Can England retain the Ashes?
A perfectly balanced person treats each day as an equal, greets each morning with the same philosophical good cheer that he greeted the last and will greet the next. Hello, day, let us see what adventures you send me!
However, those of us who are not Lao Tzu sometimes find that a curious and difficult thing called anticipation gets in the way.
Ever since that extraordinary day at the Brit Oval, when the umpires came out and then so bafflingly went back in again, indicating subtly that the game was over, the match drawn, the series and the Ashes won by England, everyone who cares about cricket — including an awful lot of people who never knew they did — could hardly wait for the moment when it all started again.
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The utter weariness of waiting, the deeply enervating nature of anticipation at this level, was visible in the faces of both captains on the last waiting day of of all. Yesterday, one more question about whether or not it was going to be great and Ricky Ponting and Andrew Flintoff — neither of them noticeably neurotic types, not Flintoff, anyway — would have screamed.
I was reminded of a time when I worked as a cake-packer at a factory in Somerset. My colleague — a pleasant, uncomplex soul, treated with much gentleness by his work-mates — had, to everyone’s amazement, acquired a girlfriend. He was not disposed to minimise his delight. I worked a shift with him — “Eight Battenburgs? “Eight Battenburgs” — and every ten minutes or so, in every pause, in every silence, in every gap between cake box and cake box, he would tell me: “Gunna get moy end away ‘n Sat’day.” Anticipation was eating him up in just the same way.
Is it all media hype? I don’t think so. The media nonsense is a response to acute public need, a desire to see battle recommence, to see if it is even remotely possible for the same extraordinary joust to take place all over again. Well, if it is half as good as last time it will be one of the best series ever.
Everything to do with cricket in the intervening 14½ months has either been about making those months go as fast as possible, or about wondering what any one day means in relation to the big one. Australia have continued their all-conquering ways as if the Ashes defeat had never occurred; England have been a bit of a curate’s egg. So does that mean that things are very good for Australia and very bad for England? Or does it mean that the prize is there for England to seize and Australia are poised at the edge of the abyss?
The questions have been asked a thousand times and the answers, if not the questions, have always been utterly meaningless.
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Waiting is not the same as doing, anticipating has nothing to do with the moment itself. The more you look forward, the less life is like the thing you are looking forward to. How many more miles, Daddy? Are we in Cornwall yet? How many days until Christmas? When will the summer holidays come? It’s all very well to talk about wishing your life away.
Anticipation is part of the human condition. We always expect that tomorrow will somehow be better than today. We choose to live in hope rather than resignation. And so cricket has lived these 14½ months under the shadow of anticipation. Every time a player emerged — Monty Panesar, Alastair Cook — we not only celebrated his triumphs on the day but also savoured in advance what he might be capable of doing against Australia.
There was nothing any cricketer could do without inspiring those little twinges of fear and hope in those who watched. With every injury, we wondered whether or not its sufferer would be better in time for Australia. And sometimes it seems as if this sort of obsessive anticipation will spoil the action itself, and almost always we are wrong.
With the Sydney Olympics in 2000, seven years of anticipation, sniping, backbiting, politics and misery were followed by the greatest 16 days of sporting action the world has seen. London is going through the same process and it will bring about, I have little doubt, the same result.
Waiting does not spoil the thing waited for, not if the thing is worth the waiting. But waiting is always hard and the cricketers have suffered. In the last festival of anticipation, the pre-series press conferences, you could almost taste the urgent desire, not simply for the action to begin but for the waiting to end.
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It is a while since anything in sport was quite as eagerly anticipated as this. Now, thank God, the anticipating is over. Like my friend from the cake factory, England can at last couple with destiny.