Commentary
marinasb
The dentist’s chair is no place to relax. Visits to the dentist should be on everyone’s torture list, and now that we understand so much more about the importance of oral hygiene and the many sufferings that can result from poor dental care, torture sessions have become more common. regular.
My dentist has state of the art equipment and a wonderful bedside manner which helps. Nothing in his modern clinic resembles Graham Greene’s memorable description of a dentist’s tools in The Power and the Glory.
Tench, a depressed English dentist, is the main character of the novel, set in revolutionary Mexico of the 1930s, and his approach to dentistry and the description of what his patients endure are enough to convince anyone that the exquisite pain that can cause only one tooth to decay. should be preferable to an encounter with a Tench.
Fortunately, the large, flat screen televisions provide corrective images in my dentist’s office and erase the fictitious image of Greene that lives in my mind’s eye. Instead, my fellow patients get the (maybe) rare chance to watch sports of all kinds, but mostly cricket, as my dentist is a cricket fanatic.
The distraction works perfectly for this armchair sports fan. Last week was particularly effective. I barely noticed the horrendous sounds of soaking wetness and metal on enamel as my eyes were glued to the colorful games of what looked like cricketers playing something that hardly resembled the game of cricket as I know it.
I love the appeal that a Test match offers – four or five days of complete relaxation, punctuated by moments of joy – but the game on that TV screen wasn’t even like a shortened, restricted game.
It was hectic: every ball was walloped and the batsmen lasted only about three runs. It was loud and the bright outfits of the players were in stark contrast to the remembered calm of the players all in white. It was definitely a televised event – loud sound effects, short cut edits of the show that were often interrupted for the raucous audience.
It was The Hundred, one of the newest incarnations of the old sport, born in England and Wales, in which each of the two teams plays 100 balls for each innings, lasting 2.5 hours.
It is the antithesis of Test cricket, requiring focus, intelligence and strong character. It raises the obvious question of whether Test cricket can endure if players increasingly change the way they play and improve other skills?
Such new formats cater to today’s short attention spans and desire for instant gratification. They also seem in tune with the time pressures of today’s world and much more of a game for everyone, more like football.
Sport does not exist in isolation from society. They reflect that, and that may explain why we’re here now. Historically, inequities existed in the game and players looked for ways to earn a decent living from it. I vividly remember the 1970s, when Kerry Packer paid top international players big bucks outside the framework of cricket’s world governing body and created the Cricket World Series.
The whites went out and night cricket began, but so did players from their national teams, ushering in the era of commercial employment and reducing dependence on national cricket boards. It increased players’ earnings forever. One-day internationals, the Cricket World Cup and T20 leagues have added to the development of cricket as a televised sport, which now, in its shorter forms, appears to be almost entirely driven by brands, broadcast deals and franchise holders, with India playing a leading role in the attack with the Indian Premier League (IPL). Money now talks a lot in cricket.
To my dismay, my six-year-old grandson tells me that cricket is “boring”. Well, if he has not seen T-20 and Hundred on TV and has never been to such a game, this is not surprising.
His father reports that he does not encourage cricket because it misses one of the main benefits of the sport for young people. Parents want sports that build muscle and strength in children, but cricket is a lazy sport. Only the bowler and the batsman are active and only on momentum. “Too much sitting around, waiting for something to happen” is the verdict.
Then, a lot of equipment is needed – stick, pads, logs, special bag and also a good step. I know these aren’t entirely necessary to enjoy a short game, but a flat pitch helps and the fact is that all you need for football is a ball and just a pair of swimming trunks.
I don’t follow cricket enough to be sure, but structural elements may matter more. However, the administration of West Indies cricket seems dysfunctional and West Indies cricket seems to be in bad shape.
Looking to the future, how can we create three generations of WI cricket fans or club fans, as the football clubs have done abroad, when cricket is so low? Very few T20 matches come here and our players seem to play more one-day matches for international league teams than at home. If only we could imbue all of cricket with the power of football and retain its integrity.
