By teaching kids about patience, forbearance and the notion of delayed gratification, the game is more important than ever in a world where attention spans are shrinking
Could not agree more with the excellent Matthew Syed which is why we are ‘taking a chance’ and posting his article in full (am a Times Subscriber) as sometimes articles are just too important to be hidden behind a paywall!
Times Article
The Times reported on Monday that Ed Balls is heading a campaign for cricket to be a stronger presence in state schools. Balls says that this should be the government’s top sporting priority. Wrong. This shouldn’t just be the top sporting priority, but the top priority, full stop. This is the single most important issue facing Sir Keir Starmer, with or without his designer glasses, and the nation more generally. The future of England, perhaps civilisation, hinges on it.
Not T20 cricket, mind you. Sure, get kids to play a short form of the game to spark their curiosity. Get them to understand that standing in the field at long leg, with nothing to do most of the time, is the greatest possible training for the patience that is disappearing from our world. The real prize, though, is a generation of kids who, through the gateway of school cricket, cultivate a love of the highest form of the game: Test matches. A format in which nothing happens for hours at a stretch but you learn to think about time itself in a new way.
I remember tuning into BBC2 during half-terms with Dad, and Peter West coming on at 10.50am to introduce the “action” and then getting stupendously bored for the first hour or two of play, utterly bemused that my beloved father liked this stuff, going out into the garden to have a few bowls at my older brother, then coming back in to discover the riveting news that Geoffrey Boycott was still on single figures and Chris Tavaré — walking back and forth, his face bathed in concentration, “like a stork approaching a watering hole full of crocs”, as one scribe put it — wasn’t yet off the mark.
In the afternoon we’d drive over to Finchampstead Ridges, Berkshire, for a walk and Dad would put on Test Match Special in the car to keep track of the latest non-action and even, at times, carry a portable wireless to stay abreast of “happenings”. Then we’d return home and the telly would go on in the background as we had tea, the tones of the great Richie Benaud forming the backdrop to family conversation, before someone would jump up and say: “Oh my God, Boycott’s out!” and we’d rush in front of the box to watch the replay. Leg-before — but did it pitch outside leg stump?
And here’s the thing: despite the long periods of boredom — in fact, because of them — we learnt something else too. If you persevere with a Test match, put up with the rain delays, endure the absurd gaps between each delivery, you discover that the contest can get rather exciting if the match is still in the balance on the fifth day. Indeed, not only exciting but also compulsive. You discover that the waits, the pauses, the gaps in play, create a rhythm that you hadn’t quite noticed, forming a momentum, like the greatest of novels, towards a climax unmatched in other forms of entertainment.
Patience is what I am getting at here: the prerequisite to so much of value in life. Reading Tolstoy, I suggest, is a different aesthetic experience to watching a sequence of dopamine-optimised TikTok shorts, but isn’t this what makes his novels a high point of civilisation? The long passages where sod all happens aren’t incidental to the plot; they are the plot. Likewise, Wagner’s Ring Cycle is somewhat longer than a pop jingle and there are moments (let’s be honest) where one isn’t excited or titillated. But isn’t this what permits one to lose oneself in its deeper rhythms and to experience moments of epiphany that enhance life itself?
And this is really my point: if we inject a love of Test cricket into the bloodstream of kids — any kids, all kids — we change everything. Everything. This isn’t just a game, it is the greatest incubator of extended time horizons, attention spans, forbearance. There’s an episode of Inspector Morse where John Thaw and Kevin Whately solve a complex murder while listening, variously, to TMS (Lewis’s choice) and Haydn (Morse’s choice). Colin Dexter was a wise chap. He was portraying the truth that great detection, great music and great sport emerge from the same characteristic: taking things slowly, delaying gratification, playing the long game. All things we’re losing.
And while we’re at it, let’s bring Test matches back on to the Beeb. Then cut the number of TV channels from 500 to three. And ban iPads too. That way kids would have no option but to watch Tests (or endure repeats of Dallas on ITV, which was the only other choice back in the day). I’m only half-joking. I can’t be alone in thinking that Instagram, Snapchat and the rest haven’t done much for our kids beyond making them depressed, manic and more prone to mental illness — and who’s surprised when online life is a 100mph, adrenaline-fuelled purgatory? It’s exhausting just to think about it.
Test cricket, in this context, is a balm, a sanctuary, a way of training young (and older) minds to think in “long time”, as opposed to 30-second soundbites. Give our kids this gift and we give them something more precious than diamonds. Indeed, let me finish with a thought: the rise of this nation as a great power hinged on the closet sadist who invented a game where you can slog it out for five days without either team winning. Sociologists such as Max Weber bang on about the Protestant work ethic, Puritanism and the religious virtues of self-restraint. I say: Pah! It was the cricket what done it!