Ashes to Ashes

Footballers, eh. They can’t do anything without the tabloids rushing to write as many words as possible and create the worst puns. Wayne Rooney is particularly lucky, as “Roo” rhymes with “You”, and “Roo Beauty” works in just about any situation. Like if you’ve had sex with an aged prostitute.

Other sports only exist and enter the public’s notice once a year – despite the average tennis player training for 19 hours a day, Wimbledon is the only tournament that matters. An ex-pro could have won tournaments all around the world, but journalists are just doing a search through their Wikipedia page to find out if they won Wimbledon.

Horse racing too. Come the Grand National and offices up and down the country have some irritating tit begging for pound coins to run a sweepstake. Never mind that there’s horse races up and down the country every single day, detailed in those incomprehensible newspaper pages in between the proper sports and the cartoons.

Cricket only matters when it’s against the Australians, who we apparently have an enormous rivalry with. A rivalry that only exists in cricket, and only because they absolutely destroy us with annoying regularity. Which is why the Ashes matter all of a sudden. Because we won.

ESPN Classic and Sky Sports have incessantly been repeating “how we won the Ashes 2005″ style shows, conveniently forgetting the 2007 series (because we lost) and anything before 2005 (for the same reason.)

And so, the Ashes 2009 series, which had been downplayed by everyone but Sky – hyping it to death because there’s no summer football tournament and they don’t want everyone to unsubscribe from the Sports package. Then it looked like we’d win, and all of a sudden it was everywhere.

Because the Ashes lasts for 25 days. Three and a half weeks of one match. Even people who like cricket don’t watch that much. Ask them why they go to watch live, and the answer is invariably “it’s an excuse to get pissed, innit”. Which is fair enough, but if people who really like it don’t watch it, what’s it there for?

It’s there for that final afternoon when, if we’re winning, blokes in bars can whoop and cheer over every wicket or run, and cheer excitedly before forgetting about cricket for the next three years. Because sod watching the Ashes when it’s on in Australia, it’s the middle of the night. And the international sporting experience, which is similar to jetlag, finds you inexplicably pissed at 7am with a lot of explaining to do.