I remember how exciting the start of the cricket season used to be. As a young player, I would gaze anxiously upwards — dreading the arrival of dark clouds. As a fan, I would look up who was touring England — feeling especially excited if it was Australia.
Now, many years on, I’ve realised that I didn’t even notice that the cricket season had begun. Scanning the English team, I see more and more unfamiliar names. I knew Alastair Cook but I don’t know Sam Cook. I’ve never heard of Josh Tongue (whose forebears were apparently taste testers or something unprintable). I know as much about Pope Leo as I do about Ollie Pope, and Ollie Pope has been playing for England for eight years.
What happened? In the early 2000s I could have told you more about Graham Thorpe and Darren Gough than Jesus Christ.
Young English fans of today could not appreciate how different it was to support England twenty-five years ago. If the Ashes were approaching, we would not expect to win. We would just hope and pray that we would win a match. English players were not defined by their dazzling abilities as much as by their grit. Alec Stewart scoring a gutsy 65 against Australia was our equivalent of Joe Root scoring a double century.
I loved cricket. I loved the balance of talent and character (because by God you need character to, say, bat for ten hours in the Johannesburg heat). I loved how a match could twist and turn. I loved the history — reading about cricketing achievements and scandals from Len Hutton’s 364 to Brian Lara’s 375, and from Bodyline to Hansje Cronje’s match fixing. I would bore my dad’s ear off talking about the all-time best cricket players whose names began with the letter “G”. When I was asked to name a hero, in primary school, I chose the umpire and raconteur Harold “Dickie” Bird.
The lowlights were probably slipping into my own stumps or trying to catch a ball … in my mouth
Of course, I played cricket too. I wish I could report that I was a stylish batsman and devastating bowler who was robbed of a professional career only by a cruel debilitating injury. Sadly, I was bang average — a neurotic batsman and pedestrian bowler. My one glittering performance came when I took five wickets for a single run — but I think the opposing side were just startled that I could bowl as slowly as I did without spinning the ball. The lowlights were probably slipping into my own stumps or trying to catch a ball … in my mouth.
Despite a lot of training, I never got much better — but England did. Slowly but surely, our results improved. We beat the West Indies in a series for the first time in more than three decades. We beat them overwhelmingly again in 2004. The likes of Andrew Flintoff, Marcus Trescothick and Steve Harmison were not just gritty and gutsy — they were exceptional talents.
In 2005, almost twenty years ago, England won the Ashes for the first time in 16 years. It was far from an overwhelming performance — with England winning the key test by a mere two runs — but it did not have to be. It was a tremendous, cathartic victory — a great, guttural roar that followed years of frustration.
Somehow, though, that was the peak of my cricketing fandom. England have had astonishing players since, like Joe Root and Jimmy Anderson, and some of their most thrilling performances, like Ben Stokes’ 135 at Headingley and Stuart Broad’s 8 for 15 at Trent Bridge, but it was hard to equal that Ashes reclamation. The decline of great teams like South Africa, the West Indies and Pakistan made a lot of test series less exciting. I couldn’t see the romance of one-day cricket — still less that of Twenty20 or the obscene farce that is “the Hundred”.
Moving abroad didn’t help. Trying to explain cricket to a Polish person is like trying to explain nuclear physics to, er, me. It’s difficult enough to explain what the batsman is trying to accomplish even before you get to “LBW” and fielding restrictions. Plus, it was hard to find anywhere to watch the matches.
Slowly but surely, I stopped watching cricket. Then I stopped checking the results. Now, I couldn’t even have told you which team England were playing. Life, sadly, is too short for us to follow everything.
Still, I know that if I walked past a cricket pitch and a match was in progress, you would need an Abrams tank to drag me away. There’s something as deeply romantic about the thump of ball on bat — or on stumps — as the whispering of the waves or the singing of the birds. It demands attention from the soul of anyone who has ever loved the game.
Plus, I feel like I have one cricket match left in me. When I last played, I was deeply anorexic and depressed, and I hadn’t picked up a cricket bat in years. I was out for a duck and didn’t bowl. That can’t be the end of my cricketing career. Hey, if nothing else, I can hardly do worse.
