The papers are full of it. Shock, horror, people drink at test matches. This is also known as lazy journos not looking for a story. Richard Whitehead ‘The Thunderer’ in The Times is perhaps the worst http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6736701.ece
“Those not used to these occasions might think they have slipped into a Hogarth canvas.” My fourteen year old daughter, who was perfectly happy and safe to go to the loo or chips within this Hogarth canvas, employed a highly effective and poetically technical Hogarthian term to summarise ‘The Thunderer’s’ veracity – “Bollocks” (I may have chosen “All piss and wind” but there is a generation gap.)
In the comments Michael Hurst wrote: “No wonder there is such a high water-table level at Edgbaston,” but this masks a very serious problem. Not trouble for non-drinkers, but what the drinkers are doing to their own bodies. Drink Less Miss Less
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbR2HivqRoM features Jimmy Anderson with the message wittily placed on a line that if you drink less you miss less play. Soft-soap: if you binge-drink on a regular basis you’re heading for an early grave. It’s a societal problem, not just cricket’s baby or love-child. It goes back a good way – as Terry replies to Bob in the sixties sit-com ‘The Likely Lads’ after staring at his beer when asked why he married a German girl he scarcely knew. ‘A lad gets romantic after sixteen pints.’
Although Benjamin Frankin said ‘Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,’ for some reason the English can’t get emotional without getting pissed, both men and women alike today. Never seen it myself, to quote the porter from Macbeth ‘It provoketh the desire but taketh away the performance.’
How can these two quotes be melled? Shakespeare isn’t talking about drinking but lechery, being excessive, debauched. Franklin just about beer. I reckon people get pissed, bladdered, newted, blasted, plastered, leg-less and generally pie-eyed because their working life is repressively shite – look at the two great workplace British sit-coms of this century The Office and Green Wing and you’ll see what I mean. You can’t be yourself at work, so you store it all up when you go on the town, raz, footie, cricket, pull. This isn’t cricket’s problem, but cricket could offer a solution by having four blank boxes on the back of a ticket, each to be filled when you buy a drink. After four, (twice the recommended upper limit) no more. My daughter, who isn’t a paternalist wish-washy liberal like her dad, disagrees. ‘If they want to drink themselves to death, that’s their look-out.’
The stuff about beer-glass snakes, the Fanatics and Barmy Army at each other’s throats is also, mutatis mutandis, kindred bollockry (to quote Howard Brenton’s Twelve Macbeths.) The Fanatics and B. Army play each other at cricket ahead of each test, while although beer-glass snakes are outlawed, by the end of the day of a very wet test match, I feel the Edgbaston stewards reckoned discretion was the better part of their job description and got, that’s right, bollocked by the high-brow liberal press for their tolerance. The next time Richard Whitehead thunders down the motorway and sees two cars in the outside lane with less than the length of beer-glass snake covering them both, bumper to bumper at 85 miles per hour without room for another slip between them, then he might choose what to thunder about. Otherwise it’s ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
Of course if you sit behind the bowler’s arm either at the match or in front of your slippers and tele you are a bona-fide member of the Serious Cricket Watchers Assocation (SCWA rules – 1. watch cricket 2. be serious. All transgressions punished by the utmost levity.) As such the booing of Captain Ponting is a mortal sin. Not because it is boorish, nor because it’ll get Punter’s gander up leading to even more runs to the highest test scoring Aussie bat: both are true. No, because you deny yourself appreciating a truly great player, which is why it’s the communal raspberry from the bleachers – Ian Bell dreams of being booed. The SCWA is debating whether to proscribe the merest ripple of the politest applause since it may arouse those members who find themselves dropping off so seriously have they taken to watching the game – one momentary lapse of concentration and you’re gone – zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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