Friday, July 17, 2009

Progress

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a great sports fan but one sport I do enjoy is cricket - and particularly test match cricket. As such, one of the sporting events I look forward to most is the Ashes series - the latest of which is currently underway.

My love of cricket was inspired by an uncle who used to tell me about how he would listen to the test matches on the radio. Of course, growing up in the sixties and seventies I was fortunate to be able to watch the test matches live on BBC television and it was through that medium that I developed the love of the game and all its subtleties, intricacies and strange terminology - third man, mid-off, short leg, covers, yorker, wrong 'un and so on.

Thirty years later I'm reduced to listening to the Ashes test via the Internet and I'm no better off than my uncle was in the forties.

2 comments:

Pavlov's Cat said...

We do indeed seem to be going backwards in some areas, when you consider we actually sent a man to walk on the moon 50 years ago yesterday.

As an aside, a friends dad introduced me to the delight of watching the Test's on TV with the volume down, whilst listening to Test Match Special, Happy Days.

Stan said...

I used to do that occasionally - the main benefit was that you'd learn what the game more quickly. The TV commentators would just say things like "great shot" or "driven through the covers" - but the TMS commentators would say things like "steered away through backward point" or "driven to the extra cover boundary". The extra detail from the TMS commentator team plus the visuals was always more useful.