Cricket
“Those are all cricketers!” -Monty Python’s Flying Circus
In the grand old days, football management sims were just glorified spreadsheets, rows of numbers about how good your players were giving way to a screenshot of a football pitch on which would occasionally flash such bulletins as “HARTLEP’L 1 CREWE A 0″ to the aural accompaniment of frenzied static which, as we all know, is what cheering sounded like back then.
Watching cricket on TV is still like this. It is a long, patient, inert shot of a cricket ground, along the bottom of which a statistical tickertape scrolls, informing us that 4, 19, 2, 0, 192-7, 33, that’s Numberwang! They might as well substitute the footage with a Knightmare-like graphic of your own decomposing face, age eating away at your once youthful looks and sallowing your sunken cheeks to dust. Allow me, therefore, to propose a maxim.
Any activity which is not immediately separable from its scoring mechanics is not a sport, but merely a game.
By this I mean that if you can’t imagine playing it without keeping track of the score then it isn’t a sport. It would be mental, for example, to play Monopoly without money. Darts sans scoring is just some guy throwing stuff at a wall. Kids can happily play football or rugby or basketball without keeping scores. But not cricket, though. A casual game of pick-up cricket wouldn’t make any sense.
Le it be noted that the mere relegation of an activity to the realm of games does not necessarily entail its worthlessness. Cricket is worthless not simply because it’s a game, but because it is an affectation. It has to be. There’s no beauty in it, just the same three or four things happening over and over again for hours on end. Nothing different could ever happen. Nothing different ever will. There will be no genius of cricket, no revolutionaries, just people who are slightly better or slightly worse at doing the same old thing. There’s no aspiration, no innocence, nothing even remotely human. Machines could play it. Cricket, in short, is anti-sport. And I, for one, hate it.