Protecting our part-time sports fans

Want to head down to your local tennis court for a game? You'll be lucky. It's the week after Wimbledon and all over the country, part-time tennis fans are taking their British flags off their cars, dusting down their tennis rackets for the first time since this time last year. 'Big serve from Roddick.' 'Backhand crosscourt from Murray...' 'And he wins the point with a smash!'

The same way that Wimbledon has punctuated my midsummers since childhood, The World Snooker Championship at the Crucible became a springtime fixture, and a great excuse for staying up late on that Bank Holiday Monday. In year six, dreaming that I could replicate the men in the tuxedos, I set up a school snooker tournament, on my primary school's tiny pool table. By the time we got round to playing, the drama at the Crucible had faded into distant memory and nobody was interested in playing. I only had to win two matches to win, against snooker players who must have been even worse than myself.

But it's not so much in the playing as in the armchair spectating that real part-time sports fans excel. You know the kind - the kind that mispronounce 'Fernando Torres' and tell you that 'it's really all about the way they retrieve the kick off.' Fan, we often forget, is short for fanatic. That they are not. Sporting events saturating terrestrial TV is their all-important medium, allowing them to become two-week experts on Andy Murray's return and Stephen Hendry's safety shot.

I’ll come down off my high horse for a second, and admit that I really only qualify as a full-time football fan. I guess I’m more weekend dad with rugby union, tennis, cricket – I never stop caring, I talk the talk when the Six Nations come around, but am not in the pub for Northampton – Sale on Tuesday evening.

In fact, I envy these part-time sports fans a lot. They get the exciting bits without having to go through all the drudgery in between. But, as Nick Hornby so thrillingly, nail-smack-on-the-head, described: those beautiful climactic moments are much better if you’ve gone through the drudgery to get there; you’ve put in the time, deserved it.

You can also learn a lot from them – we ran a feature on ‘The Score’ – our student radio Saturday afternoon sports show – called ‘Girls answer sport’s biggest questions’. Ignoring accusations of sexism, we found that the girls we got into the studio, with very little knowledge of sport - and therefore free from preconception and bias - cut through the crap and made some pretty insightful comments on goal-line and other refereeing technology, drug taking in sport and the like.

We should value them, protect them even. The 'protected' sports list - or more correctly, the list of sporting events reserved for free-to-air television, under the remit of the Culture Secretary, is hugely significant. There are currently 10 events on the A-list, those too important to be restricted to subscription television, ranging from the Olympics to the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final. In 1998, when the list was last renewed, home cricket test matches dropped from the A to the B-list, meaning they could be bid for by subscription broadcasters, as long as highlights were shown on terrestrial. Fortunately, for the 2005 Ashes, Channel 4 bid high enough. My memories of the greatest series therefore include watching in free periods at school and getting home to see the climactic stages on TV. I remember the Channel 4 coverage as top notch - but then again I would: the cricket was brilliant, and we won.

The last time the 'protected' sports list made the headlines was September of last year, when only the highlights of England's World Cup qualifier in Croatia were available on terrestrial, as Setanta showed the game live. It was England's best result since the thrashing of Germany in 2001, Theo Walcott scoring a hat-trick for Fabio Capello's boys in a 4-1 win. Perhaps a good omen for their cricketing counterparts, whose exploits against the Aussies in this summer's Ashes will be available only on Sky. Of course, we didn't care when the same was true in the series down under 2006-2007, but that was because it was winter and we lost, heavily. For us terrestrial viewers, Five's highlights every evening at 7.15pm are as good as it gets for the 2009 Ashes. And my tractor's only got FM radio, so I can't even listen to Test Match Special!

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'Promising' is the word to describe England's first day of the 2009 Ashes series. 336-7 is just about par, as England's batsmen got in, and then got out. I would be pretty happy if I was Andrews Flower or Strauss, certainly much happier than if one batsmen had made half of that total on his own. Bopara, Pietersen, Collingwood, Prior, Flintoff and Strauss himself all got between 30 and 70, showing - with slightly differing comfort levels - that they are in good touch. They lost their wickets - and Pietersen is the prime culprit for a ridiculous sweep-shot - because of a lack of care. Strauss can now sit down with his run-scorers and tell them, as well as Alastair Cook, whose dismissal for 10 was more worrying, that they need to take responsibility, treasure their wicket and start putting in the centuries, the match-winning 150s, 200s. For me, partnerships are more important than individual scores in winning matches though, and today showed the beginnings of two which should prove to be imperative if England are to win the little urn back. Pietersen and Collingwood, 4 and 5, steadied the ship in batting from lunch to tea and added 138. Prior and Flintoff, 6 and 7, added 86 more when they were together in the middle. Prior looked the most fluent of all of England's batsmen - which is great news. Especially after watching the Twenty20, he knows as much as anyone else that he's no superstar behind the stumps, but the more runs he gets, the more his confidence as a wicketkeeper will grow. Having him at 6 also has the advantage of giving Freddie the licence to go for his shots at 7. The openers will need to join the party in the second innings, so Ravi Bopara can come to the middle with the score at least at the 100 mark. Bopara, batting at the pivotal number 3 position, will now his first-Ashes-test nerves behind him, and looks set to score big. He will have gained from surviving - initially - a thorough interrogation by Peter Siddle, who has looked the pick of the Aussie bowlers. Before Bopara was out of single figures, Siddle planted one down short and straight, bouncing hard to hit the batsman hard under the chin. 'New boy, this is the Ashes, you know.'