Did anyone else catch the BBC 2 Documentary last night?
Had some nice early footage in it I thought - and very good to see the three Yorkshire Ashes Winning captains given their due attention....
A six part series would have done it justice. It was good and hopefully wetted the appetite of the casual watcher or dare I say, the generation who never knew cricket existed before 2005. To us lot on here who know everything about cricket and a little bit more on top, it left out great chunks of history and merely scratched the surface.
Must be good for cricket that a programme like that is given time on mainstream tv even if it's not prime time.
You can't be expected to cover the history of cricket in an hour - and it obviously concentrated on those eras of which the BBC own footage, but I thought it was intelligent and accessible - and featured some new faces and voices and not just the tired little clique we see endlessly on Sky...
Next weeks episode about cricket in the West Indies could be interesting.
An interesting if very selective coverage of the evolution of the game in England.
A somewhat narrow view of how the class structure defined the growth of the game in the 18th and 19th century,and not sufficient emphasis on how it grew to become our national summer sport in all echelons of society.
Obviously the constraints of time meant much of relevance was omitted,but no doubt some would have learned from it and have a wider perspective of the game's appreal.
I thought it unbalanced in its central hypothesis that the influence on the game of Botham and, even less sustainably, Pieterson, could be compared with that of W G Grace.
This fascinating four-part series provides a detailed social history of the four featured countries, whose very different cricketing cultures created the modern game. As inventors of the sport the English are first up, and the origins of the game and its subsequent export around the Empire are explored. At first, the sport, like the country, was divided by class, with the upper- class amateurs (they could afford not to be paid to play) battling with the working-class professionals for control of the sport. The entertaining exploits of W. G. Grace poster boy for the amateurs are recounted here; his thirst for shameless expenses fiddling makes todays MPs look like models of virtue. With rare and archive footage, as well as contributions from leading players past and present, there is plenty here for cricket-lovers.
Cricinfo
Is English cricket struggling to leave its past behind, or, with the advent of Twenty20, forgetting its history a little too quickly? Giles Smith tries to find some answers in his review of the BBC documentary The Empire of Cricket in the Times. Watch out for the interesting anecdote on the treatment meted out to WG Grace for his 'amateur' participation in an international tour.
The narrative arc seemed fairly typical for an English sport: invented it, lost it, never quite got over it. Here's my tip - don't bother coming up with a sport. Wait for someone else in another country to do it. Then casually perfect it while they're still sitting in leather chairs and hugging themselves about how clever they've been. It seems to work out so much more happily for everyone concerned if you don't give the game to the world but simply snitch it a few years late
On a day when the publicly funded BBC refuses to reveal what it pays it's stars - while crucifying MP's over their expenses - I've given up trying to understands the nuances of the Corporation!
I think we should just welcome any intelligent exposure of cricket on prime time non-subscription TV - and it was mercifully free of Sky's usual hyperbole...