Neo-Files

Are you at the edge of your seat wondering what Flintoff can do next? Are you following every bowl from the Oval?

Me neither.

The idea that cricket is the new football has recently been rammed forward by lazy stupid sports writers, though this may have just a little to do with England’s football team going through a self-inflicted nadir. “Are you Scotland in disguise?” the Irish fans chanted in a beautifully cruel double-whammy of terrace-wit as they beat their neighbours for the first time at home since 1927.

Northern Ireland are no giants of football, and their defeat has cast the English into a not-so-rare bout of self-mutilation, gorging themselves on hatred of Beckham, Rooney or Sven's tactics. So far so very turnip-like behaviour. The English you see have an appointment with greatness and are in a state of perpetual disappointment that a) the world didn’t emboss the invitation and b) somebody forgot to deliver it. This is the starting point and end-point for every sad little boys dream from Hoxton to Harwich. And so the result from St Ninian’s Park may have put paid to England’s qualification for the World Cup which they’d decided they were to win in Germany next year - to the rest of the footballing world's general bemusement.

They are the ultimate glory-hunters.

So cricket we are told is the new football, though of course its English Cricket that’s to replace English Football as the ‘national’ game/obsession. Sport you see - is taken very seriously in England. It replaces sex food and politics – which are trivial demeaning pursuits as a focus for serious attention (and no having Ainsley Harriot and that guy who went to France for a bit don’t count). This phenomenon - if ever doubted - can be verified by reference to John Major, who, incredibly, became Prime Minister in 1990, despite, or perhaps because he said his favourite restaurant was Little Chef. That Major was a big cricket fan and regularly was recorded in the papers wearing ‘whites’ and ‘pads’ confirms all of my beliefs about the game and our erstwhile leader.

Only the English could make winning the Olympics – the exemplar of universalist humanism – into an excuse to be racist towards the French. And only the English – a people who have made emotional retardation into a national emblem - could get THIS exited about cricket, a ‘sport’ that is punctuated by cups of tea. Obviously there is a relationship between this kind of emotional restraint and the now continual bubbling over of collective experience that we are all dragged into, as if to say: “Is your stiff upper lip trembling now!” Pace Diana, Henman Hill, Live 8, Beckham’s metatarsal, Steve Fucking Redgrave, those two girls who got murdered and so on and on and on.

Just as I begin to think this is all a bit negative and why don’t I really just get up to speed with what an ‘over’ is, I’m told that the very first John Peel Day will take place on Thursday October 13th.