The Racing Post

A tip is an area of wasteground set aside for the dumping of unusable and unwanted goods. In recent times, tips have been rebranded as recycling facilities and liberally adorned with green signs and flashy logos. Similarly, the tips you find in your racing papers are these days portrayed as ‘giving the punter what he wants’.

The logic proceeds thus: Man in the betting shop is dumb. Dumb people generally don’t like thinking for themselves and are in any case far too busy being dumb to devote too much time to anything else, because lets face it, Dumb eats up a lot of your day. Therefore what the dumb man in the betting shop requires from a racing newspaper is lots of big headlines telling him what to do with his money.

The same logic holds sway at the BBC. The public pay their licence fee so they should get what they want. And the BBC knows what people want, because people are stupid, aren’t they. Viewers have the intellectual capacity of a Brontosauras in a coma, therefore they need their television liquidised into easily digestible chunks. The BBC will defend to the death the right of people they look down upon to vegetate in front of trashy television.

At the BBC the problem is that the ratings are a pretty blunt instrument. They tell you what the most popular programmes are. But a human being is a tricky customer. We tend to carry around in our brains many different interests, some of which are lying dormant, some of which are only latent. Better and more intelligent market research could tell the BBC that its audience is more than a mass of soap-opera loving invertebrates.

At the Racing Post, there is no excuse. Racing and betting upon racing is a niche, specialised market. Both the sport of racing and the world of betting are fascinating, in-depth subjects, worthy of ongoing, nuanced, detailed and entertaining treatment. Maybe the man in the betting shop does like to follow a certain tipster. But how much better it would be if he were given the tools to be his own tipster, or at least to tackle the game he spends his money on with more intellectual ammunition.

And this is where the criticism of the Racing Post is most pointed and most cutting. The Post’s best columnist Paul Haigh has left the paper and gives as one of his reasons the fact that it is now essentially a bookmaker’s broadsheet. Bruce Millington and his cohorts are not holding back on giving the punter an informed and interesting publication because they think it will be bad for circulation; they are pedalling the same old tipster-driven trash because their main advertisers want it so. They need people to bet, but they don’t need them to think. Punters deserve better.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Curiouser and curiouser. South Africa thumped Australia in their own backyard. Twice. Okay, I get that, the Aussies have been deposed, bereft of their superstars, washed-up and entering a long period of rehab. All hail Graeme Smith, Micky Arthur’s a genius etc. Then Australia win in Sydney. Hmm. Well the Saffers were out partying all week, they’ve got planes to catch and Graeme hurt his hand. Consolation win, nothing more.

A month later, same teams, different venue, different result. Australia crush South Africa. Then they do it again. Now I really don’t understand. Obviously, the previous series was a blip. South Africa had their moment, like England in 2005 and that was it. The real story is of the resilience of Australian cricket, how those player cloning facilities in the outback are still functioning, how they learned the lessons, made their plans and came back fighting and how another decade of baggy green whuppings awaits us all.

Now Cape Town. Australia skittled out and South Africa, with new openers, a stand-in captain and an air of pessimism, somehow contrive to grind Johnson and his cohorts into the dust as though we were back at Perth or the MCG. I just don’t get it.

No doubt some of you will suggest, Mark Nicholas style, that this is the wonder of cricket. It is so unpredictable. It’s a funny old game. Isn’t it marvellous? Well, yes it is, from a spectator’s perspective. I’ve always preferred to watch two well-matched but ordinary competitors scrap for victory than a well oiled machine rolling over feeble opponents.

But the human brain also strives for patterns, for frames of reference. And that is my problem. I can’t work out if what we’ve been glued to for the last three months is two ordinary teams taking it in turns to beat one another up, or two fantastic sides engaged in a titanic struggle for world supremacy.

You see in cricket there is no form book. There is Wisden, of course, an entire universe encapsulated in the shape of a yellow brick. But the good editors of that august publication do not entangle themselves in the sordid business of telling you which team is best. In despair I turn to the ICC rankings. They tell me Australia are best, by a small distance from South Africa. I can live with that. Problem is they also tell me that both teams are better than India, by a slightly smaller distance, which I couldn’t even live next door to.

Eureka! The answer. It cannot be that South Africa, Australia and India are all fantastic. That would be a cricketing golden age and I refuse to accept that we have done enough to deserve one of those. Therefore, they must all be equally ordinary. Apart from India.

So there you have it. The ICC rankings are wrong, India are best and the rest are following them in ragged bunch, with England wheezing along in the rear and hoping that ominous pounding sound they can hear is the beat emanating from their I-Pods and not Bangladesh about to overtake them.

My Flag's Bigger Than Yours

There’s no point denying it, something unpleasant is creeping into the crevices and crannies of Cricinfo, creeping in like a nasty creeping thing, like that cold clammy feeling Giles Clarke started to get about two weeks ago. But just like Mr Clarke, I’m confident we can all shake off all the unpleasantness and return to our former selves.

I’m talking about nationalism. Or patriotism. Pro Patria Mori. That sort of thing. The same kind of manly (and it invariably is men we’re talking about) sensitivity to the merest whisper of a hint of a sleight aimed at the lump of rock whereupon we were spawned.

Now I’m as patriotic as the next man, though the next man in this case is probably serving a life sentence for high treason. Life is too complicated and fragile a thing to be carrying on your back a bagful of rocklike grievances which you solemnly unpack and hurl at anyone who questions your motherland (or fatherland, if that’s your thing).
But that’s just me. I’m a traitor to good old Blighty.

The Barmy Army? Face-painting? Booing Shane Warne? Well, if you must, but there are few sights less attractive than a bunch of boorish drunks singing badly transposed football songs that don’t scan in the general direction of a game they aren’t really watching. For six hours.

But I digress. And actually there is a less attractive sight than the aforementioned Englanders boiling in the Barbadian sun. It is the angry scrawl of a bile-inspired invective fired into the comments thread of a Cricinfo article. In the past week two perfectly reasonable articles, one about the Aussie tradition of the victory song and another about the Karachi wicket, have trailed in their wake such a litany of hate and unreason, you’d have thought we were in the middle of a cricket war.

Have we now reached the stage where it is not possible for members of one cricketing nation to discuss matters pertaining to another? Do we really only watch cricket to revel in the triumphs of our nation? Was George Orwell right about sport? Are we to look forward to another bout of flag-wrestling when the IPL begins and Cricinfo is deemed to be insufficiently critical/supportive?

So enough dear reader, restrain the angry patriotic beast that stirs in your breast, because like most beasts, he has no table manners, he urinates in the street and he will make you look foolish in public.