LEE PAYNE

Tag: michael

  • Looking through my box of comics and feeling old

    In my younger days, I loved The Beano and The Dandy and my mum had both comics delivered to the house each week. I thought the smell of a fresh comic was one of the most intoxicating imaginable and was sold on their bright colours, gentle humour and simple charm.

    I have a large, very heavy box under my bed right now containing pretty much every comic that ever came through the letterbox of my childhood home. When I feel like adult life is getting on top of me, which happens more often than it really should, I open the box and spend a while indulging myself in the innocence of youth.

    It seems that my ‘golden’ period of receiving The Beano and The Dandy was between 1999 – the year I turned 7 – and 2003, when I was 11.

    My box of comics

    There’s a sort of running joke I have with a friend from when I was at university. We often talk about how we’re getting old and that our youth is well behind us. Well, we will both be 30 next birthday (him before me, I must add) which feels like something of a milestone but our chat about pipes, slippers and bowls of mashed up apple might be somewhat premature.

    Still, looking back through my old comics, it’s hard not to smile at how dated these dear old things are. Here are a few examples.

    This issue of The Beano, from December 2002, was giving away a free pack of stickers for your FA Premier League album. Collecting football stickers is still very much a thing, so nothing too bad so far, but look at the players used to advertise this brilliant giveaway! Dennis Bergkamp of Arsenal (retired in 2006), Paolo Di Canio of West Ham (now 53 years old) and Michael Owen of Liverpool (who left the Premier League to join Real Madrid two seasons later).

    A 9-year-old can’t just fill his football sticker album up on an empty stomach, though. He’s got to have breakfast first. How about some Mornflake Oats? You can still buy them, though heaven knows when I last saw an advert for them. The bit that caught my eye was the statement that they are available at Somerfield. That particular chain of supermarkets was taken over by the Co-Op in 2009, and by 2012 all Somerfield stores had been rebranded to that of their new owners.

    I’ve written before about how I’m not into films, but Disney’s Tarzan was one of the few that I have actually seen in the cinema. The film was released in October 1999, but by Christmas 2002 the character was back in an exciting new video game for… the GameBoy Advance. Released in the summer of 2001, the GameBoy Advance took games away from the bedroom and made them portable – for as long as the battery would last, that is. I never had one (I had the original GameBoy, which was in black and white).

    I may not have had a GameBoy Advance but I did have a PlayStation 2. Pretty much everyone I knew who was my age between 2002 and 2006 had one, actually. There was one boy at school who had a GameCube – we all thought he was weird. The PS2 is still the best selling games console of all time (more than 155 million of them have been sold worldwide) but anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to own one in December 2002 had the chance to win one in this competition. Note how you can’t enter online, you’ve got to send your entry in by post.

    Speaking of brilliant competitions, here’s another one. I don’t know if this still happens, but when I was a kid it seemed nearly everyone – boys especially – went through a stage where we’d spend that bit between getting home from school and going in for tea whizzing about on skateboards. I had one myself, but I was utterly useless at it and never did manage to pull off a single trick on it. Here the comic is giving away a skateboard. What could possibly make that prize better? By the skateboard having a photo of your favourite WWF wrestler on it, of course!

    Yes, nowadays it’s the WWE that does wrestling, but until 2002 it was called the World Wrestling Federation. They were forced to change the name when they lost a court battle with the World Wildlife Fund. I swear I’m not making this up.

    Those are just a few examples of how the last 20 years or so have changed the world, seen through the prism of British comics. Wow, does it make me wish I was 10 again. The comics still even have the little sticker on them that the newsagent would use to let the paper boy know where to deliver them. Simpler, happier times.

    If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

  • England’s World Cup success can get the country into cricket again

    It was in early January 2003, just before school started again after Christmas, that I first got into cricket.

    I was 10 years old and would get up in the morning to find my dad in the living room watching the Ashes Test from Sydney on TV. On the screen, I could see Michael Vaughan batting for England and can remember thinking ‘this is great’.

    Vaughan’s strokeplay, especially his cover drive, were just so pleasing on the eye. I knew next to nothing about the sport at the time. I didn’t know England were 4-0 down in the five match series. I didn’t know the Australian team was one of the best there had ever been. But I was fascinated by this Englishman artfully approaching these little red missiles being fired at him and making several Australians chase after them. I didn’t want to stop watching.

    Watching Michael Vaughan bat got me into cricket

    I would say I love football and cricket equally. Thankfully, with the end of the football season signalling the start of the cricket season in this country I rarely have to choose between the two. If I had to pick just one, however, it would be cricket.

    So much can happen at any moment in a cricket match. Every ball is an event. There are so many ways for the batsman to score runs and so many ways for the bowler to get him out. Football tends to be mostly tedious until the last ten minutes of a game. And cricket is so aesthetically pleasing – it certainly takes the crown of ‘the beautiful game’ for me. Sorry, Pele.

    I also love how cricket is so incredibly difficult to be good at. You’ve got three disciplines to tackle and it’s hard to be proficient at any of them. The chances of being good at all three are next to zero. International cricketers seem almost superhuman compared to mere mortals like me. Just look (below) at this catch England’s Ben Stokes took in an Ashes Test in 2015.

    Cricket was the new cool in 2005 when England won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years, beating an immensely strong Australia 2-1 in what is unlikely ever to usurped as the best Test series of all time. The game was on the front and back pages of the newspapers and 7.4 million people tuned in to watch the end of the final Test live on Channel 4.

    Since then, the England cricket team has only been visible on live television to Sky Sports subscribers. Prohibitively expensive to many and not likely to be stumbled upon by the casual viewer, cricket dropped out of the national consciousness and the numbers of people playing and watching sank. The conclusion of the final Ashes Test in 2009, only on Sky Sports, was watched by less than two million.

    These are the reasons why this year’s World Cup has been so important for cricket in the UK. The world’s best players have been competing on our doorsteps for nearly seven weeks. Fan parks have opened the tournament up to thousands of newcomers. And to top it all, England came into it as favourites and have reached the final.

    England thrashed Australia in the semi-finals to reach the Cricket World Cup final for the first time since 1992

    It’s hard to put into words what England winning the World Cup would do for the game. How often can we say that England are world champions in any sport? With the match against New Zealand at Lord’s being the first time the England team can be seen live on terrestrial television for 14 years – it’s going to be live on Channel 4 – this is a massive opportunity for cricket to engage with the wider public once again.

    I’d love for a kid to catch sight of cricket on the TV for the first time on Sunday and be captured by it in the way I was sixteen years ago. For Jonny Bairstow or Joe Root to inspire in the way that Michael Vaughan did. After all, success makes you popular.

    • The Cricket World Cup final between England and New Zealand at Lord’s will be live on Channel 4 and Sky Sports on Sunday 14th July, with the first ball at 10.30am.