“Are you watching this?”
I was in Croke Park when I received this message on Sunday afternoon, watching Cork v Derry.
“Yeah, it’s shocking stuff, isn’t it”
“What are you talking about, it’s absolutely amazing!”
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I had the impression that perhaps we were at crossed wires, but the message came from one of the Fíor Gaels on my contacts list.
“I’m in Croke Park, sitting by myself, waiting for (our mutual friends) Collie and Mark to arrive for the Dublin game. What are YOU watching?”
“The cricket, you idiot ... the cricket. Stokes is going crazy here.”
This was an unexpected turn of events. But I ended up spending swathes of the remainder of Cork v Derry updating “over-by-over” coverage of the second Ashes Test between England and Australia, trying to keep up to speed with the latest from Lord’s.
I then mentioned on Monday that I might have been the only person in Croker spending their afternoon thus, only to be met with a steady stream of messages telling me that in fact there were plenty of people who decided England captain Ben Stokes’s heroic 155 in a losing effort was a far better bet than the All-Ireland football quarter-finals.
Instead of ruminating at length once again about the current ills of Gaelic football, it might be instructive to instead talk briefly about what has been happening in English cricket in recent months. Actually, let’s go back a little farther than that.
Test cricket, the original form of the game, has been in decline for years. Too slow, too ponderous — five days of action, only for the whole thing to be declared a draw.
One-day games were introduced, only for them, too, to be deemed pedestrian. Twenty-over games (T20s) were then trialled, deemed to be a roaring success, and that is the form that is slowly taking over the world, with each game taking about three hours in total to complete.
But there is still a residual grá for five-day Test matches — it is still seen by many (and I pompously include myself in this bracket) as the ultimate test of a player. And under their new coach Brendon McCullum, and new captain Ben Stokes, England wanted to revitalise that form of the game around the world. They wanted to play for wins, to eradicate draws, to swing for the fences.
‘England are winning the Vibes Ashes’ sniffed the Guardian last weekend, bemoaning England’s commitment to entertaining the people, while losing the game. Entertainment? Just win, baby
They beat India last summer. They won the series against New Zealand and another against South Africa. But they trail the Australians 2-0 in a five-Test Ashes series, with the third Test beginning on Thursday morning. Their free-wheelin’ attitude (given the moniker ‘Bazball’, after their coach) has of course been put under the microscope as the Aussies have ruthlessly, assiduously picked apart England in the first two Tests.
“England are winning the Vibes Ashes” sniffed the Guardian last weekend, bemoaning England’s commitment to entertaining the people, while losing the game. Entertainment? Just win, baby.
Which is ironic, because cricket is a byword for boring for many sports fans. A two-hour afternoon session at two runs an over, and one wicket taken, is no one’s idea of a rollicking good time and I’m not going to be foolish enough to make an opposing argument.
But Test cricket is about the adjudication of risk, even in the opinion of this neophyte. You can bowl conservatively, slow a team’s rate of scoring down, contain and suppress. But at some stage, you have to try and take wickets. Winning the game still comes down to taking 20 wickets. Isn’t all sport about the adjudication of risk? Maybe, but cricket moves sufficiently slowly for you to convince yourself there’s always a lot to be said for showing patience. The best captains know that is a fallacy.
The conditions are constantly changing. The ball is ageing, the weather is shifting, and so too are the parameters of your decision-making. Trying to take the game away from your opponent can happen as surely on the morning of day two of a Test match as it does on day five, when you’re chasing a total. When you get an inkling your opponent is vulnerable, you attack mercilessly.
The orthodoxy of showing patience, when there’s a game to be won, is now endemic in Gaelic football, and it’s not a mindset that suits us.
The great, recently deceased New Yorker writer Roger Angell wrote a beautiful piece about what he missed about baseball during an MLS strike in the 1980s. In it he describes the sport as “fluvial”, and that is the central appeal of cricket, too. You can watch a Test for five days, but you can also cut the lawn, do your taxes, finish a crossword puzzle and ring your parents. Like a river, the cricket will still be there when you return to it.
We’d much rather get in a whiskey barrel, and go over the edge of the Niagara Falls. That is the feeling we crave
Gaelic games, when they’re doing what we want them to do, are not fluvial. We do not want to “stand on its green banks ... [and] sense with only a glance across its shiny expanse that the long, unhurrying swirl and downflowing have their own purpose and direction, that the river is headed, in its own sweet time, towards a down summer broadening and debouchment and to its end in the estuary of October” — when the World Series is played, as Angell wrote.
What we want from the GAA as supporters is not to sit on the sport’s riverside and watch it inch past us. We’d much rather get in a whiskey barrel, and go over the edge of the Niagara Falls. That is the feeling we crave. When there are Fíor Gaels (and not just world-class soup-takers like myself) thinking there’s a better chance of finding that feeling at Lord’s than in Croke Park, then that should give us all pause.
