It’s Just Not
Cricket, Old Boy…..
(I
really must say that there is nothing quite so wonderful as watching Village
Green Cricket with a pint of beer in your hand on a warm summer’s day).
As I
say I know little or nothing about cricket but this event was one of the most
spectacular sporting events I have ever seen.
It is being hailed as the ‘best cricket match ever played’ and I am
certain that it will go down in sporting history as exactly that.
Since the advent of Pay to View, primarily in the UK
by Sky Sports Channels, many – in fact,
hundreds of thousands – of people have lost interest in many sporting
events. The main exception is Premier League Soccer into which Sky and British Telecom have pumped billions
of pounds over the past few years. Many
teams, such as Manchester United,
Liverpool and Manchester City now have world-wide following and the money
being paid to the top players is obscene.
Most of the top one hundred
players ‘earn’ more than the Prime Minister.
The Open
Golf Championship will be played in Northern
Ireland in a week or so and it too will be Pay to View.
When I started playing golf in the early 1970’s,
it was almost impossible to get a booking particularly on the weekend. Our course used to be crowded to total
capacity. However, since the Golf Pay to View Channel arrived, the
thousands have been reduced to dozens and quite often practically empty.
My point in this posting is that I firmly
believe that apart from Soccer, many
young people have little or no interest in non-soccer games. The up-and-coming life blood of the sport –
both golf and cricket is dying an ever increasing slow death. As a result a great many golf courses in the
UK have or are going into liquidation and having to close.
The
people taking the TV money are cutting their own throats and will be lucky to
survive.
The last two weeks also saw Wimbledon Tennis tournament. It was shown – maybe even over-exposed – on free Terrestrial TV and was a wonderful spectacle.
I have no doubt whatsoever that children and
teenagers all over the UK will all be playing tennis and cricket on every piece
of spare ground over the coming months as a result.
When the bubble bursts, as it surely will, what
are all those overpaid sports stars going to do………………..Virtual Reality will be even
better than at present with young people playing golf, football, cricket and
almost every other sport with their ‘virtual’ teams, or ‘favourite sports star’,
at ‘virtual’ sporting arenas.
‘Sport’
as we know it, will have died and all because of greed and the Pay to View
channels on TV.
--------Mike--------
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