Fans of long-form sport, rejoice. April is here, and it is our month. Not only does it see the first four-day matches of the county cricket season, it’s also when snooker stages its world championship.
Long-form sport is always the best. A four-day cricket match (five for Tests) has way more scope for drama than a T20. And the snooker at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, where even the shortest match is the best of 19 frames, gives space for the twists and turns that characterise true sporting excitement.
Both games have sought to recruit new fans in recent years by offering shortened versions. Cricket has gone from 50-over games to 20 and now ten (with the 100-ball version in there as well). Snooker has introduced the Shoot Out, where each match is a single frame limited to ten minutes (with time restrictions on individual shots as well). It also plays some tournaments with six reds instead of the usual 15.
Fair enough – old farts like me might call these ‘diminished’ forms of the game, but if they attract new fans then that’s good. Especially youngsters: we all know how tricky it is getting kids to sit still and concentrate for extended periods. But hopefully those new fans will soon progress to the hard stuff (two-innings cricket and multi-session snooker), realising that matches of this length have time to develop plots as gripping as the best novel.
Often T20s are effectively over by the second innings. But when a Test match goes to the last ball, you’ve had an experience from which your fingernails will take several days to recover, and which will stay in your memory forever
You might see one side or player surge ahead, then get pegged back. Or you might see a contest that’s nip and tuck all the way through, before reaching a denouement that reveals which combatant has the bigger heart. Often T20s are effectively over within a couple of overs of the second innings. And even if they go the distance you’ve only had three hours’ entertainment. You’ll probably forget the result by tomorrow. But when a Test match goes to the last ball, you’ve had an experience from which your fingernails will take several days to recover, and which will stay in your memory forever.
It doesn’t even need to have a result. Take the draw at Old Trafford during the 2005 Ashes. I still class this as the most entertaining ticketed event I have ever attended. The tension built and built throughout the final day. I was at the end from which Andrew Flintoff was bowling, and as he turned to start his run-up each time, my section of the crowd was roaring him on with such vigour that I lost my voice. England dismissed the penultimate Aussie with four overs to go, giving us 24 balls against Brett Lee and Glenn McGrath. They survived. My disappointment at the failure to win was soon dwarfed by the knowledge that I had witnessed something truly special. In a way the draw seemed more apt – it had all been about process rather than result. Tantric cricket.
Someone who appreciates the long form of both sports is the snooker player Neal Foulds. The former world number three, who commentates for ITV and Eurosport, loves the way that longer matches allow skill to show through. ‘They take luck out of the equation – you know that the best player is going to win. In the 2004 world final, Ronnie O’Sullivan went 5-0 down to Graeme Dott. In a first-to-nine, he’s going to lose that, you know he is. But in a Crucible final, first to 18, he’s got time to come back and win. Which is exactly what he did.’
The most famous example, of course, was the 1985 final, when Dennis Taylor recovered from 7-0 down to beat Steve Davis on the final black. Such was the excitement that Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward, visiting London at the time, stayed up to watch the whole thing. ‘Joanne was keeping the entire hotel awake,’ recalled Newman, ‘jumping up and down on the coffee table, which I thought was rather tacky. It was an extraordinary match.’
But Foulds knows that skill isn’t the only ingredient in sport. ‘Longer matches are good because they allow character to show through. Who’s going to hold their nerve, who’s going to get over the line?’ Did he prefer these matches as a player? ‘Generally, yes – you knew you could recover from a bad start. Unless you were playing Steve [Davis], that is. You knew he’d annihilate you, so you’d want to play him over ten minutes.’
The most compelling series of Crucible finals were those in the early 1990s, when Stephen Hendry inflicted four defeats on Jimmy White. If a snooker match is a novel, this was a four-volume series in which every possible plot appeared. There was the year Hendry destroyed White 18-5, the year he won comfortably 18-12, the year he came back from a ten-frame deficit to win 18-14, and the year White missed an easy black off the spot in the deciding frame to lose 18-17. What was that about character?
Foulds is also a cricket fan. ‘I’m big on the slow-burning, slowly-unfolding nature of a Test or four-day game. Apart from the action itself you’ve got the end-of-play discussions by the pundits after each day – that adds to it for me.’ And, discussing other sports, he mentions the Tour de France. ‘That’s a whole month – you really see who’s got the stamina then.’
In football, winning a league (dozens of games over nine months) is prized more highly than winning a cup. In golf the recently launched LIV Tour (so-called because it’s played over 54 holes rather than 72) is struggling to attract fans: one recent tournament was beaten in the TV rankings by World’s Funniest Animals.
All in all, despite the shorter attention spans of modern life, it looks as though long-form sport might have a nice long future.
Comments