…..the backlash against Johnny Come Lately cricket fans start?
Its begining to feel like football became after Italia ’90 and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. All these people talking excitedly about ‘Freddy’ – I can’t believe they all knew who he was last year. All these people making sure you know they are really desperate to know the Test score. Yeah right. I bet you were all Arsenal fans three years ago.
And how many ‘fans’ does the England rugby union team have now? Remember ‘Johnny’?
Fear not old school cricket lovers – it won’t last. As the fate of the England rugby union team shows – a few setbacks will see off the fairweather fans and if that doesn’t happen we are going to stop them watching anyway.
As one of the few grumpy Northerners in the sports press puts it today:
So successfully has cricket reinvented itself as a television sport that one fears for its immediate future once it leaves terrestrial screens. It is not that Sky won’t make a good job of future Tests – they will. But the reason everybody has been talking about cricket this summer is that everybody has been watching it. Even people who didn’t realise they liked cricket have been glued to the unmissable action from four highly competitive matches, creating and sustaining the sort of communality that normally occurs only during a football World Cup. That will not happen when the game is available only on a satellite channel.
