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.