REVERSE SWING..

The whole world is, of course, shocked by the appalling devastation suffered by the people of Japan following the earhtquake and the tsunami and all one can do from this distance is to sympathise and hope  for some kind of recovery.

In a way, it brought to mind the comments I posted on Friday, when I suggested that Professor Brian Cox`s programme concerning the vastness of space and time put our own world into perspective.   And by and large the news media across the globe has been rightly concentrating on the events in Japan with rolling television news, page after page in newspapers and informed, analytical commentary on radio, with even events such as the Libya crisis taking second place.

And yet, on that fateful morning when the earthquake happened and the tsunami wreaked its devastating havoc, just a few short clicks away on the remote I chanced across a cricket match being played in Kandy between Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe as part of the 2011 Cricket World Cup.   It seemed a telling and poignant contrast with the events in Japan set against a game being played half a world away in distance but a whole parallel universe away in terms of awareness and priority.   A reverse swing if ever there was one.

Now, Brian Cox`s perpective was concerned with the place of Planet Earth in time and space but events in Japan - like those recently in Christchurch, Queensland, Western Australia and not forgetting Haiti - brought the place of mankind against the forces of nature into sharp focus once again.   And once again, it emphasised the transient and fragile nature of our own existence on the thin, vulnerable shell of this tiny blue dot in the middle of nowhere.

So I don`t know whether to be disappointed that the cricket match was still being played or whether to remain sanguine that cricket simply demonstrated that it truly is a world of its own, with its own timescales, its own insularity, its own sense of priority but, therefore, its place in providing a haven of refuge from the realities of a savage, unpredictable, sometimes devastatingly cruel world.  

I noticed that a respectful silence to mark the carnage in Japan was impeccably observed last evening before Real Madrid`s game with Hercules - and I hope cricket will at least raise its eyes above its own horizon and do the same before the next game in the World Cup series.   It wouldn`t come amiss.