Who won the Ashes, really?

Who won the 2017/2018 Ashes series?

(The Ashes, for those who don’t know, is possibly the most famous sporting contest on the planet.  It is a competition taking place every two years between England and Australia.  The game in question is cricket.  For those unfamiliar with cricket, please press the backspace icon a few times and Google ‘Kardashians’, this will be a far better use of your time than reading the following).

Of course, there are those that will say that Australia won the Ashes.  There are those also that will say that England lost the Ashes.  There is, after all, an important difference between the two matters.

What is undoubtedly true is that England’s tour Down Under was trouble-prone.  There were players that could not join because they had got into a spot of bother back home (famous sports stars get into ‘a spot of bother’ rather than being ‘charged for assault’ just like middle class students involved in vandalism are involved in ‘high spirits’ or if you go to a decent public school; ‘japes’.) and the performance on the pitch was not great.  Hovering over all of this was the unique cricket pastime of ‘sledging’ or as non-cricketing types call it ‘abuse’.  Any cricket fan will recognise the title of this Blog (although it is named G&P for quite different reasons) and will have drawn their own conclusions about which category certain Aussie and English players.

So, Australia retained the Ashes.

But BBC Radio 5 Live won the Ashes.

Here’s why.

The coverage was magnificent.  There is nothing like Test Match Special.  Arguably, the best thing to ever happen to TMS was for the BBC to lose the rights to televise cricket and then for digital radio to come along.  This meant live and uninterrupted coverage of play in Australia throughout the night, bookended by anticipation and analysis.

The BBC rightly committed programming time to exploring the phenomenon of nocturnal radio.  But it boils down to this:

If you are watching television through the night there will come a point about three in the morning when your entire body craves sleep and you feel as if somebody has replaced certain parts of you with grit.  You trek up to bed late/early and get up a few hours later feeling shocking.

Not so with radio.  One places the radio by the bed, turned down low because distractions are falling away as the midnight hour advances, and then you listen throughout the night.

Of course you don’t.  You are soundly asleep by 12:05 but occasionally stir as you subconsciously process the fall of wickets and any streakers.

You awake refreshed and ready for the day.

Radio coverage is far, far better than television coverage because the quality of the commentary is so much better.  TMS is an institution and can afford to only accept the greatest talents.  Ideally, one should apprentice until one is about 80, and then one may consider oneself a TMS fixture.

The thing about TMS is it knows that it is shepherding souls through the darkness half a world away, and it takes this privilege and responsibility seriously.

On this tour, with the performance of the England team, there was an element of pastoral care to be considered, as the commentary team did not want to wreak untold psychic damage to the unconscious subconscious attentive minds.

Moreover, this was happening over the Christmas period.  The best Christmas present that the TMS team gave the listening public back in England at the commencement of the Boxing Day test was hope.

Our sporting life

The British are a great sporting nation, but it’s the English who excel at summer sports, not least by managing to persuade people that half of the bloody stupid things they do are actually sports and not, as it appears, some sort of folk rite. If bowls is a sport, morris dancing should be an Olympic event.

The English are good at summer sports because they get the weather for it. True, at present the weather favours summer sports like rowing, but usually the gentle summer sun favours the gentler sports. An Englishman likes a sport where he does not have to actually physically exert himself.

For the Scots, golf is the game they can claim to have given the world. It’s a good fit for the national character, as there is nothing quite like teeing off into the teeth of a howling gale and losing, in no particular order, ball, match and bet in order to set one firmly on the path to alcoholism.

The Welsh have made rugby their own. Large men rub up against one another, sweating and heaving in a dirty and brutal struggle. Then they come up from the pit and play rugby.

The Irish have hurling. Pints of second hand Guinness into the gutter on a Friday night.

For the English, essential sporting equipment is not a bottle, box or hurling tongs, but a panama hat, blazer and club tie.

Croquet is the epitome of an English summer sporting pastime. It is, to begin with, insanely complicated. Not just a matter of thumping your opponent into the ground like a tent peg using your mallet, you instead have to go round and through various hoops before hitting the pin to finish. There is a rumour that Dan Brown’s next book is about somebody who uncovers the hidden meaning in the game and then spends the next 200 pages feverishly wanking with assorted objects, including a pine cone and a small bust of Queen Victoria, up his arse. Erotic fiction is quite the departure for Dan and it will be interesting to see what his fans think of it.

But back to croquet. Apart from being so complicated that ironically the only person who can understand it enough to play tactically is Stephen Hawking who, of course, is unlikely to be swinging a mallet any time soon, it has a reputation for being played by posh people. Presumably this is because like shotguns, the only people trusted not to go bonkers when handed a mallet are those with breeding. When handed a double barrel shotgun, the correct response is to drive immediately to a grouse moor and attempt to depopulate it, not to drive immediately to a Natwest and attempt an unconventional withdrawl.

So posh is croquet that here in the village the bowling club briefly became a croquet lawn (croquet is played on nothing as vulgar as a pitch) and croqueters were to be seen enthusiastically knocking balls through hoops with every indication that they knew what they were doing. Possibly they were using an app but I suspect they were simply using the same English Assurance About Being Right that allows them to express forthright views on immigration at dinner parties. Not that I’d ever criticise a croquet player, the way they swing those mallets they could do me more damage than a chaffing pine cone.

There is something splendid about croquet though. Like bowls which requires the sort of green that more resembles a snooker table than a lawn, like cricket where the leather and willow are incidental to the tea and the quality of the light on the pavilion, so it is the sport entire that we hold dear; the English summer sunshine on a blazer’s brass buttons, the quiet applause as a player does something unfathomable yet obviously popular, the congratulations through gritted teeth as matches are won and lost and, of course, the shrieks of fear and terror as the president of the bowls club finds out that the captain of the croquet team has defiled his beautiful lawn by knocking bloody great hoops and pegs into it and goes absolutely fucking mental.

Oh, sorry, he’s English…absolutely fucking eccentric.

Summertime, and the cricket is easy

Today is supposed to be the hottest day of the year so far.

It certainly feels like it. I have made sure that I have derived maximum enjoyment from it by sitting indoors in the shade, sipping cool drinks and listening to Test Match Special. Something of a cliché? Possibly, but I recall that in the hot summers of my youth, the cricket was the background to whatever else was happening. Cricket is criticised because it takes five days to play a match, but surely that’s one of the many great things about it. Doing anything properly; building a cathedral, erecting a henge, singing a German opera, takes time. Things that are less impressive – instant coffee, Pot Noodle, eating anything that is ‘fun’ sized is less satisfying.

A colleague recently asked me if we weren’t in fact seeing a return to ‘proper’ weather, like wot we ad when we were kids! They have a point. Winter actually came with snow. Real, proper fluffy white snow rather than the brown slush we’ve been putting up with that insinuates itself into your shoes and, for some science-defying reason, never melts once it’s in there!

Now we have the sort of summer that’s turning the lawns the same shade of brown as the faded poleroids that document the last time we had a summer like this. I foresee hosepipe bans and brown lawns for everyone except the Midnight Waterer who is bright enough to realise that he’s not supposed to be watering his lawn, but not bright enough to realise that somebody in authority might make the connection between a street full of sepia grass and a single lawn of emerald green.

The idea then of climate change actually being caused by nostalgia has been added to the other theories about global warming. What nostalgia will not affect is my dress sense. Judging by those same faded photographs I was a big fan of man-made fibres and spent the summer of ’76 sporting nylon tee shirts decorated with pictures of Action Man. Not a good look on a fat adult.