Slog™

Amidst the hullabaloo surrounding the impending 150th Slog™ Globe-O-Champ, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when the world’s most popular sport was just a twinkle in its inventor’s eye. So what did bat-and-ball fans do for entertainment in those dark and distant days?

Once, there was another game. Now a footnote in sporting history, it was by today’s standards preposterously cumbersome, and its popular appeal was limited. But without it Slog™ wouldn’t exist. Let us give thanks to Cricket.

Nowadays Cricket would be proscribed as an Anti-Sport. Played outdoors, lasting up to five days, adjudicated by humans, and involving two teams of eleven – half of whom spent long periods completely inactive – it seems now, a century after the last international match, like the invention of a drug-crazed madman. Hardly anybody played it; the regulations took impenetrability to extremes usually reserved for near-earth planning regulations; entire matches were played without a winner. If you approached SportFed with such a proposal today, you’d be arrested.

“Compared to Slog™,” explains Tallulah Badminton, Sport Archivist at Beaconsfield University, “Cricket was complex, arcane and bewildering. For example, Hurlage™ duties were delegated to people called ‘bowlers’. These poor creatures ran to a predetermined point, delivered the ball, then trudged back to their mark. Run, deliver, trudge, repeat. Each process took at least thirty seconds. Compare that with the Hurlatron 5000™ with its delivery of fifty balls a minute, and the mind boggles at Cricket’s inefficiency. Then there were ‘fielders’, who emulated the lowliest FetchDrone™, yet were nonetheless part of the team and also participated as ‘batsmen’ (the Cricket term for Sloggers™). Furthermore, the scoring system was archaic. There were no AutoHitZones™ – instead, the ‘batsmen’ sprinted twenty yards to register a ‘run’. Four hundred was considered a high score. And as well as impenetrable GamePlay, Cricket boasted a ridiculous vocabulary – how do you decipher expressions like ‘she murdled a groogly to smiley mid-out’?”

Despite its many faults, Cricket enjoyed the devotion of a significant, if localised, pocket of followers. But the rapid rise and global domination of Slog™ left its sister sport gasping for breath. So where did it all go wrong?

“Politics, partly,” says Badminton. “Cricket ate itself in an orgy of greed and power struggles. But it was also a victim of its own complexity. People just didn’t understand it. The short form, T20, fell between two stools – too banal for Cricket fans, too complex for Sloggists™. And in the great Slog™ nations – America, China, Belgium – there was no cricket culture, so Slog™, pleasingly simple and addictive, spread like wildfire, and Cricket died a quiet death. The last international game was between Slog™ minnows England and Australia.” (England won by an innings and 498 runs, whatever that means.)

Today, with Cricket long dead, only the committed historian knows of its existence and the link between the two games. But they are based on a shared attribute: hitting the bejeezus out of a ball with a wooden stick. With recent signs of unrest in the Slog™ community, perhaps cricket is due a revival. Groogly, anyone?