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Des Gallagher is keeping his fingers crossed.

The 66-year-old retiree has entered the ballot for tickets to the Roses match at Old Trafford at the end of May. The lifting of lockdown restrictions this Monday means he can start planning for the possibility of seeing his beloved Lancashire play for the first time since the end of the 2019 season. Like so many of us, he has not only missed the gentle hubbub of live County Championship cricket but realised its importance for his well-being.

Mental health is a trendy term these days. Unfortunately, being older, sometimes lonely and struggling to talk about troubling thoughts has never gone out of fashion. During lockdown, Gallagher lost friends and relatives to Covid-19, as well as the companionship of his partner Barbara, who has been in hospital for the past eight months due to a combination of Coronavirus and the effects of a fall.

Cricket has offered spiritual sustenance. The live streams have maintained a crucial connection with Lancashire but what he most wants is to settle in front of the pavilion at Old Trafford with a flask, some sandwiches and the company of his fellow supporters.

“It will be nice to see people, just to chat cricket again,” he said. “I have been talking to other fans on Facebook but it is not the same. The banter will be brilliant when we get back. There will be no Yorkshire fans there so it will be one-way but it will be wonderful just to be there again.

“I last went to see Lancashire at the end of the 2019 season and I have really missed it. I find the cricket washes over you. You might go to the game with something on your mind and somehow it does not hang there. You can concentrate on the play and nothing really matters in the same way.”

Before we had ever heard of Covid-19, it was clear the domestic game had a peculiar ability to soothe a troubled mind. Last summer, sports writer Ian Ridley published a poignant book about how cricket had helped him process the death of his wife, Vikki Orvice, a trailblazing sports journalist in her own right. A few months earlier, the 2020 Wisden Cricket Almanack carried an article from BBC journalist Mark Lawson detailing his return to the bosom of the county game after his mother had passed away. My own book, Last-Wicket Stand, was published in between. It detailed how following Essex CCC around the country in 2019 mollified my own mid-life struggles. On my 50th birthday I spent five hours on the motorway travelling to and from Canterbury despite a distinct threat of rain. The highlight of the trip was a double rainbow and the well-drilled efficiency of the Kent groundstaff as they hauled the covers off and on. I sat in the back of the stand reading the paper, drinking copious cups of coffee yet as content as any man can be when they raise their bat for that long-feared personal half-century.

While cricket can act as therapy for some, it is also helping change overall attitudes towards mental health. When batsman Gary Ballance needed to take time out last season Yorkshire immediately issued a statement saying he was “managing heightened feelings of anxiety”. There was no need for the cover story of a fake injury or virus as you often see in other sports or even the true-but-vague “stress-related illness” label attached to Marcus Trescothick’s departure from England duty back in 2006. Ballance could be honest enough to say he was not right.. and that was alright.

Such openness has rubbed off on county fans like Craig Tranter, 40, another Lancashire member.

“If cricket was not there I honestly don’t know where I would be,” he said. “I see it as my safe space where I can relax and not focus on anything but the game. These days, I am prepared to say I have suffered from long-term mental health problems since the age of 11. If this was a couple of years ago, I probably would not have been happy talking about it. But cricketers like Kate Cross and Glenn Maxwell have given honest and frank interviews about their mental health issues. It has been really inspiring and taken away the stigma. So talking about mental health is not a taboo for me anymore.”

Tranter has his own of hopes of sitting on the pavilion terrace at Old Trafford for that Yorkshire game alongside his friend Mike, whose red roses hat is a familiar sight on the county scene.

“It might feel like normal, it might feel like the first day at school or a new job or it might feel difficult getting back to meeting people fact-to-face,” he said.

“But I’m sure it is going to be pretty damn emotional.”

This article first appeared in The Cricket Paper, get it every Sunday or subscribe here

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