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Synopsis
This is a story about coping with growing older and the perceptions of others while trying to find purpose and meaning through the lens of English county cricket.
It starts at the beginning of the 2019 season. For its hardy band of devotees, this is a time for restrained celebration and tempered optimism as friendly rivalries are renewed under inclement April skies. However, this year, it was not just those slate-grey clouds that were creating a sense of foreboding. We knew the 2019 season might be the last chance to see county cricket in its natural habitat.
The Championship had been on the endangered list for years. The equilibrium between football and cricket in the immediate post-war era had long since been tilted towards the former. The Premier League explosion in the early 90s had opened up a chasm in every sense. Football was fast, rich, popular, young, a spectacular television event and minutely-scrutinised by the media. Cricket was the exact opposite.
In 2005, English cricket’s governing body reacted with unusual foresight by creating Twenty20, a lively, short-form version of the game designed to attract a new audience. It was an immediate hit and spread rapidly across the world.
But the likes of India and Australia out-innovated the inventors, creating more popular, money-spinning T20 Leagues played in front of large, sold-out stadiums and huge television audiences.
Still struggling for money and interest, the belated English response was The Hundred - 20 balls shorter, family-focussed and only played by eight new franchises. It was designed to monopolise all the attention during those precious few football-free months of the summer. For the first time in 130 years, the counties were being pushed aside.
I resolved to spend this ‘last campaign’ following my team, Essex CCC, around the country, recalling the plight of the average county member over the last few decades and putting the game into some sort of context. For good or bad, it seemed like it would never be the same again. I was at Cambridge University in March for the traditional pre-season friendly, a bitterly-cold Rose Bowl for the first ball of the county season, among 28,000 spectators at Edgbaston for a dramatic T20 Finals Day and Taunton for the winner-takes-all culmination of the Championship season.
Why did I have the time?
Well, my life was at a crossroads too. This was my 50th year and, like county cricket, I felt valued only by a devoted, yet rapidly diminishing, few. I was invisible to everyone else. My career had “pivoted” a couple of years earlier. A previous upwards trajectory had not so much plateaued as flatlined. Football seemed fraudulent and flatulent now, all money, hype and attitude. County cricket still retained some sort of sporting spirit and real meaning. So, like many in my situation, I reverted to what I knew.
Cricket had ‘saved’ me previously. My father died the weekend before England secured that famous Ashes of 2005 and we held the urn until a few days after my son was born in 2007. Somehow, stupidly, I felt the glory was ‘tiding me over’. Then, just as my career went bad, Essex CCC came good. A major professional shift hit me in the late summer of 2016 and, within a week, I had seen them secure promotion. I witnessed much of the fairy-tale County Championship win that would follow a season later.
We always knew 2019 was going to be a special year for English cricket. The birthplace of the game was hosting the World Cup and The Ashes with a realistic chance of winning both. However, those would be corporate events full of rich people on a ‘jolly’ or average punters overpaying for the privilege of sitting in the cheap seats. I had been educated within the magnolia-painted walls of a horrid comprehensive school in west Essex. I was utterly ordinary in every way and, despite delusions of grandeur in my early career, recent events had forcibly reverted me to the mean.
It is fashionable to talk of mental health these days but, for the past few seasons, county cricket has been my therapy. I was incapable of opening up to anyone about the maelstrom that swirled within my head as life stopped giving and started taking away. Going to see Essex CCC play was a sanctuary.
Frankly, no-one else seemed to care about the fragility of our middle-order, whether Alastair Cook still had the appetite to score hundreds or if Jamie Porter’s pace would be sufficient for him to repeat his impressive wicket-haul of 2017. But this kitchen-sink drama mattered to me desperately as I struggled to regain my place in the eyes of the world, and more importantly myself. And now the ‘suits’ were taking it away from me!
However, there is life left in me and county cricket, this book will tell you why.
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