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Modern spectators, ahem, consumers, still enjoy slow sport. It’s just we don’t see much of it these days. 

It’s come to the point in sport where it’s all about coming to the point. The wider culture has no time for games that take up too much of it. Test match cricket is under perpetual threat from T20. Grand final replays are overkill. A golf tournament is going to be played in Victoria this month with quick-fire, six-hole matches instead

of a final round. If life keeps on getting faster, as people are wont to say, there’ll eventually be complaints about the 100m sprint!

In his new collection of cricket writings, Gideon Haigh surmised the convulsing timeframes out in the middle with this thought – what we used to call “spectators” are now referred to as “consumers”. And the content to be consumed has to be conveniently digestible, to the point of throwaway, even if it’s to no one’s particular taste.

This summer, the nation is relishing the contest of the Ashes, and is constantly reminded how this series remains the last, best hope for the future of five-day cricket (and as a proxy for long-form sport in general). Its formidable and venerable brand can hold out against the tide of modern commerce, ready to chop up the game into so many profit-making derivatives. It’ll make its appeal to the sense of tradition, authenticity and discernment in every cricket fan, and a few non-cricket fans as well.

In essence, it’s becoming the sporting equivalent of slow food. The slow food movement began in Italy in the mid-1980s out of protest to the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, and defined itself against the values of fast food. Instead of a standard, globalised taste, it held up local flavour as the highest principle. Cost and convenience were secondary to the preservation of old farming and cooking practices. An appreciation of the finer qualities of food was prized.

The movement has set itself up in more than 150 countries, and if the popularity of cooking shows on television is anything to go by, it has quite a platform for spreading its message. While slow food has been criticised for being elitist and political, it’s also shown there’s money to be made in deliberately going slow.

Some sports administration entrepreneur will figure this out. The question for sports into the future is – if they are indeed just a business - to identify properly what product they are selling. And not all of them are making hamburgers – some are actually selling heirloom tomatoes. Increasingly, the sports you follow may fall into a broader pattern of whether you spent the morning before the game at a supermarket or farmers’ market.

For an example of what slow sport can be, look no further than last year’s Wimbledon. The match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, with its 70-68 damn-the-tiebreak fifth set, was a masterpiece of talent, determination, anachronism and absurdity, like one of those pre-Queensbury boxing bouts that lasted 60 rounds. It was also undeniably intriguing – how many other first-round, outer-court matches have so transfixed spectators, ahem, consumers, worldwide? And the reason it occurred was the All-England Club’s pre-modern institutional bullheadedness against the imperatives of the clock.

Incidentally, once Inser completed the 11-hour epic, all he wanted to do was eat, and Andy Roddick brought him three boxes of pizza. Even the stars of slow sport, it seems, run on fast food. 

    – Jeff Centenera