let them eat jaffa cakes

Ferdinand - another Jaffa Cake fan.

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Four Years On, Nothing Changes

By Dave Tickner

In these commercially-driven times when the almighty dollar is king, we're used to sporting teams doing whatever it takes to please the suits. The bank balance is all that matters, and to hell with tradition.

So it is that football clubs like Arsenal and Bolton opened shiny new stadiums with the most soul-crushingly depressing names ever devised by corporate fools in shiny suits, while anyone watching the England rugby union team for the first time could be forgiven for thinking they were watching the O2 XV in action.

But the England cricket team have railed against such madness, signing a sponsorship deal with McVitie's Jaffa Cakes. The ECB are apparently "looking forward to working closely with Jaffa Cakes in 2007" while promising that the energy-filled snack will boost England's World Cup chances.

It must be the greatest coup for Jaffa Cakes since they managed to beat down Her Majesty's Custom and Excise in 1991 and have the orangey snack officially reclassified as a cake rather than a biscuit.

Don't laugh, it's serious business.

Biscuits, you see, are "luxury items" and therefore subject to VAT, while cake is considered - and this could surely only happen in Britain - a staple food and therefore exempt.

The case hinged on what happens to Jaffa Cakes when they go stale. Like other cakes, they go hard, while your bourbons or digestives go soft.

Case closed. A victory for common sense, and one in the eye for The Man.

But back to the England tie-in, and a sponsorship deal where there actually seems some link between the product and the sport.

Even leaving tiresome and obvious Jaffa puns to one side, the Jaffa Cake is as much a part of the typical English cricket tea as neatly-cut cheese sandwiches and undrinkably tart orange squash with bits of luminous sediment in it.

Village cricketers up and down the country can now emulate their heroes by chomping Jaffa Cakes (saving the orangey bit til last of course) between innings.

Confirmed Jaffaholic Rio Ferdinand is presumably considering switching sports.

With the Jaffa Cake now installed as the "official energy snack" of the England team, it surely can't be long before hot, sweet tea replaces Red Bull as Kevin Pietersen's pre-innings tipple of choice.