Over the past weekend the “County Cricket” season launched, with both divisions of men’s “first-class”¹ cricket competition beginning in England, soon to be joined by the women’s “One Day”² Cup starting this Saturday (April 11th). If the starts of the IPL and PSL represent the Memorial Day Weekend of the cricket calendar, the beginning of the County calendar is the summer solstice stands as its “official”/actual start, and, like its non-sporting seasonal counterpart, is mostly celebrated by the real weirdos/sickos out there.

Presumably because it represents a kind of shifting in the ethereal planes to create a different alignment in their heart chakras (or whatever middle-aged English folks are into these days) but also because, while it may sound cliche, it is indeed the purest form of one of the oldest continuously-played sports in the world. For someone whose experience with cricket has been almost exclusively of the T20 variety, with smatterings of one-day/list-A matches thrown in, sitting through even one day of original recipe cricket requires an almost complete shift in expectations and viewing habits. And while I don’t know if I prefer it to the shorter forms of the sport, spending just six or so hours immersed in a single day of the county/first-class system makes it very clear why the people who do prefer it make that choice.

Aesthetically, it’s extremely pleasant. And, from the perspective of someone watching from home (or, it seems, in the stadium) the pace — which slides past “leisurely” into “soothing” at some point during the nearly endless stream of balls being bowled and wickets being defended — is a nearly perfect “‘first’-but-actually-second screen” experience. This is especially true with commentary on, as the entire cadence of their performance (itself a reflection of what’s happening on the pitch) splits almost perfectly the difference between radio and TV baseball broadcasts.

There is an almost constant use of what a screenwriter might call “exposition” but is more often referred to in broadcasting parlance as “placesetting” by the commentary teams, creating two parallel tracks of small talk between the principals involved: an on-going record of what’s happening in the game at any given moment alongside a kind of meta-commentary of what’s happening in the game/the sport/the world/the broadcast booth³ outside of that given moment. The (often deft, but that would likely depend on who is holding the mic) way in which they are weaved together without ever totally interacting directly almost unintentionally creates an intersection between county cricket commentary and the kind of live streaming that has become the primary way by which a shocking percentage of internet personalities become impossibly famous and wealthy now.

This sort of “long-form hangout podcast by happenstance” atmosphere makes the initial sheen of the broadcast feel more modern than almost any other popular presentation in sports, engaging the viewer in an almost avant garden way. Though it’s the way in which that feeling is coupled with what is perhaps the slowest moving and least modern sport actively being played in the world (at least at this level) that creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that comes across as a very acquired taste.

And since this vibe (for lack of a better term) came out of structural necessity that the game’s very deliberate format generates organically, it’s equally easy to see why waning enthusiasm (and the financial rewards associated with that feeling) for this version of the game have put the entire idea of this kind of event in peril. It also helps to illuminate some of the reasons why the game hasn’t caught on in a meaningful way within the US (especially in terms of reasons beyond “baseball existing”):

If you can deal with, or in my case, come to appreciate that kind of idiosyncratic competitive structure, the world/the game can be your oyster. Most folks, however, can (or at least have) not. And with financial troubles abound for a number of top-level clubs (in both the first and second divisions,) along with what could politely be called “sparse” attendance even during the league’s opening weekend, it’s easy to see why there’s been an ever increasing fear that the sport may lose this connection to the past on anything but the highest levels of international competition, like the Ashes.

This is especially true for the women’s game, which essentially has no first-class format practiced domestically in any country in the world. The closest that the English women come is the aforementioned One-Day Cup, which features 50-over games following essentially the same “county” structure found on the men’s side, as well as overlap between the two tournaments in terms of the cricketing clubs involved. Test cricket is the only form of high-level “unlimited overs” cricket played by any women in the world, but even that is in danger of being lost, with the financial viability of producing such games putting it at risk, as the demand for their broadcasting rights, or lack thereof, being the determining factor (like they have in nearly every other sport) for the health and success of the sport.

And it’s not just a function of whether or not anyone is willing to pay for them, but that the opportunity cost of using multiple days during the international barnstorming tours during which they happen for a not particularly popular/accessible version of the sport has created a massive financial disincentive for cricket boards around the world to even think about involving the format in the first place.

(Wisden Women’s Cricket podcast had a much more in-depth breakdown and discussion of just how precarious long-play cricket’s place in the overall sporting landscape is relative to its truncated counterparts.)

Which is all a shame, on some level, not simply because things that are old are always (or even sometimes) better, but that young girls and women dream of doing things that they see their heroes do, whether they are men or women or somewhere outside of that binary. The desire to wear “the baggy green” for Australian women was one of the driving forces behind keeping test cricket going for their national team, and on a core human level, the idea of being able to put on your test/first class whites to play for the sporting honor of your county or country is obviously something that transcends pretty much any other opportunity in the sport.

But even if we are in the waning days of first-class cricket and the concept of county teams playing the same game of cricket for days on end, it’s important to appreciate it while it’s still around. And that’s true whether you like it for the laconic nature of the action, as a way to watch the grass grown in style or because you just like hanging out with your new-found friends all day.

Before we go, an important public service announcement: the Women’s Six Nations rugby tournament starts this Saturday and while we would never tell you how to live your life, we did want to take the time to provide a schedule for the proceedings before our weekend watch list comes out this Friday.