Reason why Rugby and Cricket are boring compared to football

Boring? More people play cricket than any other sport!

I understand that not everyone understands the appeal of test cricket, not everyone can have sophisticated tastes. Some people like The Godfather, some people prefer Face Off. Some people like filet mignon, some people prefer big macs.

but to say "the intensity isn't there" is ridiculous. For cricket fans, watching a Test match is an incredibly intense and stomach wrenching experience.

20 minutes of football is more physically exhausting than 20 minutes of cricket, yes.

But is 90 minutes of football more physically exhausting than 7 hours of cricket? No.

Comprendez?

A great rugby or football match is like a great action film. You look forward to it all day, You get edge of the seat excitement from start to finish, a couple of plot twists and you leave feeling pumped. A couple of days later and you've already forgotten what happened.

A great Test match is like reading a great novel. The suspense and drama builds slowly but powerfully, and the book takes over your life for 5 straight days. Every waking moment you're either trying to comprehend what you just saw, or wondering anxiously what will happen next. As the complex plot builds to a climax you can barely turn the pages for fear that something terrible will happen to the characters you have just spent the last week with.


Action films are fun, they are light relief from the stresses of real life. But great novels live with you for the rest of your life. I can still remember details of Test matches I watched almost 20 years ago. I remember Wasim and Waqar ripping through our batting with one mysterious skill (Edward Said would have had a field day with Western representations of subcontinental "mystery" bowling), and then the next year Warne arrived with his flippers and googlies (of course, we couldn't simply label him another in the long line of Indian or Pakistani cunning spinners, which is why he was lauded as such a genius. White men weren't supposed to be able to do clever things with their fingers.)


It's no coincidence that the kind of people who like cricket also tend to be deep thinkers. I don't think Said would have much to say about Everton vs QPR.

Football matches are forgotten easily?
Champions League Final in Istanbul, Liverpool 3-3 AC Milan... a champions league quarter final Liverpool 4-4 Chelsea... I am not a Liverpool fan but I remember these games.
In test cricket each ball is the same as the other, in a football match each second is different.
In the time I take to watch 1 DAY of a test match, I can easily watch at least 4 classic football matches. My point? The conclusion that which team is better in cricket is annoyingly stretched in a test match.

I'm actually seeing where you're coming from. In your favour, I also think that it's worth pointing out that in football, the ball is actually only in play for about sixty minutes or so. Therefore, out of the 105 minutes that a game is meant to comprise, the players are hypothetically doing little to nothing for about forty of those minutes. That's around 38% of the game in which the players aren't doing anything.

60 minutes? What happens in the other 30 minutes? There is a term called "Extra time" which is used to cover up the time that the ball was out of play. Any football watcher would know that.
Even if players are not on the ball, they have to keep moving around in the pitch. Defenders have to play an offside trap, midfielders have to run from box to box in a counter attack..the list goes on.

Boring? More people play cricket than any other sport!

Football matches are forgotten easily?
Champions League Final in Istanbul, Liverpool 3-3 AC Milan... a champions league quarter final Liverpool 4-4 Chelsea... I am not a Liverpool fan but I remember these games.
In test cricket each ball is the same as the other, in a football match each second is different.
In the time I take to watch 1 DAY of a test match, I can easily watch at least 4 classic football matches. My point? The conclusion that which team is better in cricket is annoyingly stretched in a test match.

Well I do agree with you entirely, but prefacing everything with "in my opinion" on fora gets tiring. It's just my opinion. No doubt it's intense for cricket fans. Heck snooker is intense and it hardly lights up the world in terms of physical slam dunk action, but the excitement is there so I understand it. I just find cricket too drawn out and it's only the one day world cup matches that get me excited even though it may not be 'the best' form of the game.

It's true that 90% of football matches are just forgettable. Liverpool 3-3 AC Milan where Liverpool won on penalties from 3-0 down at half-time is probably the most incredible match I can remember. Liverpool 3-3 West Ham in the FA Cup final the next season, where Gerrard scored that goal (it was goal of the season) in the last minute of extra time to force penalties, which Liverpool won, was also a classic.

But 90% of football matches do follow more or less the same story. Not so with test matches, especially if they are between two closely matched teams.

I love test cricket (I also like football btw) and I've never watched every ball of a day of test cricket, let alone a whole test match. Your goggles which you are viewing this whole thing through are too short-term and immediate. It's the saga that unfolds over 5 days that makes test cricket interesting, not getting excited about every single delivery. Not every test match is exciting, but some of them are amazing, and a lot of them are very good.

I disagree that one should watch sport to see what the best team is. In most cases you know that anyway, even if the best team loses - something far more likely to happen in a football match. If that is your objective in watching the game, why watch Premiership matches? One look at the table will suffice in most cases to tell you which team is better.

A test match is 20 times as long as a football match (this may seem a lot, but the truth is test cricket is played more sparingly than football, and unlike a football match, you can go away and come back to it more easily).

This means in order to get an idea of the flow of the game, you have to watch for 20 times as long. What would you think if someone walked into the room where the footie was on TV, watched five or six kicks of the ball and then declared loudly "boring", before walking out?

Perhaps you should listen to what people have to say about test cricket, who have watched a lot more of it than you, and ask them what they get out of it, and listen to what they have to say, rather than take a cursory glance and declare it to be crap because you haven't seen the like of it before (or at least, not for more than 5 minutes).

A great Test match is like reading a great novel. The suspense and drama builds slowly but powerfully, and the book takes over your life for 5 straight days. Every waking moment you're either trying to comprehend what you just saw, or wondering anxiously what will happen next. As the complex plot builds to a climax you can barely turn the pages for fear that something terrible will happen to the characters you have just spent the last week with.

Action films are fun, they are light relief from the stresses of real life. But great novels live with you for the rest of your life. I can still remember details of Test matches I watched almost 20 years ago. I remember Wasim and Waqar ripping through our batting with one mysterious skill (Edward Said would have had a field day with Western representations of subcontinental "mystery" bowling), and then the next year Warne arrived with his flippers and googlies (of course, we couldn't simply label him another in the long line of Indian or Pakistani cunning spinners, which is why he was lauded as such a genius. White men weren't supposed to be able to do clever things with their fingers.)

I agree with certain points and that certain people here (including me) can be labelled as "Fast and Furious".
What makes a football match classic is that two teams play their hearts out even if they are not of the same stature.
And why I would call a test match boring is that each ball is similar to each other, That's like reading a 1000 page novel with each page pretty much the same and without any plot twist.
Yes you can never leave a hotly contested match for even a minute, but that is the beauty of the game.
On paper you can easily point out which team is better, but the truth is told when the match is played.

On paper you can easily point out which team is better, but the truth is told when the match is played.

And therein lies the problem. Until you can understand how, and why, every ball in cricket is different, you're not going to understand the drama and intensity of cricket. If you thought that every shot on goal in football was the same, you'd think football was boring. The truth is that football, rugby and cricket are pretty similar in that you have to understand why the attacking team did what they just did and how the defending team countered that, otherwise you cannot enjoy the sport.

A good post. I would put limited overs cricket in the rugby and football category, like an action film.

Test cricket has a great history and while you are watching a Test you are aware that history is being written and people will, if its a good test, be talking about it for decades, remembering small details on which the game turned.

I can remember lots of details from Test series in the 1990s when IMO Test cricket was at its best: stuff like Fanie De Villiers hitting Devon Malcolm on his helmet when Malcolm was batting then Devon coming out and steamrollering the South Africans with 9 wickets in 1994, Cork's hat trick against the WIndies at Old Trafford, Atherton and Russell's match saving centuries at Johannesburg in 1995, the drawn Test in Zimbabwe in 1996 when David Lloyd went 'we murdered em', smashing the Aussies in the first test in 1997 only for them to claw back their supremacy over us for the rest of the summer, Atherton surviving a barrage of out and out pace from Allan Donald when England bet South Africa in 1998, England's lowest ebb getting booed off after a home series defeat against NZ in 1999, Andy Caddick destroying WIndies in 2000, Butcher's heroic innings against the Aussies in 2001...

But Rugby has real men