Reporting on cricket keeps you on your toes

Though its format is predictable, writing about cricket often isn’t

On paper, covering Test cricket is a bit of a doddle. Five days, each lasting about eight hours, broken up into three sessions and two meals. Honestly – how much time do you need?

The beauty of the format, though, is how it can appear to reveal the story and yet you have to wait before writing it. A first-morning blitz needs the fourth innings to really put it in perspective. Success for a player in one knock might mean nothing in the second. Even a team that wins cannot yet be deemed the outright victor, with previous results in the series, or the matches that lie ahead, tempering any out-and-out acknowledgment of success.

Maybe that’s just the game, though. Of course, when reporting on Ben Stokes at Headingley or England at the World Cup, there is usually a degree of – to borrow a cricketing term – “going big”, a clutch of climactic moments that take you by surprise and demand to be riffed on. It is those moments, when writing with the silencer off, that are the most enjoyable, especially in the game's oldest format.

It's very nature means even the writer must abide by the rules of dress code and literature. The former is more lax outside of England, granted (I write this wearing flip-flops at Newlands, Cape Town) but certainly, on the reporting side, you feel the responsibility of writing about a sport that is over 140 years old, knowing you are adding to the volumes of previews, reports, reviews and hatchet jobs of some greats of the written word. Cricket’s canon is vast and distinguished. Even the mediocre pieces you write are added to that pile.

It’s a good sort of pressure, though. Spend long enough in any job and you’ll grow cynical, even in a gig such as this where you see talented players do brilliant things in wonderful places. But reporting on Tests keeps you honest and stokes that fire within you. Especially when the game’s flipped on its head in the last 30 minutes and you’ve got to bin a thousand beautifully crafted words. Don’t ask…

Yours,

Vithushan Ehantharajah

Sports feature writer