Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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Couldn’t imagine. I played cricket to a high level at school. At one point, I represented four teams. These were one-day games. A few overs. A few hours to compete. Half a Saturday or weekday evening lost to the game. Exhausting. Couldn’t get over the powerlessness of cricket. During the many hours you play, you have a limited amount of time to have a direct impact. You may bowl five or ten overs. Can’t bowl all of them. If you’re batting and you’re bowled out, you’re out. No second chance. Better make the most of your time. The rest of the time you’re either fielding while teammates are bowling or sitting in the pavilion watching the game while your teammates are batting. If you don’t seize your moment with bat or with ball, you spend a lot of time limply thinking about what could have been, while trying to motivate your teammates to seize their moments. Too much damn time to think. Couldn’t imagine having to do it for five days.

For the viewer, bliss. A friend for five days. You end your week on a high. In those days, a Test match in England started on a Thursday (the build-up), reached its peak over the weekend (when you could go to see it live if you had been working during the week) and, if you were lucky, it would reach a conclusion on the Monday (a great way to start the new week). A novel. A box set. For the live audience, unpredictable. They don’t know what they’ll get. Five days can at times blend into one. But the 1984 series was different. The games didn’t blend. The results were predictable, but the drama within the games was unpredictable.