Leading Edge: Anyone for cricket? Not many in England

The women’s football World Cup and Wimbledon have shoved the men’s cricket World Cup into the shadows.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

A man walks into a pub. He buys a pint and sits down to watch England play India on a television the size of a sleeping bag.

If you aren’t at the ground and you want to see the game, which is on Sky here in England and thus hidden from all but a small number of subscribers relative to the general public, this is the best option.

And yet only three of us turn up for a match between the home side and the most watched cricket team on the planet.

“Cricket? Don’t even know the rules, mate,” the fourth person around, the barman, a youngish Englishman, says over the dad-rock that is every pub’s default soundtrack.

One of us is 30-something, expensively groomed and posher-than-thou in a suit, no tie, and good shoes. He has the heavily lidded eyes of the entitled.

Another is a decrepit denizen of the East End, old and wobbly and bent like a burnt-out match, whose voice is sandpaper on steel. He doesn’t bother closing the door when he goes to the gents. He also doesn’t bother washing his hands.

The other one of us is me. I walk into the same pub on Tuesday, 20 minutes before England are to kick off against the United States in the women’s World Cup semi-final.

Only two tables do not have “reserved for tonight’s football” notices on them. The place is alive with people shimmering with youth, youthfulness and, erm, experience, and with perhaps a 60-40 split in favour of women — one of them pointedly dressed in red, white and blue.

Even before the match starts, the muzak is turned off and the volume of the commentary hiked to noisy neighbour levels.

Unlike the cricket, the football is on the free-to-air BBC and so available to most. Yet a good chunk of us have come out to spend money to watch it.

All of 11.7-million saw at least five minutes — which translates into “peak audience” in TV-speak — of Tuesday’s game on the box in the United Kingdom. That’s more than 21 times as many as the average of 550 000 who are tuning into each World Cup cricket match.

The French Open, which was reaching its sharp end when the cricket started, was a comparatively minor distraction. But the tournament slunk into the shadow cast by what some of the world’s finest footballers were getting up to in France until Sunday night. It has been shoved still further aside by Wimbledon, which started last Monday.

So the Wimbledon men’s singles final and the men’s World Cup cricket final will be played not quite 20 kilometres apart on Sunday.

The only advantages cricket has in that bunfight is that Lord’s holds twice as many as Wimbledon’s 15 000, and that the first ball will be bowled three-and-a-half hours before the finalists are due on centre court.

With the notable additions of a rising generation of women and people of south Asian heritage, cricket’s audience in its birthplace would seem to have dwindled to the kind of old and young farts who were in the pub last Sunday.

Problems … But only if you hold quaint notions about context.

Does it matter much that cricket now matters little in England? Or not nearly as much as football, which despite all of its built-in banality — indeed, perhaps because of it — enjoys an exponentially bigger catchment of attention and support.

“Hotstar, ICC’s official digital licensee in India, delivered a record 15.6-million peak concurrent live viewers [the highest number of viewers watching a live video] for the India v Pakistan match - a record for an international cricket fixture across formats,” a report gushed like a Playboy cleavage.

Cricket? It doesn’t live here anymore.