Time to put the brakes on English cricket's lager-drinking, money-making gravy train

By Martin Warrillow on Aug 6, 09 05:06 PM in Cricket

Over the past week, I have looked on with increasing amusement as English cricket's authorities have tied themselves in knots over the unruly behaviour which plagued last weekend's Edgbaston Test and which will surely raise its head again at Headingley over the next few days.
Honestly, I know the England & Wales Cricket Board were the only people who didn't smell a rat over Allan Stanford (and didn't care as long as he was carrying wads of cash) but it's not that difficult, is it?

My daily journey to work takes me through Birmingham New Street station and on the first two days of the Edgbaston Test, the station concourse was crammed by 9am with replica shirt-wearing, flag-waving, lager-drinking noisy twenty-somethings heading for Edgbaston.
Judging by the amount being consumed at that time of the morning, some of them would have been incapable by lunchtime, even on their own supplies. But what do the authorities do? They let them into the ground and they let them carry on drinking in the bars....all day, from 11am until whenever play ends.
That's seven or eight hours of solid boozing, in a noisy boisterous atmosphere under a hot (OK, warm) sun. And yet the authorities still cannot work out why some of them go off the rails.
The authorities are largely to blame for this, of course. By selling out to Sky, by subsequently promoting England-Australia as something close to war, they have turned the audience for Test cricket in England from one full of cricket-watchers and cricket supporters into one full of England supporters and, by definition, turned Australia into the enemy; a team to be booed, their failures to be mocked, with such mocking to be fuelled by however many pints of chemical lager can be necked in seven hours.
The answer, of course, would be to close the bars at the first sign of trouble, or at least open them only during certain parts of the day.
But that would threaten the progress of the money-making gravy train that cricket in this country has become - and that would never do.