Recently, Dom Sibley was being interviewed about his struggles in Sri Lanka. While consensus amongst journalists seemed to be that his rather dour (and of course matchwinning) fourth innings fifty, three umpires calls and all, was testament to his courage, his stoicism and that oh so English quality of stiff upper lipness that still seems much admired, something that he said struck me as a perhaps indicative of what this blog is intended to be about.
His preceding failures, he said, had left him in a ‘pretty dark place.’ Indeed, much has been made of the difficulties that England cricketers have faced over the last nine months or so – cancelled tours, biosecure bubbles etc. all so they can provide joy and entertainment to those of us stuck at home. But, quite apart from the fact that watching Sibley bat (and this is in no way personal I hasten to add) is neither joyous nor entertaining, where does that leave the rest of us?
To paraphrase from Damian Barr, we may all be in the same storm but some are playing test matches in Galle, that most picturesque of international grounds, and some are hitting tennis balls in our bedroom with a view of bleak mid winter from the window.
Now, this is not to complain but, rather, to offer an opportunity for perspective; to reframe if you will. Nor is it to criticise Sibley - quite the opposite. Furthermore, I’m sure that many of us feel pangs of inadequacy when we see Joe Root make batting – something, as Arnold Palmer might have said, ‘deceptively simple and endlessly complicated’ – look quite so easy. Unlike Sibley, if that starts to get us down we can always just turn off the television.
Rather, it is to ask the question of what role sport and, in particular, cricket is supposed to play in modern society – a question that, I believe, is particularly pertinent in the wake of Covid 19 wreaking havoc, in particular, on the amateur game.
Over the last two years or so, my life (like so many of us) has drastically changed. In late November 2018, I was living in Lebanon and running a successful business, a bookshop-cum-café-cum-bar. My father had just been knighted for services to science and education, I had a beautiful and kind partner (don’t tell her I said that) and a wonderfully eccentric, motley but very close group of friends whom had become a second family to me.
Then my neighbour, a fellow Englishman called Gavin, was brutally murdered in his flat. This set of a chain of events which included moving home to look after my father after he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, his subsequent death, revolution and economic collapse in Lebanon, the pandemic and, to cap it off, an explosion almost killed my partner and my business partner, left over half the city I had called home in ruins and destroyed the bookshop.
However, taking inspiration from my father I’ve always tried to see the positive side of things and, while in many ways this has been a time of deep sadness and upheaval, I’ve also tried to look at it as an opportunity – a chance to press reset and to find out what it is that I really love and what I want this life to be.
Furthermore, while the grief over my father’s death led to great introspection, it also allowed me to look deeply into what had made him successful while remaining a kind, patient and caring man – in a climate where it seems that the opposite is often needed.
Indeed, I came to see that it was these very qualities, cultivated over a great many years, that were the catalysts for his achievements borne out, I believe, from pursuing a passion rather than a career and, perhaps most importantly, that at every stage of his career to have achieved more than someone from his background might have been expected to. Whatever challenges he faced, he always felt lucky.
He used to tell a very funny story about David Phillips, later Lord, from their time together at Harvard in the 1970s. The upper echelons of the faculty was split into three groups – those who hadn’t won Nobel Prizes, those who had and those who had won two – and they were all, with the exception of David who fell into the former group, deeply unhappy.
Those who had none wanted one, those who had one wanted two, and those who had two thought that the others didn’t deserve them. When someone mentioned to David that he must be very disappointed not to have won the Nobel Prize, he responded with indignation. ‘Disappointed,’ he cried. ‘My father worked in a mine and I’m a professor of chemistry at Harvard!’ For my father, swap a mine for the Bradford Wool Exchange.
I had fallen out of love with playing cricket in 2006. The year before, I had scored a century off 85 balls on debut for the Southern Highlands Representative side in Australia, made a 70 at better than a run a ball on the Bradman Oval and had been bowler of the year for both Hampshire u19s and Oxfordshire u21s, taking my wickets at 12 runs a piece. That had preceded a season in which I was top run scored for Oxfordshire u17s in a year where we beat both Sussex and Somerset and, personally, a very successful final year at school. 2005 was also, importantly, the year that England had won back the Ashes for the first time since the year I was born. Anything was going to struggle to live up to that.
As I started at Durham University, the obvious progression was the Centre of Excellence there run by Graeme Fowler, to see how far I might be able to take my cricket while pursuing a degree at the same time. However, while I had success on the field, by the end of a year of which more time was spent on gruelling cross-country runs and gym sessions than actually practising cricket, I had two bad knees, a back so bad I struggled to tie my shoelaces, hands so bruised from taking hundreds of high catches that I couldn’t grip the ball and a stress related illness. I quickly decided that cricket was not a career I was interested in pursuing.
I had fallen in love with the sport as a nine year old in 1995, the year that Brian Lara came to town! At the time I was obsessed with the Guinness Book of Record and The Prince of Trinidad, after his 375 and 501*, featured heavily. I instantly loved everything about the game – the grandeur, the history, the facts, the records and, of course, the stories. First it became my passion, then my refuge and finally my obsession.
As such, as my life went in other directions and I put away my bat – at the time I thought for good – cricket was always there in the background but it took this time away, I believe, to start to realise what it was I had loved about it in the first place and to reflect on how something which for so long had offered unadulterated joy had left me feeling, at times, so fatigued that I struggled to get out of bed in the morning – something, I realise, professional sportspeople aren’t always afforded.
In Lebanon, I met Fernando – along with my mother and my father, perhaps the most impressive human I have been lucky enough to spend time with. He was a Sri Lankan migrant worker who had been living in the country for 15 years. He had come to Lebanon for work, initially cleaning toilets, while sending money back home to provide for his family there.
When I arrived, cricket tournaments – which had been a big part of life for many South Asian migrant workers – had all but stopped due to an incident where the Lebanese army had used one such tournament (taking place in an excavation site) as an opportunity to round up a large number of them at gunpoint, arresting all those who were deemed illegal.
Subsequently, people became too afraid to attend and large tournaments were stopped, replaced by less formal Sunday cricket games. These took place either in a car park in central Beirut or an abandoned Syrian military base just north of the city.
Within 18 months of meeting Fernando, we were hosting tournaments in the car park with 25 teams (including the first women’s teams to compete), over 1,000 spectators, dancers, DJs, live commentary (in three languages), food stalls serving traditional Desi food, mobile bars and visits from dignitaries, including the ambassadors of Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the UK.
Through contacts at the British embassy, we were able to organise police protection for these events to avoid a repeat of what had happened previously and other tournaments began to happen all over the country.
Life was tough for Fernando. Along with dealing with racism on an almost hourly basis and the archaic kafala system which meant he was effectively owned by his employer, he worked 12 hours a day, six days a week to make just $400 a month. I once asked him how he was able to bear his life in Lebanon and all the strife that afflicted him and, yet, remain so positive – I don’t think I ever saw him with out a smile.
He did it, he told me, so that his children needn’t live the same life that he had. Plus, he added, breaking into an even larger grin, life was ok really. After all, on Sunday he had cricket.
