I do sometimes anthropomorphise cricket, as though the sport is a
person with whom I'm still in the rose-tinted,
grope-each-other-in-public phase of a relationship.* We have not yet reached
the stage of "if you leave a wet towel on the bed ever ever
again, I will stab you through the eye with a potato peeler" and I hope
we never will. As such, I'm not keen on hearing the bad stuff about
cricket and am tempted to put my fingers in my ears and sing if anyone
says anything nasty. "Hey, you know that lovely bloke you just started
seeing? Well, he slept with his ex-girlfriend's sister." La la la! I
can't heaaaaaaar you! Actually, this analogy holds in two ways:
(1) I would be foolish to ignore that there are, potentially, signs that cricket is not as wonderful as I thought it was.
(2) I would be equally foolish to think that this meant cricket was rotten to the core and I should dump it immediately.
