melvyn Bragg of the Wisden-and-willow world. Although a younger man, he lacks the bouffant hairdo, having gone a bit straggly up top, but the other key characteristics are in place: that slight theatricality, for one, and that more than slight impression that he is deeply, contentedly, in love with himself.
Anyway, that's the first virtue of the highlights package: you don't have to watch the rain fall. The second, of course, is that all the longueurs of cricket are lopped off and left on the cutting-room floor or whatever digital depository has taken its place.
Of all the major sports, cricket is surely the one with the highest proportion of inaction. True, in golf you can wait a few minutes between shots, but a television presentation will have cut to someone elsewhere on the course before returning to the original subject. In cricket, on the other hand, nothing else is there to be screened. We just have to wait. Patiently or, increasingly, otherwise.
The third virtue of this highlights package is Geoffrey Boycott. Although self-parodic at times, and prone to criticising batsmen for venturing to score the odd run within the first few hours at the crease, Boycott retains his shrewd perception of the game, and of changing trends within it.
This was nowhere more apparent than his assessment of a wild swing at the ball by the New Zealand batsman Ross Taylor. "Oh, that's a one-day shot," Boycott said, disgust at the effort mingling with glee at the opportunity to say something really critical. "That's because he's been playing one-day cricket." That was the dangers of the Indian Premier League summed up in a couple of sentences, but in case we had failed to get the message first time round, Boycott delivered it again when Taylor was out a few balls later.
"That's Ross Taylor playing one-day cricket," he said. "Awful."
Boycott is by no means the first to warn that the Twenty20 version of the game, as played in the IPL, could seriously compromise the standards of full-blown, five-day Test cricket. But the case of Taylor did constitute a particularly telling example.
All the same, there is something a little strange about such a warning coming midway through a highlights programme which is only 45 minutes long. This length of show, surely, is for those of us without the time or inclination to watch what Boycott would call the real thing – the full match, seven hours or so for four or five days. By helping pandering to us, by taking part in a highlights show at all, has Geoffrey not actually become part of the problem?
One particularly stripped-down aspect of this programme was the use of cutaway shots of celebrities. Usually, a glimpse of Mick Jagger or Mike Brearley comes with its own little commentary, but here we just got a couple of seconds minus a namecheck.
In the case of those two it was OK – at least, it was unless that wasn't really Mike Brearley I saw – but in others it was just baffling. Who, for example, was that shortish young man with the improbably long and grey beard? Were we meant to know, or had the Mystery Guest round from A Question Of Sport done its own spot of channel-hopping just for a laugh? And no, it wasn't Abel Xavier.
The full article contains 729 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
