Bat for Ashes

I was there when Monty Panesar showed true English courage to held out against the barbarian hordes and snatch a glorious, er, draw from the jaws of Ashes defeat. It, my friends, was yesterday.

Despite my love of sport, I've tried up to this point to keep this blog free of all chat of a sporting nature, for fear of alienating my huge female readership (not that women necessarily don't like sport, I'm just lazily generalising. I do that sometimes). I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, though, so I'll allow myself a little one (which will include no disscussion of a tactical nature whatsoever, I assure you).

It was a glorious sunny day yesterday, despite the near-unanimous prediction of rain (a fact which, while admittedly rather nice, didn't help England's attempt to salvage a draw much). I got burned to a frazzle. I look ridiculous. I don't mind, though, as it was a lovely day out, as (test) cricket matches often are. It's a wonderful thing, a five day sporting event. You hardly even have to watch the actual sport. You can read the paper, eat a cucumber sandwich, nip off to the loo, or, indeed, get riotously drunk without there being too much danger of you having missed anything important. The last of these activities, in fact, seemed an immensely popular way of spending the day, with the crowd's singing getting more and more slurred and less and less coherent as the match wore on and the alcohol wore in.

It's a funny thing, crowd behaviour at cricket matches, as this most genteel of sports inches ever closer to the mainstream. Where once stuffy gents in striped blazers and straw hats stroked their chins and ho-hummed along, now cricket crowds are increasingly difficult to distinguish from football crowds, with many of the same songs making the crossover. It's self-evidently good for cricket to grow in popularity and to welcome those from outside its traditional social circles, but I do think the rise in multi-sport chants/songs is to be lamented. Actually, I don't mind all that much, except that it's the most tedious ones that seem to make the jump - the ones heard at every football ground up and down the country, with little or no local or idiosyncratic variations. That's a shame, if you ask me.

Still, my (partial) disappointment with the crowd aside, I do still think it's a grand way to spend a sunday. The Ashes are coming to London next, followed by Birmingham, Leeds and then London again. You should look into it, you really should.