Testing time for Sky

With 2004’s multinational motley done, dusted and delivered, other activities can bloom. The jingo-jangle palaver and babel of the Olympics, European soccer, and the Ryder Cup are now consigned to musty files, and a happy new year is herald to less hyperbole and ballyhoo. The world athletics gala at Helsinki in August will work up a passing tizz as to who’s on drugs or not, and whether Kelly Holmes will be fit or bothered enough to make the starting line or, indeed, if Paula Radcliffe is ditto enough to make the Finnish finishing line. The new year’s three most delectable asterisks for your diary warm the midsummer: rugby’s British Lions Tests in New Zealand (25 June–9 July); golf’s Open at its ancestral St Andrews home (14–17 July); and cricket’s lustily awaited Ashes challenge between England and Australia (21 July–12 September).

For stay-at-homes, the rugby will be televised exclusively on Sky; the Open on BBC; and the cricket live only on Channel 4. Fair shares: one subscriber-satellite channel and two ‘free’ terrestrial channels. Enjoy. Particularly because, in the case of cricket anyway, 2005 will be the last summer that the nation’s dishless millions will be able to watch live transmissions of England’s Test matches. The England and Wales Cricket Board’s Christmas present was the £200 million deal to allow Mr Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster exclusive live rights to all England’s home Test matches for the next five years. It not only represents the end of Channel 4’s breezily bright seven-year coverage of home Tests, but a sad finis to terrestrial ‘free’ television’s 66-year-old involvement — the fledgling BBC first relayed fuzzy live pictures from the Lord’s Test of 1938.

Since then televised cricket must have kindled, fired, inspired and nurtured the game’s appeal for incalculable numbers of successive generations.