Phoenix will not rise from Ashes

The Guardian, 15 June

With the arrival of the Australians and the prospect of an Ashes summer, cricket suddenly finds itself enjoying near-football-like status in the media. Advance bookings have broken records at grounds across the country. On eBay, tickets for the first day of the Lord’s Test are being auctioned off at ?300 apiece – getting up to Wimbledon semi-final rates.

One of the things the England-Australia contests have going for them is pedigree. This is perhaps the world’s longest-established international, stretching back to the first Test match in Melbourne in 1877 (Australia won). Over the generations it’s acquired a patina of legend (Bodyline in 32-33, Botham in 81), and in a world of the instantaneous that has an attraction.

But the era when Australia-England contests might be considered world-title fights is long gone. It’s a bigger cricket cosmos these days, England is no longer its centre, and there is a widespread recognition of that reality among both fans and players. The gathering excitement about the coming summer’s play, at least among cricket lovers, has less to do with heritage than the joys of competitive cricket. First, Australia are the best cricket team in the world and never dull to watch; and second, for the first time in a generation England seem to have a realistic hope of matching them on the field.

Among England fans, celebrations of last year’s walkover against the West Indies were tinged with regret at the decline of Caribbean cricket. Sentiments will be much less generous if England win this summer. With the help of the media, the Australians have cultivated an image of swag ger and arrogance, and have used it to overawe opponents. Which makes them the team everyone wants to beat. People enjoy seeing the mighty humbled. That’s what underdogs are for and to some extent that’s what sport is for.

But for the governors of English cricket, a victory over the Aussies is something else. As they have tinkered and re-tinkered with the structure of the game in this country, their overriding assumption has been that the success of the national team is the motor engine of the game’s prosperity; that recapturing the Ashes is the key to unlocking popular culture and putting cricket back at its heart.

But winners do not necessarily command a mass fan base; the repeated and widely televised Olympic successes of Redgrave and Pinsent have failed to make rowing a hot topic in the pubs. The ECB is grappling with a problem whose dimensions go way beyond the cricket pitch. For many years there has been a disparity between the prestigious niche that cricket occupies in the national mythology and its actual place in the hearts, minds and leisure time of the population.

In a YouGov poll in 2004, respondents were asked how they felt about the performance of the English national cricket team over the previous 10 years; 43% said they didn’t care and 13% simply didn’t know. In another survey, earlier this year, only 5% named cricket as the sport they’re most interested in – behind football, athletics, motor racing and rugby. What’s more, the surveys confirm that cricket’s fan base is disproportionately male, elderly and affluent.

Dedicated cricket fans are not born, they’re made – by social and personal circumstances, chance encounters and the presence of cricket in the world around them. While a successful summer for the England men’s team will stimulate interest in the game, in itself it will not remedy English cricket’s crisis of access, which will be exacerbated by the ECB’s decision to hand over exclusive TV broadcast rights to Sky from next year. Meanwhile, in many parts of the country, facilities remain inadequate or nonexistent. According to the National Recreational Cricket Conference, since 1994 there has been a 40% fall in the number of recreational cricketers.

Sadly, but predictably, much of the sports media has decided to frame the summer’s fun in macho stereotypes. The cricket has yet to get under way, but already we’ve been treated to a season’s worth of platitudes about “toughness”, “competitive zeal”, the abysmally named “killer instinct”, and how the Aussies’ traditional willingness to “win ugly” is now matched by England’s. Here the unspoken assumption seems to be that England have gone down to defeat in the past because English cricketers were too timid, too gentlemanly, too friendly, too wedded to outdated higher principles. Historically preposterous, but carrying a message suitable to the devil-take-the-hindmost ethic of neoliberal economics.

The real excitement of the cricket this summer – at least for those of us whose addiction to the game is unconnected to the fortunes of the England team – lies in the chance to enjoy a close-fought seesaw contest showcasing skill, sweat and inspiration. Like an ample 19th-century novel, the 12-week Australia-England showdown promises plot and subplot, major and minor characters, a wealth of incident and (if we’re lucky) a result that is unpredictable yet somehow just, and in genuine doubt until stumps are drawn on the last day of the final Test at the Oval in September.