Repeat a word often enough and it seems to lose all meaning. It’s called semantic satiation, and it’s a phenomenon you will already be aware of if you have spent much time talking to toddlers or sports marketing executives. “Legacy” went some time in the last decade, buzzworded to death after London 2012, and I suspect we’re about to lose “engage” and its variations, too. The England and Wales Cricket Board says it has “engaged” 1 million children in this World Cup, the International Cricket Council has set up fan zones to “engage” with families, partnered with TikTok and Helo to “engage” with social media users, and signed up with the PR company Ogilvy UK to drive “engagement”, while their many sponsors are anxious to “engage” with all those India fans.
There are an awful lot of ways to “engage” with this tournament. There are clips, snippets and titbits on the ICC’s app and website, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, the BBC and ESPN Cricinfo; there is Test Match Special’s coverage on the radio, and the 45-minute highlights packages Channel 4 has been putting out in the middle of the night. What you can’t do, unless you pay upwards of £32 a month for Sky TV’s coverage, is “engage” with it by sitting down to watch it live, in its entirety. Which – and forgive me if I’m underplaying the appeal of following cricket exclusively through tweeted gifs of people hitting sixes – seems like a fairly fundamental part of the whole experience.
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