This summer I am giving myself the gift of cricket.
During the autumn, I was having acupuncture for a bad back that has plagued me on and off for 15 years. It almost certainly ended any aspirations I had to take my cricket career further and reduced much of the enjoyment I had taken from the game thereafter.
Conscious that my back is worse when I am feeling stressed, Francois acts both as my traditional Chinese doctor and as somewhat of a therapist. I had told him that I was feeling worried about the impending lockdown, worried about being lonely and worried about being alone with my grief. However, I also told him that, after the stresses of the previous year, a guilty part of me that felt emotionally exhausted was excited about the potential solitude.
Francois reflected that, my father being a public (and much loved figure), my own grief had been very public too. He told me that it was ok to want to be alone. There is, of course, solace at sharing such profundity as loss with thousands from around the world. But another part of me wanted to keep it for my own – hidden, private and unblemished; safe in the knowledge that it was mine to control.
That week I had been reading The Breath of Sadness by Ian Ridley. It describes a year of his grief after the death of his wife, the renowned sports reporter, Vikki Orvice. I was struck by the similarity in the dichotomy of how we both felt; the desire to be alone and yet surrounded by other people. He describes finding solitude in the meagre and sombre crowds watching country cricket across the country.
I likened this feeling to that of a friend of mine who described trying to give up smoking. For the first three days, they said, they could find very little enjoyment in company; only half present, the other fifty percent of their mind focused on their want to smoke. However, the thought of being alone was almost worse.
Francois told me that now was a good time to start to think about myself. ‘But thinking about myself seems scary’ I replied. ‘How can one think about the future when everything feels so incredibly uncertain?’
While sticking needles in odd places, including the bridge of my nose, he said ‘thinking about yourself doesn’t have to be about your future,’ wise man that he is, ‘it can be about your present – even if that means just staring out of the window and appreciating the view.’
Thinking of this now, I am reminded of the poem by William Davies that my mother repeats on her daily walk with Jimbo, her greyhound and companion in grief – ‘what is this life if, full of care,/we have no time to stand and stare…a poor life this if, full of care,/we have no time to stand and stare.’
Recently, I came upon an excerpt from a 1743 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine. While ‘cricket is certainly a very innocent and wholesome exercise’ it stated, ‘it may be absurd if either great or little people make it their business...It propagates a spirit of idleness at a juncture when, with the utmost industry, our debts, taxes and decay of trade will scarce allow us to get bread.’
And yet, even if that were true in 1743, in 2021 or any period in between, cricket (or sport for that matter), particularly of the amateur kind, is a wonderful place at which metaphorically to stare out of the window and appreciate the view.
There’s solace in the idea that we can give ourselves over to something which operates outside of the societal norms of day to day life. It is an environment whereby we can redefine society’s and our own relationship with success.
In CLR James’ seminal book Beyond a Boundary, which starts with the author reminiscing about a childhood staring at the view of a cricket pitch through his own window, he describes his neighbour, Matthew Bondman. ‘He was a young man already when I first remember him,’ writes James, ‘medium height and size, and an awful character. He was generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce, his language was violent and his voice was loud. His lips curled back naturally and he intensified it by an almost perpetual snarl.’
However, while Bondman was vilified during the week for his sloth and his drunkenness, he was a hero on a Saturday or Sunday, ‘for ne’er-do-well, in fact vicious character, as he was, Matthew had one saving grace – Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a bat in hand was all grace and style.’
Later, he talks of the great Learie Constantine, ‘of royal ancestry in cricket, but in ordinary life, though not a pauper, he was no prince…[this] happy warrior…had revolted against the revolting contrast between his first class status as a cricketer and his third class status as a man.’
This is the dichotomous nature of amateur sport (in Constantine’s day the line between amateur and professional was much more blurred). It exists in parallel to the rest of one’s life. For James ‘the British tradition [was] soaked deep into [him] that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind the sordid compromises of everyday existence.’
At school, one could be deemed both lazy and someone who spends too much time partaking in activities which require huge amounts of physical exertion. For my Sri Lankan and Pakistani friends in Beirut, they had cricket – as Lara was the Prince of Trinidad, so Majid the labourer six days a week was transformed into Majid the Sultan on a Sunday. While running Aaliya’s (much to my business partner’s consternation), I would retreat to the golf course because it was only here, away from the noise, that I was able to think.
It is of course, too, a deeply nostalgic activity wrapped up inextricably with a loss of the innocence of childhood when life was given over to play and of a past, which perhaps never existed, where life moved at a slower pace – perhaps, to quote from the Frank O’Hara poem read at my father’s memorial, a time when ‘we were still first rate/and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth.’ Even while well past one’s physical peak, as one readies oneself before a game there is the tantalising feeling that today could bring some semblance of greatness.
Indeed, as Carl Jung says ‘it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the discontents of civilisation…we no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise.’ Amateur sport can provide a buffer, seamlessly co-existing in the past, the present and the unknown.
Or, in the words of TS Elliot, ‘this is the use of memory:/For liberation – not less of love but expanding/Of love beyond desire, and so liberation/From the future as well as the past.’
For me, my memories of sport, and in particular cricket, very much revolve around my father. While not a sportsman himself, he took great pride and pleasure in my own enjoyment – perhaps being the one field in which I exceeded his own achievements. Starting with Headingley in 1997 where we witnessed Rick Ponting’s maiden test hundred, we spent many blissful days driving around the country either to watch or for me to play, culminating in being invited to the Media Centre at Lord’s, three weeks before he died.
There, I was struck by a sudden awe. We were surrounded by the good and the great, countless legends of the game whom we had revered as we grew learning the game together and it dawned on me, as we hobnobbed with Ed Smith, somewhat of an academic himself, that my father – my best friend – was, to quote from Vic Marks, ‘the cleverest man to have ever been in the building.’
When he was sick, I mentioned to him that sometimes I regretted playing cricket – that perhaps I would have been better off concentrating on golf (or school…). He looked sad and replied, ‘if only you knew how much it has meant to me…’
When I think of my father now, 18 months on, the words of Billy Joel play on repeat: 'in every heart there is a room,/a sanctuary safe and strong,/to heal the wounds from lovers' past,/until a new one comes along,' but ‘I would choose to be with you/that's if the choice were mine to make,/but you can make decisions too/And you can have this heart to break.’
Perhaps all of this is hyperbole or verbiage, hagiographising a mindless activity in order then to justify my own participation but, after leaving Francois’s office, I made the decision that, nine years after having previously played a full season, this summer I would give myself the gift of cricket – to commit fully to it, privileged position that I am in. But the gift isn’t just for me. It is for my father too – remembrance of the pleasure it had given to him. Cricket, 'you can have this heart to break.'