1. Test cricket is complicated. It is possibly the only sport ever invented to which no one really knows all the rules. Not even the late Bill Frindall. Remember – complex and unfathomable is good. Ask Stephen Hawking if you don’t believe me. Football, the rules of which require 22 people to keep a ball within a rectangle while occasionally hoofing it towards a net, simply cannot compare as an intellectual challenge.
   
   
2. Cricket is played by intelligent people, many of whom have been to a good university and know how to behave and speak and so forth. Conversely, football is played by pig-shit thick potential and/or actual criminals who probably couldn’t spell the word ‘university’ if you helped them with every other letter.
   
   
3. Americans don’t play it. Imagine, just for fun, trying to explain the concept of test match cricket to an average American (don’t worry – there are plenty of them to choose from). Bear in mind that in American, football leagues*, any tied matches often go to a penalty shoot-out as the out and out desperate need to have a ‘winner’ is ingrained in the American mentality. Something to do with Vietnam I imagine. How then would said American deal with a game described thus: ‘It can last for up to 5 days and still end in a draw or even a tie.’ Their eyes would probably bleed.
   

Good points all I’m sure you’ll agree. However the most important aspect of cricket for me is the opportunity it offers for British national penance. I write as an atheist and therefore from no more than a philosophical viewpoint, but I’d argue that cricket is good for our nation’s soul. Consider for a second the test playing countries: Australia and New Zealand; West Indies; South Africa and Zimbabwe; India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Test match defeats to any of these nations hurt. In so doing they help purge the national sins of imperialism, war, colonialism, transportation and slavery. In fact, if the Irish ever wish to exact revenge against the British for 900 odd years of quite beastly behaviour, forget a unified republic or the occasional bomb. All they need do is develop a really good test side!

* They call them ‘soccer leagues’ but they are in error.