Dead Badger
State 12th Man
Richard: I don't want to get drawn into a sentence-by-sentence deconstruction, so I won't. At this point, however, your entire argument appears to be that it's always been like this and that's what you like. Well, that's fine as far as it goes, but it's not the most satisfying reasoning, is it? Particularly when you consider that we're talking about a format which has only existed for a few decades. To wiffle on about the purity of cricket and the preservation of elitism, pooh-poohing the possibility of change is completely ridiculous when we're watching guys in coloured uniforms, wearing helmets, playing a format only finalised within most of the players' lifetimes. Times change. You know they have women at the MCC now, too?
Successful sports are broad-based, well balanced and meritocratic; the whole basis of sporting endeavour's appeal is that competitors are tested by their actions, not by their reputation. If you're arguing that opening a sport up will lead to the wrong people winning, you must, in my opinion, be tacitly admitting that something is wrong with your sport. I don't think there's much wrong with cricket; I think it's fascinating in many ways that aren't found in other sports, and I love it for that reason. I don't see how allowing Ireland their chance to take on the big boys mitigates this fascination in the slightest. Indeed, the very fact that a team of supposed has-beens, amateurs and journeymen could take on the might of Pakistan and win to me illustrates that the supposed elite are in fact in grave danger of complacent stagnation.
Is it really your opinion that cricket is so weak, so fragile, so ... contrived, that we can't even permit lesser teams to compete, for fear they might win? Are you so wedded to your ideas of tradition and history that you won't even contemplate the idea that a Test nation might be humbled by a minnow? Even if it means compromising the whole point, the whole purpose of sport? The very definition of "sporting" gives the lie to your argument: "involving risk or willingness to take a risk." You seem so devoted to the ideal of perpetuating what has gone before that you forget that there was a time before this weight of history, a time when all there was was the idea that players should go out, perform to their best, and seek a result. Now you want to relive endlessly the series of yesteryear, but to what purpose? Who else besides you is going to be interested in such a charade?
Your arguments are similar to those used by industrial protectionists, and just as flawed. If cricket, like our industrial champions of old, is so weak as to require such mollycoddling to preserve it, does it really deserve to survive? I think it has more than enough strength, character and history to survive in the modern world; but to do so it has to be opened up to proper competition. You think you advocate protection, but you advocate stagnation. You would have cricket turn into the Rover of the sporting world; a curate's egg of a sport, endlessly re-enacting the glory days while real sportsmen pursue some hideous tiddlywinks-esque pastime like baseball. I'm not having it, I'm really not.
I am absolutely loving this bit about "political nations", though. As if the plain fact of nationhood is just some trifling detail that must inevitably bow to tradition. Cricket transcends piffling matters such as national borders, dontcherknow.
Successful sports are broad-based, well balanced and meritocratic; the whole basis of sporting endeavour's appeal is that competitors are tested by their actions, not by their reputation. If you're arguing that opening a sport up will lead to the wrong people winning, you must, in my opinion, be tacitly admitting that something is wrong with your sport. I don't think there's much wrong with cricket; I think it's fascinating in many ways that aren't found in other sports, and I love it for that reason. I don't see how allowing Ireland their chance to take on the big boys mitigates this fascination in the slightest. Indeed, the very fact that a team of supposed has-beens, amateurs and journeymen could take on the might of Pakistan and win to me illustrates that the supposed elite are in fact in grave danger of complacent stagnation.
Is it really your opinion that cricket is so weak, so fragile, so ... contrived, that we can't even permit lesser teams to compete, for fear they might win? Are you so wedded to your ideas of tradition and history that you won't even contemplate the idea that a Test nation might be humbled by a minnow? Even if it means compromising the whole point, the whole purpose of sport? The very definition of "sporting" gives the lie to your argument: "involving risk or willingness to take a risk." You seem so devoted to the ideal of perpetuating what has gone before that you forget that there was a time before this weight of history, a time when all there was was the idea that players should go out, perform to their best, and seek a result. Now you want to relive endlessly the series of yesteryear, but to what purpose? Who else besides you is going to be interested in such a charade?
Your arguments are similar to those used by industrial protectionists, and just as flawed. If cricket, like our industrial champions of old, is so weak as to require such mollycoddling to preserve it, does it really deserve to survive? I think it has more than enough strength, character and history to survive in the modern world; but to do so it has to be opened up to proper competition. You think you advocate protection, but you advocate stagnation. You would have cricket turn into the Rover of the sporting world; a curate's egg of a sport, endlessly re-enacting the glory days while real sportsmen pursue some hideous tiddlywinks-esque pastime like baseball. I'm not having it, I'm really not.
I am absolutely loving this bit about "political nations", though. As if the plain fact of nationhood is just some trifling detail that must inevitably bow to tradition. Cricket transcends piffling matters such as national borders, dontcherknow.
Doesn't work that way, I'm afraid.
