We’d prefer it if you didn’t.

Kind of. Lower standard though innit.

But now, while you’re doing that, you can also see the hilarious run-out.

Might as well just go look the score up on Ceefax.

I don’t actually think Cricket Highlights form even a halfway reasonable representation of what was actually going on in a cricket match. The dot balls and the singles vanish, for one thing, but moreover the sense of time disappears.

Cricket is an unusual sport in that time itself slows down and speeds up, or appears to, during periods of play. In fact it’s that time dilation that probably best characterises any given period of play. On highlight shows we simply see from the clock that massive chunks of time have apparently disappeared, or alternatively that a bunch of clips have come from within a few minutes of each other, but we don’t feel the time… there’s a sense of it that’s missing. The urgency – or the deep freeze.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is. Perhaps to broadcast more singles and twos. Including the last balls of maidens might help too.

Incidentally, this might raise tension during highlights, which is their other key problem. You basically know you’re likely to see a chance, a wicket, a boundary, a “meaningful” run (to complete an individual or partnership fifty or century, for instance, or the scoreboard ticking past something-zero-zero) or an incident of ensuing hilarity. A scarpered single when there’s no landmark at stake is likely to be a run-out, for instance, and otherwise we know it’s almost certainly because the batsman’s getting his 50 or whatever.

It would be nice if sometimes, like in real life, a single is just a single.

My children will like it, however. They’ll say, “Hey dad, borrow us your iPad so we can watch some very short highlights of the ICC World Cup of Cricket”, which taken at face value will be difficult to refuse. And then they’ll go off and play Agario or watch porn or something. And that will be the fault of the BBC and the ICC.