Soul Limbo to Dancing Girls: The Changing face of Cricket

Growing up in the 1970s, the cricket season was pretty full-on. With very little international cricket taking place in the winter months, and usually none of it shown live on TV, apart from the occasional tuning into BBC Radio’s Test Match Special, my cricket exposure was concertina-ed into just over four months. As a result, I had to make the most of my short English sporting summer.

The same was true of the world’s professional players. With very little first-class cricket on offer in the English off-season, overseas stars flocked to these shores either to represent counties or play as a visiting pro in the club leagues in Lancashire and Yorkshire. I remember the County Championship comprising no fewer than 24 three-day matches interspersed with 40-over games every Sunday afternoon and the 60-over knockout Gillette Cup, which also allowed minor counties the opportunity to claim a major scalp. From 1972, the Championship was reduced to twenty fixtures apiece to make space for the new 55-over Benson and Hedges Cup. Either way, it was pretty congested stuff, especially when you included five or six Test matches and a series of county games against that summer’s international tourists. In peak periods, the calendar squeezed in games seven days a week.

The Championship was never to my knowledge broadcast on the Beeb, but the one-dayers were a staple of my summer viewing. The Wednesday B&H games were out of reach because of those pesky school commitments. However, at the weekends Dad and I were usually to be found ensconced in the living room in thrall to whatever cricket the BBC could shoehorn into its busy schedule of tennis, golf and – my major bugbear - horse racing.

If given its own slot, rather than being a mere patch in the quilt of Grandstand, the jaunty rhythms of Booker T’s ‘Soul Limbo’ provided the clarion call to cricket fans. The ruddy-faced, blazered Peter West or Tony Lewis would introduce proceedings from a balcony somewhere on the circuit and off we’d go. There’d be none of the endless padding of short, sharp interviews and rapid-fire VT highlights of previous games. The teams were still sporting crisp ‘whites’, the now-ubiquitous colourful ‘pyjama’ kits still many years away.

It wasn’t until the late ‘70s that Kerry Packer and World Series Cricket dragged cricket kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Top players could finally earn a living wage which obviated the need to roam the globe all year round to supplement incomes. This was obviously fantastic news for the Chappells, Underwoods and Lloyds of this world, but it all had to be paid for. Inevitably, cricket sold its soul to commercial interests of TV and major sponsors, and the strains of Soul Limbo became gradually more infrequent.

As in any modern sport, the free market led to cricket’s most bankable stars getting richer and the less talented county pro becoming left behind. The pathway was established for the growth of international schedules (surely a good thing), the development of ever-shorter formats (less so) and the marginalisation of anything seen as non-standard, including the English County Championship.

The increasing focus on fast scoring has undoubtedly led to more entertainment, especially in the more traditional first-class game. With fewer deliveries faced, batsmen have to be more creative and innovative when it comes to finding the boundary. These days, any humdrum tailender has to fashion strokes that only Viv Richards would dare attempt forty years ago.

Individual and team totals are expanding constantly, rendering the records books of my youth as outdated as the Famous Five or wooden tennis rackets. It’s not all the result of superior batting. Where once the boundary fence was exactly that - a wooden fence - the outfield perimeter has encroached more and more onto the pitch. The resulting land has been grabbed by digital advertising boards, cables and cameramen.

With shorter boundaries, improved bat technology and rules on fielding restrictions, everything is geared to simplifying the task of batsmen hitting sixes. The IPL, that odious moneyfest of dollars and dancing dolly birds, keeps a rolling counter of ‘maximums’ which seems to be of greater importance than which franchise actually wins the tournament itself. I feel sorry for the bowlers. The rise in Twenty20 cricket has also forced them to innovate: varying pace, disguising slow bouncers, the doosra, even reinventing the lost art of leg-spin, a phoenix from the flames of cricket as played in the twentieth century.

But where does all this breathless evolution leave an old-fashioned fan like me? When in the Nineties Rupert Murdoch’s Sky started hoovering up all the sport’s broadcasting contracts, its endless reserves of cash far outstripping those of the BBC, I found myself becoming increasingly isolated from the sport I loved. I had no desire to splash out on a satellite dish; that would have legitimised the destruction of cricket broadcasting as I knew it. The sport was awash with money, and yet it set out deliberately to reduce the number of people able to watch it. Twenty years later, cricket is no longer a national sport. Only an England Test victory is big enough news to make a national bulletin.

Are there any positives?  Well, now I’m in a digital household. there is obviously a lot more cricket around to follow That is, if I can be arsed to scroll down to find what turn out to be  a ‘vital’ Bangladesh v Pakistan One-Day International, the Cobras playing Scorpions or Royals versus the Super Kings. I seem to have lost the ability to concentrate on TV cricket but, on the fiip side, I am more motivated to get off my backside and see matches in the flesh, as it were.

The ‘live’ experience is so much better than it used to be. My first ever visit to a match with Dad, on a cold May Sunday afternoon in 1975, was to a Chelmsford County Ground boasting just one permanent building (the clubhouse) and seating comprising, with no exaggeration, planks of wood! Tournament success for Essex financed proper plastic seats and actual stands, and more generous funding from the ECB has paid for similar spectator comforts across the county circuit. Cardiff’s Test-quality Sophia Gardens even has decent toilets!

Of course I occasionally come over all nostalgic for Jim Laker and Tom Graveney discussing a Geoff Boycott on-drive, tree-fringed boundaries or a post-match pitch invasion by delirious autograph book-wielding teenagers at Hove. Such paltry pleasures were part of my childhood. However, as long as the game splutters on, I shall support the enduring benefits of first-class cricket and the county system. I’m not totally antipathetic to Twenty20 but shall fervently man the barricades (online at least) to keep the massing forces of T20 and – heaven forbid! – ‘the 100’ and the dreaded T10 at bay, and keep the fires of my cricket enthusiasm burning for the rest of my life. It’s survived the introduction to the vocabulary of Duckworth-Lewis, the ‘Manhattan’, economy rates, Power Plays, DRS and ‘Snicko’, so not all is lost. Cue Booker T….