What is it for? Can it be stopped?

The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity, wrote George Bernard Shaw.  Indeed. 

One of my early tasks as a cadet reporter on the Auckland Star, long ago, was to spend Saturday at some apparently important cricket game and turn in a report for publication in the 8 O’Clock edition by 6 pm.  I had never played cricket or ever been remotely interested.  I had no idea what it was for, what the aim was, let alone what the finer points might be.  Older hands in the reporters’ room advised me to find the scorer who would know what was going on.  I phoned the office about halfway through the day, having discovered that this game was not over in 40-60 minutes but appeared endlessly self-sustaining – “How do I know when it’s finished...?”  The answer was that they would take the stumps up.  It was a day of terminal tedium and at the end of it I had not a clue what to write, so I went home. 

Another memory from those times however is what seemed to me a sudden Day of National Calamity.  Grown men groaned.  The New Zealand cricketers were playing England and were all out for 26.  It was 1955. 

And yesterday the Black Caps were all out to South Africa for 45. 

So now we have wall-to-wall post mortems and lamentations.  But it has seemed to me increasingly over the years that New Zealand, for all it has going for it, is embarrassingly incapable of cricket.  I have no idea why.  Does it matter?  The gestures, expostulations and wild excitements on the field when we manage to bowl someone out seem to me simply pathetic.  It was more impressive back in the stately days of “Oh, jolly good show...!”

We taught cricket to India, and presumably the West Indies, brought it to South Africa and Australia, and now look.  In New Zealand, however, the plant has been sickly from the start.  But I am trying still to find the intrinsic value.

Who needs it?  What is it for?  Can it be stopped?