wisewords
There are times when life is almost too much to bear. Last Sunday was one of those days. At 10.45, I went to the JCR to watch the coverage of the England-India World Cup game. Except I didn't watch it. Because the BBC has cleverly spent 99% of the licence fee on BBC News 24, it has lost the rights to almost everything of importance. And my college sadly features people who don't realise that the only point of a JCR is to have Sky Digital and a widescreen telly. That's it. Bugger welfare and crappy bops and academic affairs. Sky. That's all you need. It's not asking a lot, especially considering Murdoch went there. But no. So we went to the Union. It was closed. We went to Bar Oz. It was closed. Oh I forgot. This is England and pubs don't open till 12. Why? No-one knows. So Will said we should go to Vinnie's, a very up-its-own-arse sports bar. It was open. Yes. It had a telly. Thank God. It didn't have Sky. Arse. So having gone halfway across town, we went halfway back, to the Union again. It was open. Can we watch the big screen? Yes. Great. But I can't find the key. Fuck. So we waited twenty minutes while she didn't find the key. So we went to the Old School pub; however, it being 11.59, they quite reasonably wouldn't let us in. Then, by some fluke of chance, I ran in to a mate from St Peter's, so we watched it there.
We had subsequently missed three wickets in the time we'd spent arsing around. It was pitiful. And when England are pitiful, it's because foreigners have been cheating. Almost always that's the reason. I had not been desperately concerned if we had lost because even if we did, Zimbabwe would have had to have beaten South Africa in order to prevent us from qualifying, for Christ's sake. But somehow they FUCKING DID. Hmmm, sounds suspicious. Zimbabwe, a pisspoor team beat South Africa, a very good team; even had them 40-6 at one stage? I think not. I think it was a southern African conspiracy to get back at imperialist England for ruling them for years.
Thorpe got a dodgy lbw decision and sadly he is rare as he is a good English batsman. The rest then proceeded to disappear. Of course, Fate is a sadistic bastard, so after wrenching our guts out it then proceeded to play with them. Gough got a couple of class boundaries and suddenly it was possible. You go from complete despair to insane optimism in these circumstances very rapidly. But because I was sitting next to an Indian guy who thought it appropriate to laugh loudly every time another wicket fell, I adopted a third mood: anger. When Fraser was bowled, I wanted vengeance. I met my mate in the Radcliffe Arms and plotted to track down the Zimbabwean population of Oxford and maim them.
Complete failure is disappointing enough. What makes it worse is the general indifference of the rest of society. The vast majority of people in the JCR weren't even watching the cricket. Those that were just calmly flicked on to the grand prix, like the security guards at the end of The Truman Show, as if it's just something else to watch. And not, for example, the WORST THING THAT'S EVER HAPPENED. When England got knocked out of the football World Cup last time, all the pubs were packed and there was widespread mourning. The first person who I saw after the game was my housemate, who said "We lost? What sport is that?" with similar indifference to Stalin when asked whether he had killed twenty or thirty million people. And anyone who says "It's just a cricket match, they happen all the time" deserves to be brutally murdered. If you come home and say that your girlfriend's just dumped you and they say, "Come on, you've had lots of girlfriends. What's your problem?" you might feel slightly aggrieved. Well, many might argue (obviously not me) that the plight of the English cricket team is more important, if not much more important.
Like the end of a relationship, you get over it. A few pints later and I was like "Who needs them anyway?" The England cricket team is one of the most frustrating things in the world; right up there with watching a paraplegic attempting auto-fellatio. But the only thing worse than deep mental anguish is unshared mental anguish. We may never win a cricket match again, but it would be nice to think someone cares. But somehow I doubt the pissing rain will ever seem that appealing.