I Don’t Like Cricket, I Hate It – the North v South edition

A semi-regular feature in which we ask Prince Prefab about cricket – even though he hates cricket. We are in bold. Prince Prefab is not.

Anything you want to know about this week’s North v South cricket matches?

Is this real? Is it really North versus South? Are they trying to drum up interest in this manner?

Absolutely real. I don’t know about interest up-drumming being the primary aim. It’s a kind of pre-season taking-a-look-at-people thing mostly, but I think they’re maybe hoping it’ll become “a thing” too.

Balls to that. I know this is barely related but I hate the whole north/south thing. Northerners are hard and friendly salt of the earth folk, southerners are soft and unfriendly. I’m a northerner and I know loads of soft and unfriendly bastards up here.

And, in a country where you can basically walk from the top to the bottom of it in an afternoon or so, we are supposed to believe that there are different characteristics between the people who live about half an hour apart. Balls, balls, balls. Dog balls, cat balls, lion balls. Balls.

Yeah, if a southerner told you that Lancashire and the North had nothing going for them compared to the South, you’d just shrug it off, wouldn’t you?

They’re just being a colossal ball bag. But the fact they are being a colossal ball bag has nothing to do with the fact that they’re a southerner.

Even when they’re saying the New Forest pisses all over the Forest of Bowland, say?

Well, if they’re referring to pure ‘woodage’ they’d be spot on. The Forest of Bowland has relatively few trees, the ‘forest’ in its name, being used in its traditional sense meaning ‘royal hunting ground’. If they mean the New Forest is just generally better than they are, of course, talking balls.

Let’s steer this back towards another kind of balls. Would we be right in saying that you are unlikely to be won over to the sport by a North v South match played in the United Arab Emirates then?

That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard. I’d rather go on a stag do in Blackpool than watch that.

What about a stag do in Margate?

At this point Prince Prefab sent us a surprisingly long, detailed and sweary work of fiction focusing on the bitter personal rivalry between Terry Bardane and Tony Abercrombie, two competitors at the Blackpool and Fylde Annual Veteran’s Pole Vault Championship at Stanley Park. The story climaxes with one of the crowd being impaled by a pole after describing this website as ‘shit’. We deduced from this response that our North v South discussion had probably run its course.