Ben Stokes and his team save us from banality of TikTok and YouTube

Times

3 days ago

It's said that Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum are saving Test cricket. I disagree. These two heroes are saving civilisation. They're saving it from short-form cricket, short-form sport, short attention spans, instant gratification, TikTok, YouTube shorts, dopamine-optimised trivia, fast food that fills you up in ten seconds but leaves you unsatisfied, overly salinated and feeling slightly ill.
I'm regularly told that sport extending over five hours, let alone five days — and where you might not even get a winner — is out of kilter with the spirit of our times. People don't want sport where the two teams stop for lunch and little happens for minutes at a time. But periods of boredom are the point of Test cricket, along with the patience required to stick with it, to soak it up and to realise that — not unlike reading Tolstoy or listening to Wagner — that those lulls conspire to create a climax unreachable in shorter, more superficial forms of sport or, for that matter, culture.
What a contest this was (with Headingley, once again, the crucible for England's heroics) from the brave decision to put India into bat, to that moment on day two when India were 430 for three and Stokes was (according to some) looking decidedly foolish, to the missed catches, Ben Duckett's reverse-sweeping, Jasprit Bumrah at times looking unplayable, Ollie Pope's century, Zak Crawley's determination, and Rishabh Pant's two hundreds. Across all of this, the complexion of the match shifted imperceptibly from hour to hour, before, on that final day, England dared to believe not that they could win but that they absolutely would.
I wish I could bottle the psychology of this England side and transfer it into hearts and minds up and down the nation. It's not so much self-belief as sheer derring-do. They are not arrogant. They are not conceited. I doubt they'd describe themselves as God's gift to cricket or anything else. It's more that they see Test cricket as an adventure, a thing to explore with heart and courage, to perhaps risk failure but give it everything along the way. Against India in Rajkot last year, Duckett was asked what kind of target England could realistically chase down and he replied: 'The more the better.' Wonderful.
We're in the middle of a political debate about the rising cost of welfare, about the thousands of new people every week joining the ranks of those claiming benefits. How I wish for a sea change in attitudes whereby people stop talking about all the things they can't do, daren't do, are unable to do, and instead ponder the things they can.
Left-wingers will doubtless say it's glib, perhaps even insulting, to ask people to take a leaf out the book of Stokes, McCullum, et al. I disagree. Sure, life is about luck, opportunity and the rest but it's also a state of mind (or, as Talk Talk put it in their finest song, Life's What You Make It). How thrilling to see England's body language on the second day, when doubters were writing them off, still believing they could win. As Stokes put it, thrillingly: 'Every session, we turned up with the attitude that we could blow this match apart.' Put this on billboards across every school in the nation.
This is why I love this form of the sport. I love the tempo, the brilliant writing in the papers, the wonderful vicariousness of going home from work on the Tube and then catching up with the score when you regain a signal. I also hugely miss the days when I'd watch with my late father on the telly in the morning and then jump in the car for a day out for a picnic in Dinton Pastures and he'd bring along the radio so we could keep track of Test Match Special. 'What's the score?', a passer-by would ask. 'Boycott's just gone,' we'd reply or 'Gower's on fifty'. These weren't just conversations; they were the gossamer threads connecting strangers to that abstraction we call society.
Don't get me wrong. I should perhaps say that I like the short-form stuff too. I get a Maccy D's from time to time (breakfast muffin with a hash brown). I scroll through TikTok every now and again. T20 can be gripping (one thinks of the 2016 World Cup final between England and West Indies — we may not have won, but the contest was unforgettable). Conan Doyle's short stories are a treat to read and In My Life by The Beatles is only two minutes, 27 seconds long but packs in more beauty and truth than a hundred longer, more cloying pieces of music. I'd never fetishise length or duration for its own sake.
But what should worry us is when intricate, complex institutions like Test cricket start to disappear altogether, or when they become like besieged islands in a sea of ephemera. 'O gentle son, Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper Sprinkle cool patience,' wrote Shakespeare in act three, scene four of Hamlet. They are words that will resonate with anyone who stuck with this magnificent contest across five enthralling days. Roll on Edgbaston.