Who’s batting? What’s the pitch doing? Anyone know the score from Brisbane? Just a few years ago, to learn the overnight score from a cricket match being played in Australia you had to endure a sleepless night worrying if some hapless Brit had been shamed by a foreigner under the Queensland sun . . . No, wait! That’s not the Test match, that’s Jan Leeming being jeered by David Gest in I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
To get the overnight score you had to make a telephone call, before leaving for work, to your Aussie uncle in Sydney, who would relay the news of the Australia batsmen’s latest triumphs at the crease with varying degrees of sarcasm, depending on how good a lunch he’d had.
Or you could stay up all night with your ear to a radio listening to John Arlott (“A cut so late as to be positively posthumous”), with a pencil being tapped on the side of the commentator’s microphone to simulate the sound of leather on willow; all the while promising your partner in bed that you would turn the radio off at the end of the next over, in two minutes — these being Test-match-fan minutes, each lasting six hours.
Then came satellite television, enabling fans in England to assist their team’s captain Down Under by yelling tactical advice at the TV screen.
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Now you can even wake to a video podcast from The Times’s chief cricket writer, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, a video diary from Matthew Hoggard and a podcast from Shane Warne (but no haircare tips).
But the key thing, as all true cricket fans know, is that it doesn’t matter who comes out on top, it’s the quality of the cricket that counts. So may the best team win (ha-ha-ha! Just our little joke!).