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| 'Country Cricket', by Christine Atkins |
The mysteries of the passions. One day, the thing that
you’ve been doing – and looking forward to doing – for the most part of your
life suddenly feels like the thing you least want to do. Like a trip to the
dentist, a physics exam, some bespoke phobia or other.
It’s hard to put a finger on the exact point that such
a transformation happens – almost impossible, in fact, when you’re in the
middle of it all, much as you wouldn’t see the point when you become bald by
looking in the mirror every day – but the point when you realize it has happened is as clear and unambiguous as dropping a
frying pan on your toes. You simply cross a threshold of patience and what only
the previous day was tolerable suddenly becomes unbearable. In an unsurpassably wise text,
F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: “Of course all life is a process of breaking
down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the
work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones
you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends
about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that
comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything
about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be
as good a man again.”
I remember well the moment when I realized my elastic had
snapped, the moment that the various lines of pressure – lines that were muddied
at the time but, looking back, have become clear – suddenly overwhelmed me. I
was on the toilet one Saturday morning, usually an exciting time (the morning
of the match, that is, not sitting on the toilet), but cricket had become the
thing I least wanted to do in the world, a monumental chore. I sighed a few
times, shook my head, put that head in my hands, may even have sobbed
(thankfully, the tears didn’t come), and slowly came to the realization that
there was no getting out of it – well, I didn’t think there was.
How did I get there? After several weeks of poor
results, several weeks trying to man-manage a team with a few personalities
that were not disposed to the selflessness and generosity of spirit required in
team sport, several weeks of having to arrange sub pros (to go with long stints
in the previous two years) and actively loathing one of the sub pro’s we did sign (which I
have written about previously), I’d reached my tipping point. Looking back,
though, I know that these flannelled factors comprised only a fraction of what had
shoved me to the brink. See, cricket had always been an oasis away from
real-world stresses, as I’m sure it is for many who play the game. A place to
switch off. And although there’s a certain (self-imposed) pressure to perform,
ultimately you enjoy the game, the challenge. When it starts to become a
pressure in its own right, however, it stands to reason that it can no longer
function as that valve. That was true with me, but the greatest pressures by
far lay elsewhere…
At the time, I shared a two-up, three-down in the
middle of Stoke with a good mate in bad nick. Our neighbours were a pair of
bickering, sleepless old alcoholics, housed there by social services, and their
every ‘conversation’ – each one a pool of petrol in a flame-thrower shop –
could be heard through walls thinner than French pastry. They were not particularly
house-proud people, either: once, they blithely set fire to an unwanted settee that
had been loitering awhile in their rarely visited back yard; on another
occasion, they couldn’t find it in them to remove a sizeable dog turd from
their front doorstep, so it sat there for a whole month (basically, until it
had dried out and perished, as though they were preparing some Chinese medicine
or other). The only time they would venture out from the murky shelter of their
boozecave was when DTs forced them to procure more bottles of White Lightning, sending them
shakily up the street like stick insects learning how to roller-skate.
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| Potteries cricket |
We never
did invite them round for tea, not even when a weasely little heroin dealer
named “Cookie” moved in (I knew his name because that’s what clients would
shout at 4am when throwing stuff up at his window looking for a score). Nor
when Cookie’s prison acquaintance – who we called “Tattoo Man”, on account of
the large tattoo covering the left-hand side of his face – turned up with his
late-night disco blaring through the walls, advising Cookie to tell us that he
was going to “come through their fucking front door with an axe” when we
complained. I even started to feel sympathy for Brian and Dave’s race to drink
themselves to death having been inconvenienced by this psychopath. No, we never
did invite them round for tea.
All of this – the cricket, the neighbours, the
skintness – was played out against the ongoing saga of my PhD, which was the
real gnawing, chafing, heavy presence at the centre of things. I had been
burgled in Nottingham in 2006, lost my laptop
and, in this pre-Dropbox era, the majority of my work (15 months; 65,000 words).
Benefiting from a huge and timely stroke of good fortune, I took a year out,
selling advertising to property firms in Europe, North Africa and the
Caribbean, and then had to settle back into writing, from scratch, a long, abstract and very, very theoretical piece of historiography (185,000 words
reduced to 120,000 in the final eight days of furious editing). A comedown, to
say the least. And once the funds from the advertising jaunt had dried up, it
became increasingly difficult to get motivated for each day’s slog. The mind
wanders, the internet swallows time. Each morning – or, often, afternoon – you
wake up alone and in a desert, knowing you must push forward those few steps. Meanwhile,
every fortnight I had to fabricate a jobsearch to keep the state happy (getting
a part-time job would have used up time I didn’t have, and probably would have
made me poorer). And while all that
was happening – that, and a mother dying of primary biliary cirrhosis until a
life-saving liver transplant (and she didn’t go anywhere near White Lightning,
nor anything more refined) – you’ve got to keep yourself together for the
cricket team. Be El
Capitán.
Anyway, as I sat there on the toilet that morning, the
prospect of donning the captain’s hat and giving the team-talk seemed
impossible. If you feel like throttling three or four of your team (literally,
in one case, metaphorically in the others), it’s quite hard to be convincing
when it comes to the motivational pep-talk. This was not a time for Henry V’s
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”; it was a time to go to a spiritual
retreat in the hills of Sri
Lanka and have nubile women rub coconut balm
over your body. But PMT had recently discontinued the Potteries to Colombo service, so that
was no longer a realistic option. Yet neither was the “Come on today, fellas!” pretence.
I was cracking, as slowly and inexorably as a WACA pitch.
And that was it. The passion that had sustained 21 years
of first-team cricket had vanished, as quickly as a puddle in the tropical sun. I played
on for a few weeks, maybe six, until three or four weeks from the end of the
season a nagging knee injury gave me my reason to free myself from the torture.
I had no idea the end of my cricket-playing days would be as sudden to arrive or
as anti-climactic as that, but as the start of the following summer came around
I realized beyond all doubt that I’d fallen out of love with the game – ironically,
around the same time as I started to write about it, and to watch more of the
professional version than I had in the previous two decades combined.
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| Eve of Ashes 2013: even this didn't get the juices flowing... |
As well as watching Notts a fair bit in that first,
cricket-less summer, I also popped down a couple of times to watch Wollaton,
the club in Nottingham for which I played in 2006 and 2007. I swung over to Staffordshire
to see how Moddershall were doing on a few occasions, and a few more in 2012. I reported
that year on Test matches against West Indies at Trent
Bridge and Edgbaston, a T20I against
the same opponents in Nottingham, and an ODI there against South Africa.
Still I had no real desire to play. I saw Graham Onions take his 9-57 against
Notts, covering
the game for The Guardian. And
last summer I was in the press box for the opening exchanges of the Ashes, as
well as Jos Buttler’s ODI savaging of New Zealand. I still didn’t feel like playing. Slowly, slowly, however, I was becoming
aware that I might have an itch to scratch – the feeling of wanting to hit a
spanking cover drive, or to skip down the wicket and loft a spinner back over
his head – although I didn’t really feel I could face the sacrifice (as it had
become) of fielding.
Nevertheless, just as imperceptibly as it had
disappeared, the passion was starting to swell. I still can’t put a finger on the exact reasons – and maybe I haven’t yet
had the moment when I know, definitively, that the passion has returned, the frying-pan-on-the-foot
moment – but I was definitely inspired by seeing a club that had endured such a
torrid couple of years slowly rebuild itself, but on much more secure
foundations. And I was inspired by seeing an emerging crop of youngsters not
only dominate at junior level (with those unprecedented back-to-back trebles)
but also make real contributions to senior cricket. And then there was the
Staffordshire Cup final: the ground looking a picture, the pavilion buzzing, a
young side doing themselves and the club proud.
Yes, the passions were stirring. The sacrifices of
fielding began to pale alongside the possible pleasures of batting: possible – because the possibilities
encompass glory and humiliation, and
everywhere in-between. By Christmas, with the persistent nudging of one or
two good cricketing friends, I’d made the decision to give it another crack. I
now needed to commit, mentally and materially, the time to playing, and to
commit some to shifting a bit of timber. After a couple of rust-coloured nets –
finding myself padding up again was weird (weird in the way that certain
victims of stroke can no longer recognize their own face) and I had more or
less forgotten how to do it – the skeleton of an idea was starting to acquire
the flesh of reality.
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| Plenty of flesh on this (old) reality... |
Sadly, I then had to go to Cyprus for seven weeks – well, not sadly, but you know what I mean – and
cricket training opportunities are pretty thin on the ground over there.
Nevertheless, the juices were now flowing, and one of the first tasks was therefore
to find a household implement that could double as a bat for practising shadow
strokes. First, I found a broom with a long handle (and everyone in cricket
knows that you sweep with a short handle) before stumbling across something
more wieldy in the form of a sponge-headed mop of approximately bat-length, the
only problem being that if you didn’t align it properly you’d thrape yourself
on the back of the calf when playing a cover drive – oh yes, it had started to
feel familiar!
My shadow-batting elicited a few curious glances from
passing Cypriots, that’s for sure. Still, no mither: I managed to average 734
for the winter, with a strike-rate of 167 per 100 balls, two triple-centuries
and three double, so I felt in reasonable nick coming into the season, despite
not having hit a non-imaginary ball in a competitive match since August 2010.
Tomorrow, I step in from the wilderness to play a
friendly, and then it’s into the league campaign.* I know that, in a cricketing
sense, Fitzgerald was right: I’ll never be as good a man again. Even so, a
writer – an aspirant writer – can be consoled that the passing of what
physical prowess there was is often accompanied by the arrival of intellectual
acuity and, more importantly, emotional balance, a wilting of the go and with
it all the clamorous interiority of the young, vain and anxious. Fitzgerald
was also convinced that “a man does not recover from such jolts – he becomes a
different person, and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care
about”. Six months ago, I would have agreed without hesitation. But the old passion – if indeed it
is the same old passion – appears close to having returned.
Hopefully, then, a metaphorical frying pan will fall
on my foot. Hopefully, I’ll feel the simple delight you get from hitting a ball, from chipping
in your efforts for the team cause, and from watching a young player have a
light-bulb moment. Hopefully, what had once brought me so many joyous,
sun-kissed afternoons, so many different types and tones of pleasure, so many
thrills and spills, can be fully restored. And hopefully, that unmistakable
sense of Saturday-morning anticipation – whether sat on the Great White Throne
or elsewhere – will bring its blue skies and butterflies once more.
* I made 38 (4 fours, 1 six), against bowling that
wasn’t, to be honest, too challenging. I hit an extra-cover drive for four that gave me a
Ready Brek glow of satisfaction and had me hold the pose for a few instants …
until an opposition fielder made some wisecrack about getting his camera! I
told him it had been four years and he shouldn’t begrudge me the moment. We smiled – at cricket, probably. I
ended up being too delicate with a shin-high full-toss and steering it straight
to long-on.
