Wimpish new world lurks beyond the boundary (8 June 1999)

8 June 1999

Wimpish new world lurks beyond the boundary

Sybil Ruscoe

Slough, John Betjeman's least favourite town, is an unlikely place to discover what might be wrong with English cricket. But on Sunday, when rain stopped television coverage from Headingley, I found myself trapped in the crowds at a Slough retail park, where I experienced a moment of enlightenment - sporting or spiritual, I cannot say.

At this modern temple to consumerism, I saw hundreds of men spending the afternoon worshipping at the altar of gardening and DIY. The bra-less Charlie Dimmock, the jovial Alan Titchmarsh and the ever-smiling Carol Smillie filling our TV screens with wondrous garden and dining-room make-overs have a lot to answer for.

A whole generation of our menfolk has been seduced away from the cricket field and is now meekly confined to the home and garden. They choose to spend their precious weekends pondering over gloss and emulsion. They worry over wisteria and hardy annuals, instead of perfecting their leg-breaks and cover-drives.

Bullied by four decades of feminism, our men have gone soft. They have gone through a kind of metamorphosis - from hard-working lads to quiche-baking 'new men' and from there to painting and gardening wimps.

Where once they built an empire of canals, railways and iron bridges, they now erect patios, garden sheds and bookshelves. You cannot blame them entirely, of course. The decline of heavy industry - the steel mills and the mines - has denied modern man the uniting, macho, camaraderie of factory life, the cradle of sporting endeavour.

Men are now left to lonely hours tapping away at computer keyboards or dull days of driving up and down the motorways, cocooned in company cars, selling advertising space and double-glazing.

But women must shoulder a share of the blame. Where once they belonged to the if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em generation and put on their pinafores to make the cricket teas, they now demand that the blokes stay at home on Saturdays and Sundays to re-paint the spare bedroom and keep an eye on the coals at the family barbecue.

Years of political correctness in the classroom have also forced our schoolchildren to swap their bats and pads and games afternoons for domestic science kitchens and sewing machines.

There is also the weather. It was the English rain that drove me to Slough in the first place.

And last week, returning from the Scotland v New Zealand game in Edinburgh - mercifully unaffected by rain - I made a detour to Strathallan School, near Perth, where a promising schoolboy batsman had managed to face only 15 balls so far this season due to the inclement weather.

On the journey home, the skies over Manchester - Atherton and Cardus country - were filthy. On the M6, a stone's throw from Edgbaston, forbidding thunderclouds rolled across the Midlands. Floods threatened New Road in Worcester and it was all gloom in Gloucester, where latter day

W G Graces and Wally Hammonds would have been kicking their heels in dank pavilions.

We may have invented cricket, but how can we reasonably hope to match the Aussies and South Africans, the Indians and Pakistanis, with a climate that prevents us from playing very often?

But, like the shipping forecast that infuriatingly interrupts Radio Four's Test Match Special, I digress.

The abandonment of the playing field for the garden lawn and the greenhouse might have been great for feminism and shares in B & Q, but it is a disaster for English cricket.

How can the game hope to be healthy, faced with such domestic competition? If the men won't come out to play on a summer Sunday, the game is doomed.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph