The lessons of the longer game

 

I’m off to St David’s this morning to watch the cricket – the same games I watched yesterday, and most of them aren’t even half way through yet. They started at 9 yesterday morning and they’ll go on until 6 tonight and, even then, it’s likely that some won’t be finished and they’ll be called draws.

And everyone will be back again tomorrow for the next round of games, which will carry on until Sunday night and, again, some of them won’t produce results.

There are many who question the sanity of a sport that allows that to happen – it drives the Americans to distraction. There you have extra time in every game, at every level, there has to be a result, they say – otherwise why play?

What’s happening at St David’s is time cricket and at international level it goes on for five days and even then there might not be a winner in the end. And the amazing thing is that cricket people (the purists, anyway) love it. So do the international players – they make their living out of shorter formats of the game, but just about every time you hear one of them being asked, they say Test cricket is what the game is all about.

The Fasken Time Cricket Festival on at St David’s this weekend is school sport, remember, and school sport should be education first, competition second. That’s something I’m always banging on about, although it’s a losing battle. Winning has become so important that, in most codes but especially rugby, school sport has become pretty much professional in its approach.

That applies to cricket too and you see the worst of it in the shorter formats of the game, like T20. It shouldn’t be that way. Cricket has the potential to be a great educational tool, and good schools and coaches see it that way. That’s not to say that winning isn’t important, it is the point of playing, but it’s not the only thing.

Which is the great thing about this festival. It was born out of a recognition that the cricketing education of school boys is incomplete if they are fed a diet of limited overs cricket only. But it also recognises that school cricket can and must teach other lessons too.

The learnings are well articulated in the festival brochure – things like building an innings, bowling an intense spell, and coming back to do it again later; fielding for an entire day, and coming back to do it again tomorrow; and for the captains, the art of declaration – risking loss to give yourself a chance of victory, and buying a wicket by keeping your run-leaking spinner on a while longer. Think of the business lessons in those last two points.

It's a cricket tradition to appreciate your opponents – the players will applaud an opponent when he scores a 50 or 100, in which other game do you get that? And coaches will generally talk about their opponents more that themselves, I heard that in the bar at St David’s last night again.

And that’s another point that the Fasken Festival intentionally makes. The players are told to watch their opponents appreciatively all day and decide who performed the best out of them. And after the day’s play, their captain will present him with a purple cap and they will applaud him. Who cares if at the end of the two days the game is drawn – those little ceremonies alone are victories in my eye.