Sooner or later it had to happen. A UK policymaker would find a way of comparing Britain’s departure from the EU to a game of cricket.
The only surprise was the source of the metaphor. Theresa May is a self-confessed cricket fan and cites Geoff Boycott as one of her heroes. John Major loved to slope off to the Oval whenever he had the chance. Mervyn King would lovingly drop a reference to cricket in his opening statements at inflation report press conferences.
Instead, it fell to King’s successor, Mark Carney, to draw the parallel between Brexit and the sound of leather on willow. An ice hockey goalie in his youth, and a keen runner to this day, the present boss at Threadneedle Street has taken a while to warm to the subtle nuances of cricket. Indeed, one of his early decisions was to axe the cricket game at the Bank’s annual sports day because it was deemed too exclusive.
But faced with the task of welcoming the West Indian legend Michael Holding to a seminar at the Bank, Carney was well padded-up. He knew Holding was known in his pomp as “whispering death” and was part of a WI team that dominated the game in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
What’s more, he found a new way of describing the process by which Britain would leave the EU. It was possible, Carney said, to think of the protracted negotiations as a “marathon not a sprint”. But in the end he had decided the cliche was not really appropriate. “We thought about that and actually you’re more exhausted after the marathon than after the sprint so this is the wrong metaphor,” Carney said.
A more appropriate comparison, the governor averred, was between two forms of cricket: the Twenty20 format in which matches are won and lost within three hours, and a Test series in which games are scheduled to last for five days and can still end in a stalemate.
“It’s not T20,” Carney said. “There’s a narrative to this, it takes time, it takes strategy, it takes everyone in order to be as successful as possible to fulfill our mission to promote the good of the people of the UK and that’s what we’re doing.”
With that, Carney departed the crease, leaving the Bank’s Yorkshire-born chief economist, Andy Haldane, to provide Holding with a few gentle long hops.
