Cheers! How cricket game bowled over a nation

Chris Hampson London bureau chief • E-mail

LONDON - So here’s how it goes. Take two teams of eleven players. Give two guys a bat each, one guy a ball, get 10 to stand around the field all day and let the others hang out in the pavilion snoozing.

Check the weather and light, start the game. Break for tea, play some more, stop for lunch, resume play, break for rain, start over.

Repeat every day for up to five days. And then do that four more times.

Oh, and use a rule book that makes about as much sense (to most of us) as Ancient Greek.

At the end of it, if you’re lucky, one of the teams will have won. Or, maybe not.

Exciting stuff, huh? Yes, that’s cricket for you.

On Monday, one of the teams did win. England.

Better still, we beat arch-rivals Australia for the most important cricketing trophy there is — the Ashes — for the first time in almost 20 years. 

Victory at last
Tuesday, the streets of London were brought to a standstill by the “Barmy Army” — the affectionate media nickname for the thousands of loyal and dedicated English cricket fans — and tens of thousands of ordinary folk, cheering their new-found sporting heroes to the skies.

Two open-topped double-decker buses inched these sporting titans through the crowds to a massive demonstration of joy in Trafalgar Square. TV stations carried the celebrations wall-to-wall.

Yes, we love our sporting moments in the sun. And, these days in the UK, we don’t get too many of them.

But it’s not often that even we English get this excited about cricket.

Beating a former penal colony explains it all
So what happened?

A lot of it is down to the (usually friendly) rivalry with Australia.

They affectionately call all Brits “whingeing poms” (translation: whining Brits), implying we are a nation of complainers. As if!

For our part, we love to remind them that for a former penal colony they’ve done OK.

For years the Aussies have been telling us they’re the best at sport. Annoyingly, for a bunch of ex-cons, they often are.

Well, here’s some breaking news.  Not any longer, mates! Not for now, anyway!

The game of cricket itself must take much of the credit. There are times these days when it has become — dare I say — exciting.

Game for the modern age
Yes, the game has come of age.

No more crusty, port-swilling, retired colonels running the sport in ways that befitted the old Empire.

More important, TV and technology have given us the ability to be out there on the field, seeing what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a rock-hard ball twisting up from the ground at breakneck speeds. No wonder the players dress like modern gladiators.

They slow it down, speed it up, use computer animations to show us what really or nearly happened. Cricket for dumbos.

The players are less restrained, even flamboyant. Some sport tattoos, others have badger stripes dyed in their hair. Some even chew gum. Good lord, it’s enough to give those red-faced old colonels apoplexy.

At times, it’s a true spectacle — even if you don’t always understand what’s happening.

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