Cricket in the Antipodes is a fretful business for Englishmen following at home and the prospect of waking to Yet Another New Low has never fired an enthusiasm for the dawn chorus
Alan Gardner09-Mar-2015If a Full Member falls behind a paywall in the middle of the night, does it make a sound? Paul Downton, Peter Moores and Eoin Morgan are about to find out.England has slept through this World Cup and so, by and large, have England. The wake-up call came too late; for those back home it is probably blessed release. It is spring in the UK but the team is out well before the clocks go forward, which, even set against modest expectations, must qualify as an ECB nightmare.This regime is routinely caricatured as one that is better at the business of planning than playing, so, on the bright side, they at least have an extra week to plan for 2019.I have never been a morning person and the prospect of waking to find England limping towards Yet Another New Low has not fired my enthusiasm for the dawn chorus. For many obvious reasons, cricket in the Antipodes is a fretful business for Englishmen following at home. On television, the colours seem glaringly bright, the sun as fierce as the home side usually are; the hostility carries over radio waves too, like the sound of several thousand people asking you to step outside all at once.Then there are the tricky calculations that have to be made by the overnight armchair spectator. Stay up late or get up early? Can sleep-deprived underperformance in your workplace be blamed on England’s meticulously planned underperformance in their workplace? Is there any wine in wine gums? These were always going to be a painful few weeks.Many retain a fondness for the 1992 World Cup, an effect enhanced to a large extent by England’s telescoping ineptitude at subsequent tournaments. Still, I can only assume that the slower pace of life also added to the enjoyment.Win and you could look forward to catching a snippet of footage on the six o’clock news and reading the write-ups at a civilised hour the following day. Lose and you just needed to avoid Ceefax for 24 hours (for those wondering, Ceefax was like an 8-bit version of the internet that came through your TV).Now, the background grumbling is on surround sound. Terry and Bob spent an episode of trying to avoid the football score before watching the evening highlights, but these days the pair would be on Twitter before breakfast, probably engaged in some poor-taste banter (if that’s not a tautology).England’s crushing mediocrity in Australia and New Zealand has actually muted their mainstream media presence – BBC bulletins have been just as likely to lead on Ireland’s exploits – but from digital radio, to Twitter, to online ball-by-ball coverage, the truth is out there. And the truth hurts, particularly at 6am, although on this occasion Bangladesh’s score of 160 for 4 from 35 overs was closer to a snooze than an alarm.As Mahmudullah and Mushfiqur Rahim were warming to their task, early morning sunlight was glinting off the patina of frost on car windshields in west London. While England huffed and puffed to keep them to something manageable, commuters on the tube exhaled icy clouds and twitched nervously: nothing to do with the cricket, that’s just what people do on public transport.Should have stayed in bed: England’s cricket down under is rarely worth an early rise•Associated PressWhen I was buying coffee before getting to the office, now long enough awake to open up one or two receptors, Chris Jordan was blocking up an end at the death, the first time that has happened this tournament.There’s actually plenty to be said for following a match on your mobile phone, in terms of allowing you to hark back to the shortcomings of a bygone era. Up flashes a W in the recent deliveries section of the scorecard, teasing you with a tidbit of information, like the crackling of long wave as the transmission drops out.Or, as happened when listening to Ireland’s spandex-tight win over Zimbabwe on internet radio at the weekend, your phone loses signal. But television, as I was about to discover, leaves you nowhere to hide other than behind the sofa.So, 276 to win and maintain interest in a World Cup that has fulfilled the direst of predictions for England, bar defeat to Scotland or the team nutritionist running out of kale. On Sky, Andrew Strauss and Rob Key seem reasonably confident, as long as England don’t get stuck in a spin cycle; it only comes as a mild surprise when instead Bangladesh’s pace attack takes them to the cleaners. Duds and suds.For a while, the crested pigeons bobbing around the outfield at Adelaide Oval provide a little light distraction – England’s campaign has also been hair-raising, nudge nudge – before the familiar pall settles.In offices around the country, people start doing work in order to avoid checking the cricket score. After 35 overs, England are 161 for 5 and this time there is an alarm bell ringing. Joe Root falls in the first over of the Powerplay; Twitter goes into spasm. As so often with England, the second-screen experience feels more like second spleen.On Radio 4, as the chase stumbled towards its conclusion, they cut to the Daily Service. Someone had obviously concluded that their best chance was divine intervention.”Anyone but England,” wrote Mike Marqusee, but he was lucky to have a choice. In football, cricket and rugby, barring the odd, giddily exulted exception, World Cups are for the rest of the world. We’ll do all right out of the , of course: you don’t need much of an imagination to conjure up the maniacal cackles that would have interrupted mid-morning matters in the UK as Rubel Hossain fired the final blow through England’s defences.The only question now is whether Andrew Flintoff gets voted off the Australian version of before England fly home. With apologies to the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, England’s World Cup campaign was “nasty, brutish and as short as it could have been”. Let’s at least be grateful for that.