Best to look on bright side in times like these (5 June 1999)

5 June 1999

Best to look on bright side in times like these

Giles Smith

Last Sunday finished cold and grey and as England went out of the cricket World Cup on a technicality - the technicality being that they were not good enough to stay in - the sound of a funeral dirge was heard in the land, or at least in newspaper columns, which is nearly, but not quite, the same thing. The funeral was English cricket's.

Too soon, of course. Cricket awoke on Monday morning. Cricket got up, had breakfast and a shave. Cricket went on. It was just another week. Kent were 47 for seven against Surrey at the close of play on Thursday. There was quite a lot of rain about. The world was entirely unaltered.

This is the deal with English cricket. It finds itself trapped in a perpetual episode of ER. Wearing a neck-brace and a hopeless expression, English cricket comes crashing through the swing-doors on a gurney. Urgent medics jostle and shout until one cries "Clear!" and applies the electric heart-starter. There's an ominous pause - and then the noise of a life-support machine gathering pace. Now dazed, but definitely alive and dribbling, cricket is thrust through to recovery, where it begins its next slow loop back to the swing doors.

The good thing about this is it keeps us, the relatives, in a state of constant concern. We are involved in an endless bedside vigil. How could we turn our backs at a time like this (i.e. all the time)? English cricket should fear the day it is ever in merely normal health. No one will take the slightest bit of notice.

Anyway, look on the bright side: the replica shirts were a big success. I've yet to see anyone wearing one, but according to the manufacturers all 35,000 of those Japanese-produced powder blue numbers have been stripped from the shops. Maybe they're having second thoughts now, but at one point 35,000 people in this country wanted to dress like Alec Stewart. It's worth thinking about.

Something else: if this were a football World Cup, the exit of England would be a cause for relief and celebration; it would mean that England's fans were obliged to go home and the rest of the tournament could then take place without the streets filling up with broken glass. At least that stigma doesn't apply to English cricket. England have gone but, with Pakistan due to meet India, the security issues are only now beginning to hot up. Something here, surely, that the English game can draw consolation from.

England's exit won't kill off English cricket any more than it will kill off the World Cup, the best of which is yet to come. It may well mean the quiet death, at a bookshop near you, of several optimistically tied-in cricket books. And it's not great news, I guess, for Dave Stewart's All Over The World, the tournament's official theme song. But that's about it on the fatality list.

Arriving in shops on Monday, All Over The World managed to be out later than the host nation. I found a copy in my local Our Price, but only by going down on both knees and looking along the bottom shelf. Has any other humble theme tune been the subject of so much adverse pre-publicity? Even before we got to listen to it, the lyric had been reproduced all over the place and roundly derided for a) being an extended non sequitur and b) having no discernible connection with cricket. "As man is tough, woman is strong/The universe is just one song" and so on.

But some of the snappiest numbers of all time look drippy on paper. Surely it would have been more fair-minded of people to reserve judgment, as I did, until they had actually heard Dave Stewart get his voice around, for example, the line "The meek and the gentle will inherit the stars" - and only then to come out and say that it's crap.

In fact, the oddest thing about All Over the World turns out to be its allusion to the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the big Ode to Joy theme, which is heard briefly in the middle and then helps swell the ending. Now, maybe in his day Beethoven was one of Bonn's top-notch all-rounders and a veritable piece of greased lightning in the slips, but if so the nation of his birth didn't much follow him in his enthusiasm. Strange, then, that the official cricket World Cup theme should close on a note of German triumphalism. I'm going to stick my neck out, at this stage, and suggest that the tournament won't end in the same way.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph