Like many I will look back on last Sunday’s one-day cricket match between Australia and South Africa as the best I’ve ever seen. When first the 50-over, one-day match came into being I was reactionary, along with most of those of my generation who have grown up with the established form of the game: two innings for each side and the only guaranteed result being a draw. When all else fails in conventional cricket, a draw becomes the solemn and required alternative to winning or losing. I can think of no other game where competitors may deliberately play for no result. It takes Englishmen to think up so charitable and gentlemanly a denouement.
And like most of my generation I gradually became an enthusiastic follower of the 50-overs version of cricket, where the only draw possible is when the two sides end up with exactly the same scores. A set of new laws has had to be introduced, to include allowing a maximum of 10 overs for any bowler, fielding restrictions and others. Last Sunday’s match was a thrilling salute to this variation of the traditional game. As commentator Tony Greig said, it will go down as the greatest 50-overs match ever played. With 872 runs scored off just over 600 balls bowled, he wasn’t wrong.
I don’t attend 50-over matches as I once used to. On television the gross commercialism which attends them, and their counterparts in other sports, is bad enough. But at home at least you have a smidgeon of control. You can hit the mute button when they play cretin-friendly jingles over the speakers or do some quick channel-surfing while the commercials are on. The television coverage gives you the game from many angles. Often, too many angles what with the endless replays of catches or mighty strokes.
Television sports coverage has become disagreeable, principally as a result of its commentators and the plethora of statistical information that someone has decided is a necessary adjunct to the action. The latter usually comes at the viewer in a continual stream of figures in a vivid captioning along the bottom of the screen.
This extraordinarily invasive idea seems to have been taken directly from the now quite unwatchable Sky News, origin of nearly all the tackiest of tabloid television protocols. If something’s cheap and nasty, 10 to one they first did it on one of Rupert Murdoch’s channels, in this case, Sky Sport. SuperSport seems to be aping the Murdoch feed-the-dummies methods with enthusiasm.
Add to this an inbred clique of commentators who, with the exception of one or two, are quite incapable of keeping their mouths shut for more then three seconds. Worst of these is SuperSport’s babbler supreme, Mike Haysman, who is in the terminal stages of some insatiable mutation of CDD — Commentator’s Drivel Disease. Haysman believes that when he’s on the microphone viewers are served up with a non-stop description and analysis of every ball, stroke or act of fielding; that the inner thoughts of the players be revealed and unravelled; that viewers have a need to hear him and an Australian fellow-commentator gobble on at each other like a couple of demented turkeys. That’s all they do: try to astonish each other. Please will some kind soul put them out of our misery.
Another subject to round off. I was going through a Mail & Guardian of a few weeks ago when my eye caught the engaging headline, ‘Fanny People”. It was to a very funny Body Language piece, written by Helen Walne and in which she told of a group of 20 women who got together for a ‘Fanny Party”. One by one the women went into a bedroom and took close-up photographs of their ‘vaginas”. After the film has been developed and printed the ladies got together again to admire and compare the results. A case of Fanny Galore?
A most commendable idea. There should be gender equality when it comes to knowing what one’s reproductive undercarriage looks like. From boarding schools and locker rooms we males have long (and short) since seen enough of each other’s dried-fruit arrangements to make this sort of photographic enterprise redundant.
If these 20 women feel the need for extra education about their private parts, they could as well begin by knowing them by their assigned names. Walne’s piece forwarded a basic anatomical misunderstanding. She said the women had photographed their vaginas when in fact it was their vulvas that they’d been capturing on film. Vulvas are the external part of the female sexual, reproductive and urinary gear. The vagina is a closed subject, an inner canal the visual interrogation of which requires the use of something like a speculum. The most Walne and the lasses could have photographed were the entrances to their vaginas. Depth of field didn’t come in it.
Sorry to have to be a male, leaping with chauvinist glee as he points out this confusion. There are, of course, crude words to describe the whole V-plus-V combination, but this is hardly the place to display them. Doubtless, one of them is currently being muttered about me.