SHORT SPORTS THOUGHTS

Yesterday, I started out feeling pretty gloomy, and I even have a half-written piece that grew out of my gloom that I was going to publish here today, but then things suddenly got a lot less gloomy and, reluctant though I am to admit it, this was all because of some sport.

Things brightened up as my day progressed due to being able to listen to another terrific cricket match. I don’t think I’ve been as excited by a fifty over match since, oh, the last one I listened to way back on Sunday which ended up as a nail-biting draw. Yesterday was, however, the day when I realised that I’ll finally have to accept that I’m never going to be a sports fan in the traditional sense, and I’m certainly never going to understand the partisan nature of it, because, despite the team I have followed for so many years getting a much deserved (and not unexpected to anyone who has followed their exploits over the years) drubbing, the result left me with the broadest of grins on my face (not a good look on me…) which I struggled to shake off and quite lifted my spirits on what looked like it might turn out to be a very gloomy evening. I think it’s partly due to the rather brilliant spirit it was played in, making the whole day into the kind of event where only the game of cricket itself can be the winner, and also due to an astonishing performance by Kevin O’Brien which truly was one of the great innings to listen to.

I was even prepared to set aside one of my own slight irritations, that there would be a lot of people once again suddenly rediscovering and exclaiming their strong Irish heritage because of such an event. I used to get very tired, when I lived in the city, of the huge “Wannabe-Irish” community there, a lot of whom had the strongest Essex accents and had only ever set foot on the Emerald Isle on the occasional holiday, having spent their entire lives (including their birth) living elsewhere, suddenly donning the green and gold and drinking a couple of gallons of Guinness of a Saturday night and trying to engage the rest of us with their dubious roguish charms. Now, please understand that I love Ireland and its people, but I can’t abide that kind of pseudo-culture which happens a lot within many ex-pat communities (and alongside them, too - sometimes just because it seems ‘trendier’ to do so) where you have to try so very hard to be more, for example, English than the English and end up living a clichéd vision of Englishness that seems to embrace a lifestyle that the rest of us gave up half a century or more ago and takes every well worn, hackneyed, stereotypical image that the culture may have, and makes a feature of it. There’s nothing at all wrong with being proud of where you come from (if indeed you do - with many of the Wannabes you just could not be sure...), but sometimes it’s healthier to at least try to embrace the now of where you are.

People occasionally tell me that they find cricket dull, but then I find football dull, so it’s just a case of horses for courses, I suppose, and I'm the sort of perverse individual who can even get ridiculously over-excited by a snooker match on TV, so it is hard to tell. I guess my strange relationship with sport will just carry on much as it is, with me enjoying it in my own way and remaining bewildered by a lot of the peripheral twaddle that surrounds it.

Meanwhile, and because a lot of the full enjoyment of these games when you can’t watch it on TV comes from the internet, and after all I said recently, I got myself sucked back into Twitworld. I’m so very shallow that it pains me. Firstly I was tempted by a word game a few days ago, and then by the insightful updates of the TMS team and their references to their pictures of the venues and so forth during their commentaries. On the plus side, getting a reply yesterday morning from one of my broadcasting heroes, Mr Jonathan Agnew, quite made my day. Lovely chap, Mr Agnew, one of the true highlights of the TMS team, and a person who comes across as being so utterly charming and capable of finding the best in everyone that just listening to his voice whenever he comes to the microphone can completely cheer me up.

It’s an unusual name, ‘Agnew’ deriving possibly from the French “d’Agneux” or from a branch of the Irish O’Neils which got translated as “O’Gnew”, so I hope that Mr Agnew was able to take full part in the post-match celebrations, although I wouldn’t expect him to start claiming to be Irish (or French for that matter) any time soon, any more than I would be expected to suddenly decide to hang a Red Dragon in my front window if Wales had a good run in the Footballing World Cup because of some vaguary of my own family history. The Agnew clan motto is apparently  “Consilio non impetu” which translates as “By wisdom, not force” which I think he manages to live up to. However,  I do know that Jonathan Agnew is no relation to the writer David Agnew, because that was a BBC pseudonym that they used to hide authorship on their scripts, but I suppose he might just be a distant cousin of Spiro Agnew, so reviled in the Nixon administration, but if that is the case, I suspect that it was Spiro who bucked the trend to become the black sheep of the clan, because, Mr Jonathan Agnew, like the much missed Mr Nicholas Courtney who died last week, seems to be one of those fellows that nobody can say a bad word about.

Would that I could manage to leave such a legacy myself.