Cricket and booze
Tipsy, intoxicated, inebriated, temulent, fuddled, cut, fresh, merry, tight, plastered, sloshed, smashed, raddled, crapulous, bibulous, ebrious, potulent, potvaliant, pissed. The English seem to have as many synonyms for drunk as the Eskimos do for snow. Spend enough time at the cricket, and you’ll likely spot each and every last little variation on the theme being demonstrated somewhere in the ground. In his last press conference before he left for the Ashes, Joe Root was asked whether his players had a “drinking culture”. This after Ben Stokes was arrested, and three of his team-mates fined for “unprofessional conduct”. Root denied it, of course. But whether or not the England team do, English cricket certainly does.
Cricket and booze go so together like leather and willow, gin and tonic. The “cradle of the game” in England is the Bat & Ball Inn on Broadhalfpenny Down in Hampshire. And the captain of the first great team, Hambledon, was the pub’s landlord, Richard Nyren. Go back beyond even that and you find that one of the earliest references to the sport comes when a group of local justices decided to waive the excise duty on the beer at a “kricketing” match in Maidstone. There’s a reason that “warm beer” followed straight on from “long shadows on county grounds” in John Major’s famous speech about what makes us British.
If England struggle in Australia this winter, the question will come up again, as Trevor Bayliss’s management style comes under scrutiny. The Romans have a saying, “after a fat pope, a thin pope”, and the English pick their sports coaches in a similar way. At first Bayliss’s laidback approach was a welcome change from Andy Flower’s stricter style, but these days some wonder whether his grip on the reins is a little too loose for the team’s good. The irony is, of course, that during the hours of play, at least, Root’s team are among the bare handful of sober people inside the ground.
Among all the stats from the Women’s World Cup final last summer, one set stood out to Tom Harrison, CEO of the ECB. It wasn’t the six wickets Anya Shrubsole took, the 27,000 in the crowd, or the 1.1m watching on TV. It was the amount of coffee sold during the day’s play. “More coffee sold than ever before,” Harrison explained in an interview with SportsPro Media. He took this as a sign that the women’s tournament had reached a different sort of crowd, “a bigger, more open and diverse national audience”, as his interviewer put it. The stat was noteworthy, Harrison explained, because it meant the women’s final, “wasn’t all about alcohol sales”.
Which made it unlike pretty much every other England match. Among my many memories of the glorious Headingley Test between England and West Indies, there’s one so preposterous that I hardly dare share here it since I’m sure so few will believe it’s true. On the Saturday, the fans on the Western Terrace were playing a drinking game in which they each took it in turns to stand up, remove a shoe, pour a pint in the top, then neck it while everyone around whooped and hollered. One guy, no word of a lie, whipped off his prosthetic leg, poured his beer into the cup that fits the limb to the knee, and drank out of that. Of course he got the loudest cheer of all.
The previous week, Edgbaston was running, at a rough count, 30 separate bars for the 20,000 fans who came along to the day-night Test. They had their pick of two pubs, a real ale tent, a cocktail shack, a gin shop, two wine bars, a camper van selling Pimms and lemonade, and umpteen beer stalls. Edgbaston, which is one of the more enlightened grounds around, effectively segregates the crowd according to how much they plan to drink. They have a family stand for the fans who don’t want to expose their kids to the worst of it. ‘Atmosphere’ seems to have become a euphemism to describe how hammered everyone in the Hollies Stand is.
Then there’s Lord’s, always inordinately proud of its unique policy of allowing spectators to bring their own booze in with them, either two pints or a bottle of wine per person, though it goes against ICC regulations. But even the MCC had to send out letters to their members this summer reminding them of the limits, after a “full-blown fracas” in the Harris Garden during the Test against South Africa. Apparently “two drunk blokes started haymaking” and security turfed them out. “People were in there from 11 o’clock, and the blokes I saw did not leave the Harris Gardens for the entirety of the day,” one member told the Telegraph. “They didn’t watch any cricket at all, so even by half past 12 it was loud and boorish.”
Even in their lowest moments, one thing the ECB could never be accused of was a failure to organise a piss-up, in a brewery or anywhere else. It cultivated this culture, because it benefits from it. Root’s England team may or may not have a ‘drinking culture’, but they definitely do have an official beer, Greene King IPA, an official lager, Foster’s, an official cider, Stowford Press, an official wine, Hardy’s, and an official champagne, Veuve Clicquot. As Toby Hall pointed out in an article last year, a study by Cancer Council Victoria and the University of Wollongong in 2014 found that viewers were exposed to more than 4,600 incidents of alcohol promotion in the space of just three ODI games. There’s a parallel here with sport’s uneasy relationship with gambling. It’s forbidden for the players, but actively encouraged for the punters.
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