The Greatest Sport

Dr X. posts this from the Atherton Cricket Club:

"With cycling, baseball, and football utterly corrupted with performance-enhancing substances of various kinds, one looks abroad, to other cultures and geographies, for sporting solace.

"It is not without risk. There are no innocent sports anymore, I am sure. One could run from the relatively innocent corruption of NFL football, striaght into a much more wretched situation.

"But risks be damned, in my heart of hearts, I long to watch a good, clean, straight-up, cricket match. I love cricket because of the writing it inspires. The Independent brings this freshly to mind with their collection of eccentric cricketer obituaries.

"I have mentioned it before, but CLR James's Beyond a Boundary is, arguably, the finest cricket book written by a leading West Indian post-coloniast socialist theorist. It is a good read, and importantly, it draws our mind to the only cricket game that really matters - the pure and beautiful one that haunts our dreams and memories, and inspires us to declare our independence from colonial oppressors, introducing an egalitarian society built on humanist principles - and not the shabby kind that's in the tabloids and runs too long on tv."