sport news LAWRENCE BOOTH: Cricket delivered a perfect tribute and showed football how ... trends now
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On Saturday morning at 10.54, the Oval felt like the quietest place in London.
This was quite an achievement, since roughly 25,000 were in attendance.
And yet there they were, silence personified, the peace broken only by the clanking of machinery outside the ground and a passing plane above it.
Cricket delivered a perfect tribute to the Queen during England's third Test against South Africa at the Oval
The minute’s silence, then, was precisely that. It was not a minute’s applause, which has come into fashion, as if spectators can’t trust themselves to keep schtum for 60 seconds, or at least don’t regard silence as sufficiently demonstrative.
It was proper pin-drop stuff, the ultimate sign of respect in a society where he or she who shouts loudest often shouts last. Like the Queen herself, it was a throwback. This was a response in her image — unshowy, unfussy, understated. And that, surely, was the point.
While football made an early call on the decorum of playing sport, cricket handled things perfectly — cancelling the second day of the third Test against South Africa, then getting things
