How are fans of fading rockers supposed to forget how old they are without a drink to dull the sad truth?
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
MIDDLECLASS South Africans walk only when driving isn’t an option. Their cars are their kings. In the most unequal society on earth economically, according to the World Bank, what little public transport exists is used by the underclasses. Walking? That’s for the properly poor. Yet there the well-heeled were in Cape Town’s city centre on the evening of February 7, parking their most precious possessions and walking — yes, walking — several kilometres to join the rest of the 51,954 gathering to be enraptured by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal drinking deeply from the font of mutual admiration.
“The Match in Africa” at Cape Town Stadium, an exhibition event that revealed to the watching world how much aptitude for playing tennis Bill Gates and Trevor Noah absolutely do not have, raised USD3.5-million for charity. Perhaps that’s what gave the record crowd, for any tennis match anywhere, licence to luxuriate smugly in their imaginary First World experience here on the sharp end of the impoverished dark continent.
While that was happening, not quite three kilometres away in the entertainment district, one of South Africa’s premier rock groups took to the stage at the Jagger Lounge. At least, Wonderboom used to be one of the country’s best bands. If you’re a South African of a certain age and demographic Wonderboom’s music still hits the spot. Hard, happily. Thing is, they’ve been at it since 1996. Cito, the frontman, turns 46 in July. The kids can see the wrinkles in his leather trousers. Not that they were any kids in attendance. Nor many of their parents. An audience of 12 turned up. Embarrassed emptiness was all around, even in a setting with a capacity of only 105, and even though the band did their bit and belted out their hits — and an encore — one more time with feeling.
Seven weeks on, who’s smug now? The dismal dozen plus the four Wonderboomers and the six or so venue staff add up to comfortably fewer than the 50 people that public gatherings in South Africa have been restricted to by Coronavirus regulations. Unlike the tennis, were the gig scheduled now it would go ahead. Not quite. The Jagger Lounge has, like so many others, shuttered itself. The few such places that remain open cannot serve alcohol after 6pm. How are fans of fading rockers supposed to forget how old they are without a drink to dull the sad truth?
Do not frown on such flippancy, for soon seriousness is likely engulf us all. The closure and cancellation of almost everything we hold dear — though, strangely, not of Aussie rules football *, perhaps because it follows no rules the uninitiated understand — haunts cricket already. The start of the IPL, originally March 29, has been postponed to April 15. That seems hopelessly optimistic considering how the marauding virus has spread around the world since that decision was taken on March 13. The county championship was to have begun on April 12, but now the English season won’t get going until May 28 at the earliest and the championship seems likely not to be played at all. Even the Sheffield Shield, due to start on October 10, cannot be considered safe.
No international matches remain on the schedule before April 26, when Belgium are to host Luxembourg at the Royal Brussels Cricket Ground in the first of two T20s. The second game is meant to follow four hours after the series starts. Just weeks ago, much of the world according to cricket wouldn’t have noticed these fixtures. After suspending your disbelief about them being played, imagine the exponential increase in the asking price of the broadcast rights. Consider the clamour to see real, live international matches at a ground that has a capacity of 1,500. That’s comfortably big enough to host a Wonderboom concert these days, but certainly not for the only games in any town.
Because that’s what this is all about: how we watch cricket. There are vast differences between being at a ground on your own with only the match for company, alone watching on television, being part of a group of friends at a packed ground, and in a television audience of more or less 12 in a bar not afflicted by ageing rockers and their fans. Unless they’re also watching the cricket. Do we cheer if we’re the only spectator in a stand? Or if we’re in solitary communion with our television? Probably not. Does being in a crowd make us more likely to voice our appreciation for the players’ exploits? Does the same apply in a busy bar, especially after a few drinks? Likely yes. A man walks into that bar and asks, “Do you have Corona?” He means not the virus but the bland Mexican beer.
More flippancy. Because the seriousness is here: none of the ways in which we watch cricket will be relevant for months, at least. Because there isn’t going to be any cricket to watch, maybe until this annus wretched has run its course. Maybe longer. We will be reduced to remembering how we used to watch cricket, helped by rebroadcasts of matches we have already watched. Or not helped. It is impossible to see with fresh eyes what your brain has long since analysed and consigned to memory. There cannot be excitement, or debates about who is going to do what next, or marvelling about the unscripted excellence of a stroke, delivery, catch, runout, or even an umpire’s decision. Everything will have been scripted, and we will know our lines depressingly well.
The macabre will stalk our hunger of cricket. If we take to staving off the pangs by reading, we could do worse than pick up a copy of José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte. In English, that’s Death with Interruptions. Or, as it has been published in the UK, Death at Intervals. It’s a fittingly dark satire about a country in which people who should, by all that’s natural, die instead suddenly stop dying. And continue not dying. At first, this is celebrated as a miracle. But soon hospitals, old age homes, undertakers, insurance companies and religious orders are stricken with worry. What are they to do with scores, hundreds, thousands of the undead taking up space and exhausting resources? Families saddled with decrepit but not dead elders ask the same questions. Religious orders are terrified. How can they demand adherence to their tenets as the price for a better afterlife if this life never ends? Then someone pays criminals to take a relative who should be dead, but isn’t, to a neighbouring country. Hey presto, they duly die. Soon the government is paying organised crime gangs to ferry those who should be dead across the borders. Then death comes back to work. With a twist: she — yes, death is a woman — will forewarn her victims. In writing. Cue mass panic. It’s a brilliantly woven story, much like the best Test matches. And all the more apposite because we know that Covid-19 will kill many. Not for them the fiction of death suspended, postponed, or promised. Among the dead will be those who have sat singularly in a stand, or kept their own counsel with their televisions, or been in a throng of friends among thousands, or in a noisy bar arguing over who should or shouldn’t bowl the next over.
If we’re lucky, none of us or our friends will be among them. But we should prepare ourselves for the other possibility. For some still alive and well, it’s over. Time has been called. They will never watch cricket again.
* The AFL season has since been suspended.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 