Marcus

Get up. Leave your chair, or your bed. Go outside. If you are in England, even in the balmy south-west, you will see signs of autumn. It may be mild, but the leaves are turning; it may be quiet, but, if you are very lucky now, you may just hear the last of the northern summer's swallows, swifts and housemartins as they ready themselves to fly south. Come Newlands in January, when England are playing, this is where they will be.

There may be a slight chill in the air; a chill that may be real, or metaphorical. For cricket followers at this time of year there is always a chill. For this is where cricketers' dreams die and where players' careers end.

Marcus Trescothick's career ended here.

1991. Trescothick, 15 years old, beaming rosy-cheeked from the pages of The Cricketer. A new Slazenger bat is his, a reward for scoring 4000 runs in the season. He is flanked by Angus Fraser and Carl Hooper and Micky Stewart. The runs are extraordinary, but nobody knows if they will ever hear of him again. Young cricketers do exceptional things all the time, and frequently they fade into obscurity. Sometimes they come back, often they don't.

1994. Bath, June; a hot summer Saturday at the old festival ground, now sadly lost to the county game. Ringed in deckchairs and marquees, teeming with people, Bath Abbey gazing down like a sentinel. England are playing New Zealand at Lord's and they are struggling. The sound of TMS drifts across the ground from one of the beer tents, but it is only of marginal interest. For the many devout supporters of Somerset who are there, the fact that the Wyvern county is in the ascendant against Surrey is of much greater significance. What is more, young players are thriving. A slight and shy boy from north Devon called Mark Lathwell has already made a double hundred with timing that is a thing of beauty and art. It is art that is coincidental, in that he doesn't seem to realize how he is doing it, and nor do you, or anyone else. He has already played for England, and, despite a hesitant start to his Test career, he looks certain to go far in the professional game. Ultimately, though, his Test career has already finished, and he only goes far away from the professional game. This is what can happen.

Then there is Marcus. He may also be shy, but he is far from slight. In essence he is still a bulky boy on the edge of manhood at 18, and he is just starting to find his feet as an adult cricketer. On that day you see him make his maiden century in first-class cricket with the same ripe combination of drives, cuts and pulls as you will see so many times in the future. Of course, you have no idea of the bumps that there will be in the road, and nor does he. Nobody ever knows what the future holds, especially where cricket, and the harsh pressure that it can exert on all kinds of personalities, is concerned.

After that, for seasons, things stall. Time after time Marcus's innings consist of some early boundaries followed by dismissal to a catch behind the wicket. There are glimpses of the latent potential: there is a time when you go to Taunton and people are talking about the fact that he has made 322 in a second team game, but there is another time when you are sitting in the old Ridley Stand and Marcus is behind you with his Dad, discussing his future, which still seems uncertain. When you do see him play he is often batting down the order and bowling a little. It seems wrong. But this is the thing with cricket; over an extended period, scores don't lie. You are where you are, until you find yourself somewhere else.

For Marcus, the somewhere else was the England team, and you can still recall watching his first international innings on TV, willing him to succeed. He does, but you also recall telling someone that you feel that Test cricket, with all those fielders behind the wicket, might be a step too far.

Then you are at Taunton on the day when he bats in Test cricket for the first time. Yorkshire's Darren Lehmann is making one of the best half-centuries you have ever seen, or will ever see, but you are, of course, listening to what is happening in Manchester. What is happening in Manchester is that Marcus is batting against the West Indies - the West Indies of Ambrose and Walsh - and he is taking 45 minutes to make his first run. But he goes on to reach 50, and everyone is talking about how cool his temperament is and how well-suited he is to Test cricket.

This is true, and it remains true for years, until Marcus has to return home from India in early 2006, for reasons which everyone knows about now. He plays on for England until the end of the following summer, and you are lucky enough to be at Lord's to see what turns out to be his final Test century, even though you don't know it at the time and nobody else does either.

After this, the second half of his career begins.

The County Championship hasn't yet been condemned to dwell like a neglected orphan in the season's colder and darker months, and Marcus can be found where he is happiest, doing what he does best; close to home and batting at the top of the order for Somerset.

Here is where your impressions of Marcus crystallize into lasting memories, and now, with his time at an end, they flow like the runs used to in the times before his form started to fall away.

The first thought is of a stroke. From around 1999 to 2009 I nearly always sat in the Ian Botham Stand at Taunton, and I saw this stroke many times. Usually at the start of an innings, played against the hard new ball, often in fading light, late in the day, when thoughts turn to home. It is a stroke which usually indicated that Marcus was in form, and that big runs would follow.

The bowler would overpitch around middle and off and Marcus would drive just to the off side of straight. Without much foot movement, of course, but with the straightest of bats and that distinctive little flourish at the top of the stroke which was the nearest he ever got to a trademark. And, when he was really in nick, it would always go inside mid-off, too fast and true for anyone to touch.

There are other vignettes too. There was a time when a decent county seamer, who we'll call James Tomlinson, got a few people out at Taunton and started to fancy himself a little. He dropped one short at Marcus, and the ball was last seen bouncing across the car park and heading in the direction of Priory Bridge Road. Marcus was never the arrogant type, but you don't get to be good enough to play for England if you don't believe in yourself. He didn't need to tell James Tomlinson that he'd faced Brett Lee at Perth in 2002 and so knew what really fast bowling was like. All he had to do was hit the ball out of the ground.

In the years after he left international cricket nobody in Somerset forgot what Marcus could do. We knew it all along and we were reminded of it time and time again. Perhaps others forgot, though. So there were times when he reminded them. The time when he took Surrey for 124 at the Oval in a forty over game, or the time he was applauded off Castle Park in Colchester by Essex supporters who knew that they had seen an innings of majesty.

These years, late in the century's first decade, may have been the apogee of Trescothick's career. If his health had allowed it, he would still have been young enough and good enough to play for England, but he was forced by circumstances to tread the county game's boards instead. To many this would have seemed a much more prosaic existence, but you suspect that to Marcus it never did. He was a child of the county game in ways that players from counties where cricket means less, or who leave it behind for international cricket earlier, never were.

When he and Sir Alastair Cook briefly embraced at the end of their counties' final game of the season, it marked not just the passing of a player's career but the gradual ebbing away of an element of English cricket culture. These were two players, born on the same day nine years apart, whose international careers briefly intersected, and both of them know that their personal histories might have been very different if certain things beyond anyone's control hadn't happened. They also know and understand what it is like to exchange fame and fortune for a more moderate sort of heroism at Chelmsford or Taunton, instead of the Gabba or the Oval, whether you have any choice over the timing of your departure or not.

How many players in the future will get so much professional satisfaction, so much pleasure, from simply playing four day county cricket, long after, for them, the bright lights of the international game have been extinguished? The never-ending world of bastardised cricket will claim most of them before they even have the chance to see what they might become, let alone sink back into the life they used to know before they hit the big time.

And now, as county cricket as we know and love it enters another phase of threat and uncertainty - not that it ever left the last one, or the one before that, behind - memories of Marcus and times like these are what we are left with. And, whatever exists when the pieces thrown into the air and scattered to the winds by The Hundred land, these are what we will always have.

Cherish them for as long as you can.

The Inevitability of Genius

Everyone who saw what happened at Headingley yesterday - and many who didn't - will have their take on it. This is mine.

With one thing and another - the demands of a job which doesn't allow me to watch cricket, mainly - unless I'm at a game these days, opportunities to sit down and watch Test cricket, in all its compelling glory, for hour upon hour, are relatively rare. On Saturday afternoon, and again yesterday, I was able to do so. I was reminded of my childhood - days of Soul Limbo, and Peter West, and Jim Laker and Richie, curtains drawn against the occasional sun, my Mum trying to drag me away from the television. 'Just one more over' was what I would always say; ten overs later I was still there. And, because my parents had paid for their television licence, I could do so without having to mute the adverts. Sky was just what I saw when I went outside with a bat and a tennis ball during the lunch interval.

In modern parlance this sounds slightly sad. I did go out (usually, in the summer, anyway, it was to play cricket); I had friends (mostly they also liked cricket); I had other interests (though never anything as intense as cricket, really) and days such as those prepared me for days such as this. You name it, I saw it - Richards and Gavaskar at The Oval, early Gower, beautiful and unique, Botham when he could swing the ball (which always leads me to kick back when people get too effusive about Jimmy A), the West Indies attack in all its terrifying potency, even innings - like Javed Miandad's 260 at The Oval in 1987 - which, for all their shimmering greatness, have been lost in the mists of time.

In July 1981 I was recovering at home from a major operation (we won't go into the details here; they are unpleasant). This meant that although school hadn't quite broken up, I was in front of the TV when England found themselves 135 for 6 at the old, open, grey Headingley, a very different ground to the modern sun-drenched stadium which was the stage for yesterday's heroics. Yes, I saw Botham, and Willis, and the catches by Gatting and Graham Dilley, and all that. Start to finish. I even scored it, although, in all the excitement. my scoring skills let me down and the sheet didn't add up right.

38 years after, on a hot Devon afternoon, I find people are asking how what Botham did then compares with what Ben Stokes has just done. As I reply I start to feel like some ageing eminence grise of cricket-watching, but I am nothing of the sort. I am 53 years old and I have spent a very large part of my life watching cricket. That is all.

As always with cross-era comparions, little is gained; they were different innings, played at different times, in different circumstances. One began and continued as a rage against the dying light of a seemingly hopeless situation; the other was a cultivated response to the possibility of victory that was at least plausible, if highly improbable. And there are other, more worthy comparisons with Stokes; Lara at Bridgetown, 1999, stands out as an example of genius bending a game to its will with the same result as we have just seen.

Two things: the first is the straightness of Stokes's bat, and the dead weight position of his head as he defends again and again against Lyon on Saturday evening, and again on Sunday morning. Even though it is hot, as the Yorkshire autumn approaches the Saturday shadows are beginning to lengthen, but, even watching on television, you can feel the strength of his determination not to do anything rash. Unlike many another contemporary English batsman he has faith in his defensive technique and his strength of will. You sense that he feels that in time, with the right support, the opportunity to cash in will come, though he cannot know how spectacularly it will happen. The second thing to say is that I felt a really strange sense of inevitability from around forty runs out. Unless Jack Leach was dismissed, England were going to win.

In retrospect, that feels ridiculous. But there was - and increasingly is - a sense of the ridiculous about the way in which Stokes bats, of the impossible being not just possible, but certain. And here, the comparison with Botham has its time again, because this is the product of ferocious competitive will and iron self-belief, the like of which English cricket hasn't seen since Botham.

Stokes doesn't feel like a genius in the way that Lara did, but then genius is more readily ascribed to elegance than to the kind of raw power and ingenuity in which Stokes specializes. But what is genius if it is not the ability to do things which are way beyond the capacity of people who, by most people's standards, are incredibly good at what they do? Could Joe Root have done that? No. Could Jos Buttler have done that? Well, perhaps, and he now has something to aim for, even if such a conjunction of circumstances is hardly likely to ever come his way.

For all his innate ability to spin the ball away from the right-hander, Jack Leach is nobody's idea of a genius. But when I spoke to him in Taunton a few years ago after he'd taken some important, game-sealing wickets under the sort of pressure which makes lesser players wilt, I was impressed by the coolness and certainty of his responses. His self-possession yesterday came as no surprise, and, in a way as understated as his character, he has also written his name in English cricket's lengthy, dusty, somewhat dog-eared, but voluminous history books.

I have seen a lot of cricket, but I haven't seen everything, so it is best not to get carried away at times like this. However, I can say with absolute certainty that this was the most skilful, multi-dimensional and outrageously courageous innings I have ever seen played by an England batsman. After what happened at Lord's in July it was never a genuine danger, but it is now certain that Ben Stokes will never be remembered for being hit for four consecutive sixes in his first World final, or for punching someone on the streets of Bristol. He will be remembered for this, and for many unknown deeds that are yet to come.

Like most professional sportsmen, Stokes and Leach are culturally conditioned always to look forward, and never, at least until they retire, to look back. But they, and those of us who were fortunate enough to see what they did yesterday, especially those who were there, will never forget it.

Great Days

Driving to Sussex from Devon in the rain and gloom. It is 6.10 in the morning and it feels mad.

The rain clears around Portsmouth; soon after 10 we park and walk through Arundel. It is a small town which embodies a certain type of storied Englishness. Beautifully kept houses from many eras, antique shops, a War Memorial decorated with wreaths. A castle; a cathedral; vintage pubs which look welcoming and well-stocked.

You would not need to be told that this is the home of a cricket festival. Not one in the loose sense of the ICC Cricket World Cup, with all its noise, its forced crowd participation and its saturated and breathless media coverage. This is a festival of County Cricket as it still can be at certain times and in certain places: white clothing, red ball, Jack Russell selling paintings, others selling books. Modesty, tolerance, subtlety and elegance are built into the fabric of the day. A man playing an electric guitar made out of a cricket bat would look as incongruous here as a herd of pigs taking off from the castle ramparts.

If seen through a white ball prism, the day’s play is also full of incongruity. Will Beer, a man of thirty looking to leave his bit-part leg spinner’s career behind, bats through all the day’s 96 overs for just 76 runs. This is, by any standards, slow batting, but nobody tries to start a Mexican wave. People know what he is trying to do and they see no need to disturb him. In most cases they are simply happy that days such as these still exist. The sun becomes warm and the conversations grow slightly more animated; late in the day a few people drift away early for the alternative comforts of home, but most stay to the end. It is a time nobody wants to leave behind.

The next day, in Taunton, everything, on field and off, is faster, noisier, brasher. It is also more ephemeral, but this is not a condemnation. The game is completed in one day, it ebbs and it flows, the enthusiasm, knowledge and good humour of the immense Pakistan following is infectious and the play is of a standard far beyond anything which most of the players at Arundel have known. Many of them would like to, of course, but deep down they know they never will, and they might perhaps be happy with that.

It is one of the many strengths of the contemporary game that it can captivate and entrance in such contrasting ways. But amid the differences there are similarities; as at Arundel, an opening batsman is working to establish himself, although in this case he has travelled the road before. This is about resuming an interrupted career.

All David Warner’s trademarks are there; his century is studded with powerful drives and pulls, and he even casts off the cloak of inhibition which hampered Australia’s chase at The Oval. He lays the foundations for Australia’s victory; later the job is completed by Cummins and Starc.

Both of these, in their very different ways, have been great days, but this is not the time to consider which is best. Both are part of the pageant of modern cricket, and they can easily co-exist, with each reminding us of the virtues of the other.

Just as long as the will for them to do so is there.

A Time of Doubt

April, for cricketers, is a time of optimism, but it is also a time of doubt.

If you are a county opening batsman who was once a prodigy - you were a Test player at 19 - but you have endured two seasons of abject poverty in an environment where the only hard currency is runs, you may have more doubts than most. Yes, you may have taken a student bowling attack for a double hundred the week before, but you know that is important only because it has refreshed your muscle memory and renewed your fragile confidence a little. That is all. You know that you need serious runs; runs made against hardened professional bowlers, three of whom, even though they are currently plying their trade in Division Two of the County Championship, know what it is to celebrate Test match wickets, and another who was once a prodigy himself. Former prodigies are everywhere; many become known mainly for their pasts and lost futures, and you do not want to join them.

At the day’s start the sun is briefly out but it soon gives way to leaden cloud. A strong easterly breeze scuds across Lord’s, and, by early afternoon, it feels like a raw day in late autumn or early winter. In a sense this is appropriate, for April’s doubts are not confined to the players. An early season crowd is, by definition, composed of devotees, and most of them will have concerns about where the game is heading. Thoughts of ‘The Hundred’, thoughts of the ECB’s gift for inflicting damage on the game it is supposed to be protecting, thoughts of how Championship cricket has come to this, and of how much further it may fall.

These are concerns that are as penetrating as the savage wind, but they can easily be rendered temporarily ephemeral by what goes on in the middle. The game is the thing, and any straw of aesthetic beauty or technical skill will be grasped and used as a defence against the worries, the pessimism, and the resentment.

This is how it is with Haseeb Hameed’s innings. Within a few overs it is clear how well he is timing his shots - you only need hear the sound his bat makes as it connects with the ball to know this - and the decisiveness of his footwork makes him look what he is: a player, for all his youth, and his slightness and his air of modesty, who genuinely knows how to bat. The crease is his natural home and it is where he is most comfortable, but he has spent precious little time there in recent seasons, so the impression is of someone - like a brain-injured patient re-learning how to talk with fluency - rediscovering a language they speak well, but in which they have temporarily lost their eloquence.

The drives - both eased through mid-on and caressed through the covers - and the flicks through midwicket are one thing, but what defines the innings and ensures its longevity is Hameed’s forward defensive. It is played time and again, and it is both watertight and positive; like any player of high talent he judges length quickly and his huge stride and the straightness of his bat make the stroke look as co-ordinated and smooth as a natural body movement. In reality it is the product of thousands of hours at the crease and in nets, facing bowlers and their mechanical doppelgängers, but other players have done all that and can’t play it like Hameed can.

A last vignette: As Hameed comes through the door into the Long Room to resume his innings after tea, he pulls on his gloves with an unfeigned air of nonchalance. The early tension has gone, to be replaced by familiarity and assurance. He is still short of his hundred but it is nothing to be concerned about. He has passed this way before, countless times. It will come, and it soon does, with a six to the short Grandstand boundary.

His innings comes to an end before too much longer, but no matter. His work is done.

Winter in England has ended, really, but in all kinds of ways it didn’t feel like it at Lord’s on Friday 12th April. Until a few seasons ago, Championship cricket wouldn’t even have begun by this point in the calendar, but this is life’s new reality. What a player like Hameed gives us, and what an innings like his signifies, is the way in which, at a time of unpleasant and unwanted change, so many of us - please count me right in - are looking to cling to anything that represents cricket as we know and love it.

And we want more. much more.

It is a lot to ask of a boy from Bolton, but this should not be a concern. If he can handle expectation like he can handle a bat, he will be fine.

And so - at least for a time, and even if only in our minds - will the game.

Annie and Gary and Me

If you like cricket and you're on Twitter, and you follow everybody that everyone else follows, you will probably have heard of Annie Chave. These days, it seems, most people have. Among other things, Annie commentates on Guerilla Cricket, and she recently had the privilege of being flown to Barbados to broadcast on the First Test between the West Indies (they will never ever be called the 'Windies' around here) and England. The only thing stopping it being the trip of a lifetime is the fact that she'll probably do it again.

While most people out there have only heard of Annie in the last year, she and I go back a long way. Her Dad - a remarkable man well worth knowing in his own right - had the dubious pleasure of captaining me many times on the Devon village circuit either side of the turn of the millennium. Annie, with her sister and her brothers and her mother, and later with her husband and son, was often around. Annie watched, Annie scored, and on one occasion Annie missed an important game (the time we said farewell to our old ground before it was turned into a housing estate) because she was detained in a maternity suite. Life gets in the way of cricket sometimes.

During the game in Barbados, Annie posted a picture of herself talking to Sir Gary Sobers. This set me thinking.

I met Gary Sobers once too. And, many years before that, I saw him play.

This is not point scoring; unlike me, Annie met him properly and had a conversation with him. More, much more, than I will ever do.

The time I met him came when he paid a visit to a public school with which I have a tenuous connection which gets me invited to things. My memory is a bit hazy, but there was a Question and Answer session, incongruously conducted (unless I’ve dreamt it, and now it sort of feels like I might have done) by the former Glamorgan and Sussex batsman Tony Cottey. After that, it was a question of queuing up for the great man’s autograph behind a large number of sixth formers who had presumably been told about Sobers by their Grandparents. Initially I wasn’t sure if I wanted to bother with this, affecting to think of myself as a bit too cool (well, a bit too old) for such things, but, with my mind drifting back to the time at Lord’s (after the 1978 Gillette Cup final, which, don’t forget, Somerset lost) when I was last in a seemingly endless line of kids seeking Viv Richards’ signature (and he waited, and he signed my scorecard), I decided it was worth it.

I took along my prized copy of Alan Ross’s classic account of England’s 1959-60 tour of the West Indies, Through the Caribbean, and selected a photo of the young Sobers, hooking. Sobers signed it with a flourish and handed it back, commenting ‘That’s a rare photograph. I’m batting in a cap’. I thought about it afterwards and it was true that virtually all my other recollections of him - easing his way on to the path to 254 at Melbourne, or the 150 at Lord’s on his final England tour, or hitting Malcolm Nash ‘all the way down to Swansea’ saw him bare headed. I also remembered the time - the one and only time - I saw him play in the flesh.

September 1982; The Oval. Two end of season games: one between a ‘Barbados Board of Tourism XI’ and a World XI, and another, the next day, between the World XI and an Old England XI. The Barbados side was distinctly useful: the attack comprised Marshall, Garner, Hall and Griffith, with Sobers, Greenidge, Haynes, Collis King and Seymour Nurse to provide the runs. I can't remember whether I went to both games but I know I went to the second one, as my memory tells me it was the last day of a long summer holiday between school and college, which, for all kinds of reasons, was a time of change and adjustment.

Of course, detailed recollections are few after all these years, but my memory of Sobers coming out to bat for the World XI that Oval Sunday are crystal clear. He came in at six, with his old colleague Rohan Kanhai at the other end. Bobby Simpson, Farokh Engineer and Neil Harvey (Neil Harvey? Jesus. It dawns on me now that I saw one of Bradman's invincibles bat, a fact I didn't recall years later when I sat in the back of a minibus with him one Melbourne night.) had come and gone. I don't know who was bowling, but I think it was a spinner, so it would have either been Don Wilson or Brian Close, but, very early in his innings, Sobers, who wasn’t wearing a cap (or indeed a helmet, which would have been an option by 1982) unfurled a cover drive of such epic majesty that I've never forgotten it.

When it comes to cover drives by left-handers, people talk about elegance and purity of timing (think Gower, think Moeen) or they talk about punchiness and raw, elemntal power (think Warner, maybe, or, from the T20 generation, someone like Corey Anderson) but my memory is that this shot by Sobers (the bowling was from the Vauxhall End, so it was played towards the Harleyford Road) stood perfectly on the razor sharp cusp between one and the other. It had elegance, but it also had withering power. No matter that the fielder it passed may have been someone, like Sobers himself, born in the 1930s. This, as old Jim Laker would have said back then, was ‘four from the moment it left the bat'.

It says much about the selective nature of memory that I can recall that single shot so perfectly after nearly forty years. Is it because it was the best shot I've ever seen, or simply because someone - perhaps my Dad, who took me to the game - had told me that I was watching the greatest player who had ever lived and that I should make an effort to remember it as I would never have the opportunity again? Possibly it's the latter, although my Dad, unlike me, was never really one for the long view or the grandiose statement, so I'm doubtful. A more self-regarding way of reflecting on it would be to say that even as a sixteen year-old (but one who was obsessed with cricket) I knew a great shot - no, that's too prosaic - I knew a thing of beauty when I saw one. But then anybody, even someone with no knowledge of the difference between a cover drive and a reverse sweep, would have instantly recognised it as a supreme blend of athleticism and that which can’t be defined or described, but which we know as timing.

Few people have ever got close to emulating this aspect of Sobers’ game. To me, Yuvraj Singh at his best - against Australia in Nairobi when nobody had seen him before, or killing England in the 2006 ODI series - is the player who has come nearest. But nobody ever will, really.

Time moves on. Of the 22 men who played that afternoon at The Oval, 12 (including nine of the England team) are no longer with us. One of those who still lives to tell his tale is Gary Sobers. I know he tells a good tale, because Annie has told me so. A tale of the Caribbean of old, but also of a Swansea day in 1968 and of an England he still visits and loves.

Perhaps, when he is in the right mood - when his thoughts stray to 1966 and to Graveney, to Murray, to Snow and to Higgs - or even to a day late in his cricketing life, he will talk of The Oval.

Because we all have memories.

When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease

When the moment comes, and the gathering stands
And the clock turns back to reflect
On those years of grace, as the footsteps trace
For the last time out of the act
Well this way of life’s recollection
The hallowed strip in the haze
The fabled men in the noonday sun
Are much more than just yarns of their days

Roy Harper, When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease

When John Murray - a man who was simply ‘JT’ to a generation - died in late July, Mike Selvey, who is old enough to have played with him and knew him to the very end of his life, posted a link on Twitter to a video of Roy Harper’s agelessly evocative song When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease. It represented Selvey’s sadness at the loss of a colleague, hero, friend and mentor.

In the maelstrom of recollection and emotion that filled the space between the announcement of Alastair Cook’s retirement and the end of his final Test match, thoughts of the song seeped inexorably into my mind.

In Cook’s case the song seems both fitting and also ludicrously inappropriate. While he has left the Test crease for good, he is very far from anybody’s notion of an old cricketer. If anyone normal had played in as many games, seen off as many opening bursts with the lacquered, hard, new ball denting bat, flesh and bone, or spent hours on the field in weather hot enough to kill, or captained his country through the physical and psychological torment of crushing defeat to their bitterest rivals, they would be wizened and bent double like a cricketing Quasimodo. Not Cook, though. None of these experiences seems to have aged him at all.

Although Alastair Cook hopefully has many decades of life ahead of him, his retirement can be viewed as a kind of death. The death of a certain style of batsmanship, perhaps; or, alternatively, the death of an era.

Few people are going to get too misty eyed over the loss of Cook’s collection of staccato half-strokes, even if I will always contend that he wasn’t as ugly a player as many thought, at least on those occasions when - such as those two days in Melbourne, when, perhaps just starting to feel his career slipping away - he trusted himself to really drive the ball through the offside, rather than merely helping it into the gaps with the air of grim suspicion which years of opening the batting had induced.

However, in some ways, the fact that so many found Cook's style jarring was a welcome counterpoint to all the other aspects of him that could seem too good to be true: The matchless fitness, the failure to sweat, the seeming inability to ever sustain an injury, the apparent imperviousness to stress, the way in which his Test career concluded. True heroes can never be too perfect.

Great sportsmen make the difficult look easy, but Cook frequently did the opposite. If that alone means that for all his unique longevity he isn’t quite up with England’s very greatest players in aesthetic, rather than the purely numerical terms in which he is king, his significance goes far beyond the legacy of a thousand bent-kneed nudges through the leg-side.

It’s purely a coincidence that I began writing about cricket on the Web during the months following Cook’s Test debut. Loads of people were doing the same then. Many have fallen by the wayside, some have gone on to bigger things, others, like me, are still around in the shadows, occasionally stirred to write something by an event which particularly resonates with them. For each and every one of us, love him or loathe him (and, in case anyone doesn’t know, there are people who really loathe him), Cook has always been there.

That was a different time. The Ashes had just come home, and English Test cricket on terrestrial television was a fresh memory, not a distant dream. For many of the summers that followed - and the occasional extraordinary winter - Cook stood at the fulcrum of an England team which was as good as any in the world.

It will soon be Cook’s fate to rejoin the likes of Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott on the county circuit, as well as his other compatriots - Strauss, and KP, and Matt Prior, and Monty, and Swanny, doing whatever it is they’re doing in the half-life of near memory.

Even Cook’s greatest innings rarely quickened the pulse. They were efforts of will, of concentration, of understated poise. Monuments to the triumph of the mind. But perhaps an even greater impression was left by his courage, his dignity under pressure, his innate modesty and his decency.

In England, autumn is setting in now. Anyone who knows the country - as Cook, settling into life as a former Test cricketer by striding across farmland somewhere in southern England, assuredly does - recognizes what this feels like. Cooler mornings, fresh breezes, early sunsets. A time of change, a time for reflection, and a time for memories of what has been lost.

One memory of Cook: It is Melbourne; it is two days after Christmas, 2017. Cook, not for the first time, has seemingly rescued his ailing career from the brink of terminal decline. At the day's end he is 104 not out. Although, as usual, he is reluctant to talk about himself and what he does, he agrees to answer questions from some of BT Sport's shifting cast of characters. He says a few things about what he's done, about settling in when you're wondering if you can still bat, about the hesitant embrace of some semblance of form, about the drives starting to flow, about reaching his hundred in the day's final over, bowled by Australia's captain.

These are the themes. I can't remember everything he said - with Cook you rarely could - but something I strongly recall is Cook saying, clearly, without artifice, that 'it sounds like I'm making myself out to be a good player'.

You were, Alastair. You really, really were.

The Language of Batting

On a May Saturday morning on which Dublin Bay, looking across from Blackrock to Howth in the shimmering sun, was just a little reminiscent of the bays of the western Cape, cricket was on people’s minds. Well, some people, anyway.

To the lad in the newsagents who asked if the game was ‘up at Trinity’ it didn’t mean a lot, but to the Irishman in the White Rose cap at the station, whose self-proclaimed hero was Geoffrey Boycott, this, with Friday’s rain behind us, was the day of days. The culmination of years spent waiting, but never quite believing.

Cricket in Ireland has had its ups and downs. From proscription by the GAA to bowling the West Indies out for 25; from beating England at the World Cup to being denied the opportunity to compete in it again without having to qualify. It has never been a popular sport in the wider sense, but it has held its own. This, both literally and metaphorically, was Irish cricket’s day in the sun.

The DART train grows steadily fuller as the stations, with their familiar names from the worlds of sport and revolutionary politics - Lansdowne Road, Pearse, Connolly - pass. The English county hardcore are there, with their dog-eared hats, their trusty bags and their leftfield conversational gambits. As the crowds pour through the barriers at Malahide Station, a Lancashire fan seems more concerned with solar eclipses of the future than with the first Test match on Irish soil. The world’s cricketers are there too; a French international, born in India, but living in Dublin, talks of his overwhelming desire to see Mohammad Amir bowl. This day he will be disappointed. But, above all, the Irish cricket family is there. This is a day they have waited for for longer than most can remember and their characteristic bonhomie barely veils the air of suppressed excitement.

At the lovely tree-ringed arena in the grounds of a castle, it is the same; a feeling of togertheness, pride and faith. In the programme there is a summary of the laws of cricket for the uninitiated, but the impression is that this isn’t really needed. Possibly on account of its smaller size, this crowd appears more knowledgeable than the average Test crowd in England; these are players, administrators, members of the cricket family. Unlike a typical Test match in England, nobody seems to be there just to get drunk and draw attention to themselves. The cheerleader in the huge green top hat - ‘Larry Leprechaun’ - draws attention to himself, but he doesn’t need to be drunk to do so. A walk behind the stands reveals members of the family from both sides of the border who have done the hard yards - the ODIs at home, maybe some trips to Europe, or Scotland, or Lord’s, perhaps even a World Cup or two - greeting each other and swapping reminiscences as they absorb where they are and what they’re watching.

Play begins with a collision. It could easily be described as a clash of cricketing cultures, but this is really more mundane; it is simply a meeting of bodies of the type which, though not commonplace or required by the structure of the game, happens from time to time. There is plenty of laughter; ice is broken, and the game moves on.

Anyone who cares enough about what happened at Malahide to be reading this will know what happened at Malahide, so a blow-by-blow account is unnecessary. Vignettes come thick and fast, though.

Saturday afternoon. Tim Murtagh has played in more than 200 first-class matches and taken over 700 wickets. With his grooved, economical action and undemonstrative demeanour, he embodies the skill and nobility of the English county seamer. He has bowled sides out, he has won the County Championship, but he has never before played Test cricket, or even been close to doing so. So, as the hazy sun warms the ground and he walks towards the hospitality tents and reticently acknowledges the crowd’s applause, his thoughts can only be imagined. For him, late in his career, this must be the time of times.

Just after lunch on Sunday, Niall O’Brien is lbw to Mohammad Abbas and Ireland are 7 for 4 in their first innings. As he leaves the field there is that sudden hush you get, even in crowded places, when bad things are happening and people, through fear and embarrassment, can’t find the words to express what they’re feeling. What they’re feeling is the sudden realisation that things are as bad - and probably worse - than they could have imagined. New Zealand’s 26 all out in 1955, still the lowest Test total, is mentioned. They can surely only improve from here.

They can, but it takes time.

When Pakistan enforce the follow-on with Ireland 180 behind, the two Irish openers, William Porterfield, the captain, and Ed Joyce, stride to the wicket for the second time in the day. This, to a professional batsman, is as bad as it can get. You should never have to bat twice in a single day.

Joyce and Porterfield. Porterfield and Joyce. They sound like a firm of Dublin accountants, and they go on to bat like that as they take Ireland to 64 without loss by stumps. Ed Joyce is 39 now, a little slower on his feet and more careworn around the eyes, but the distinctive, crouching stance is still there, as is the muscle memory of years of elegant run scoring. All over the county circuit, in the world’s cricketing outposts, for England at the Sydney Cricket Ground. He knows what the situation demands.

Porterfield is younger, but his better days are also behind him and he is a less naturally fluent player than his partner. But he has also experienced situations like this before when the county circuit was his place of work. They both understand the language of batting, and the session leading to the close on Sunday evening is resonant and moving. Both Porterfield and Joyce are simultaneously fighting the dying of the light and lighting the way forward for their country’s cricket. It is tough as hell, but by the day’s end there is renewed hope.

This is confirmed on Monday, as Kevin O’Brien - ‘Big Kev’, known in many places just as a white ball hitter - builds on the poise and common sense he showed in the first innings to become his country’s first Test centurion and take his team to a position of relative strength. In the end it isn’t enough, but the feeling that this has been a triumph can’t be shaken.

We won’t talk about it as Irish cricket’s ‘coming of age’. It’s a hoary old cliche, and, in any case, it probably ‘came of age’ in the West Indies in 2007, or even at Sion Mills in 1969. Whatever.

And we won’t say that it’ll save Test cricket, because it won’t. Test cricket isn’t beyond saving, but Ireland’s performance in this match won’t affect its future one way or the other.

No, this was just about how it felt to be there. And it felt really good.

There are, of course, clouds on the horizon. It has taken a very long time for this team to achieve the right to play Test cricket and many of the players have grown old together. Before long, new blood will need to be found.

But that can wait for another day. For now, the sun still shines on Dublin Bay.

Retirement

On a sleepy March Sunday when the world has turned a shade of brilliant white for the second time in three weeks, it seems incongruous to be musing on the retirement of a cricketer.

But actually it is appropriate, as this feels like no ordinary day and Kevin Pietersen was no ordinary cricketer.

Screeds of statistics, and partisan analysis of who said and did what to whom in the years, months and days leading up to January 2014 can wait for another time. In point of fact I was never quite sure where I stood on the fall of KP, but I always knew where I was with his batting. Anyone did, because if you couldn’t appreciate his batting you couldn’t appreciate the game.

There could be more, but here are some vignettes of memory (which seems right, as, for all that he could bat long and score big, Pietersen’s genius is best appreciated by reference to moments, to shots, and to times).

In the back row of seats on the eastern side of the Oval, in front of the ageless gasholders as the distinctive afternoon warmth of September, muggy but with a hint of changing temperature and light, mingled with the anxious hopes of a crowd which hadn’t seen the Ashes come home for years, was one such time. The decision, with lunch over and a long afternoon to see through, to take the attack to Brett Lee. The crystal memory of Shaun Tait on his hands and knees, his grovelling in the Kennington dust weightily symbolic of changing times, hours before the choruses of Viva Espana (Ashley Giles, Pietersen’s stolid sidekick for much of the day was then briefly known as the ‘King of Spain’. Remember?) rained down and the bar was drunk dry. An afternoon which was the start of something special and the end of something equally precious. The start of the era of Pietersen and the last day of Test cricket ever shown on terrestrial television in the UK.

Taunton in late August 2012, with Pietersen banished to the Westcountry with the brownhats in a trail of inflammatory texts, was a very different time. Most of the history and the runs had been made by then, and, although Mumbai was still to come, the downslope had been reached. A Somerset attack based around Peter Trego, George Dockrell and Saj Mahmood held few terrors, and so Pietersen made a century of obscene ease, occasionally rousing himself, when he felt the need, to hit Dockrell into the River Tone. Those of us who were there will wait a very long time to see a first-class hundred made with such casual mastery. Brian Lara used to do things like that, but the idea that there was an England player who could do so still felt like an alien and unusual discovery.

This, of course, was the thing about Pietersen. With his accent, and his gifts, and his swagger, and his self-certainty (occasionally illusory, but real enough much of the time), he could never really be mistaken for an English player. We don’t produce players who can bat like that, and if we did they’d be prisoners of an ingrained modesty which would prevent them from achieving their potential. Pietersen, cut from very different cloth, was never encumbered by such conventions, with the result that he became what he was: One of the greatest batsmen on God’s earth, and one who knew just how good he was. This, in a British culture which values self-effacement above all else, was a recipe for trouble.

Cliches are ten a penny at times like this.

‘We shall not see his like again’, people will say. Mostly, when people say that, they turn out to be wrong.

In the strange and unique case of Kevin Pietersen, though, they would be very, very right.

The Dying of the Light

Australia is where English cricketers' dreams go to die. Joe Root knows this all too well.

Joe Root, rising 27, with his wispy would-be beard, and that hardening of eyes and features which stress produces, is at one of life's cusps. Until recently he always looked young and carefree, apart from when he was out. In the aftermath of Perth, in the harsh, unforgiving forcefield of the cameras and the microphones and the pundits' egos, he started to look, for the very first time, just a little bit old. Like many another man before him, he is starting to experience the uneasy feeling of his life changing as it turns on the wheel of the England captaincy and the difficulty of playing Test cricket in Australia. He has played in seven Test matches in Australia and he has been on the losing side seven times.

With a few exceptions, Australia - big old Australia with its huge grounds, its vivid light and scalding sun, its flies, its harsh, sarcastic crowds, its batsmen and its fast bowlers - has always been a difficult place for English teams to triumph. Go there with a Larwood, or a Tyson, or a John Snow, together with a crystal clear tactical plan, and you have a chance. Catch Australia at a point where they are rebuilding and you have a strong side touched by genius, and you have more than a chance. Other times, like now, forget it.

In some senses what has happened recently is neither as shocking nor as debilitating as the pitiless defeats of 2006 or 2013. The absence of Ben Stokes tempered expectations, and there are other things to cling on to; Craig Overton's spirit, Dawid Malan's burgeoning confidence, James Vince's cover drive. With this said, though, there is the inescapable feeling that old certainties are ebbing away. Jimmy Anderson is there, 35 and still running in with his customary liquid rhythm. He is barely tainted by age, but time is not his friend, while for Stuart Broad and Alastair Cook things are worse. They are younger but they have fallen further and more quickly, leaving them wide open to the old sporting cliche: how much do you want it? When you have been there and done it so often, how readily can you muster the energy to rage against the dying of the light? You can deny that there is a problem - that much is easy - but what are you going to do about the fact that you can't take wickets or score runs?

As the sun rises so the light dies, and for Joe Root, and for England, there is a wider sense that the skies are darkening; that before long they may be looking for two opening batsmen instead of one; they may be looking for someone with the potential to take wickets with the old and new balls, and make aggressive lower-order runs; they, if they are Root himself, will be looking for a way to turn fifties into big hundreds in the manner that is second nature to Smith or Kohli. And all this in an environment of marginalisation and complacency; where those taking game-shaping decisions are more interested in promoting a putative competition which there is little evidence many people want, while relegating to the season's margins the type of cricket which could produce another Stuart Broad or Alastair Cook. And where the expectation is always that there will be an early season greentop on which England will win the toss and Anderson will go through a shivering group of Sri Lankans like a hot knife through the butter in the Lord's dining room and all will be right with the world. England keep making 400 and losing matches by an innings, but that happens in countries abroad about which we know little and care less, apart from when the Perth seagulls or the Chennai vultures are circling.

Who needs Josh Hazlewood or Ravi Ashwin when you can bowl a side out for nothing in unfamiliar conditions and think you're a good team?

In truth the embrace of marginalisation for money began years ago, when, after the greatest home Test series anyone had seen, English cricket hid itself behind a paywall. Stuart Broad was just starting out on a professional career, Alastair Cook was on the verge of international cricket, and Joe Root was 14 and already good. To him, then, little mattered beyond playing the game, and he had all the answers.

Now, as 2017 closes in Melbourne, he and his side face only questions. Finding the answers to them will take a lot longer than five days, and many more dreams will die before they do so.

Two Players

Taunton, early season 2017. As the sun fades, the blustery wind starts to chill the bones. Any county ground after play ends has a feeling of spent energy, a feeling of faded drama, a feeling of reflection, as evening settles in. This is as true of Cheltenham in high summer as it is of Taunton in bitter mid-April, a time in which cricket never feels natural, but where it is increasingly required to dwell.

At the Cooper Associates County Ground in Taunton, outside the nondescript, functional pavilion named after Andy Caddick, players often congregate after play. They will sign autographs for the men, mostly near or past pension age, who are always there with their albums and books.

The attention is drawn to a youngish man from the east of England with a fresh, windswept complexion. You sense that he always looks like this, but recent time spent in Sri Lanka has enhanced his cricketer's tan. He is surrounded by his family and friends; there is a transparent air of humour, of expectation, of cheerfulness and of hope; of wondering what the coming season holds. At this point he doesn't know it, but for Tom Westley this will be the best season of his young career. He will play in a team which wins the County Championship, and he will do something he has always dreamed of; he will play Test cricket for England. He is right to look hopeful, because he will enjoy what is to come. He will be tested by it, and, after a promising beginning, he will fail that test, but he will end the season in the same frame of mind. This time, though, it will be hope of a recall, of another opportunity. Lose that, and you lose everything.

Scrolling forward to another time and place in England's south-west, we see an older player, one who doesn't hope to play for England anymore because he has no need to. That dream has come, and it has gone.

The County Ground, Exeter, August 2017. Devon are playing Berkshire. With a typically diligent and innovative innings behind him, Chris Read walks around the boundary with his young son. Read is revered in his adopted home city of Nottingham, but now he is back in the county of his birth and his cricketing roots. He is a small man, with few unusual or distinguishing features, and someone who self-evidently feels uncomfortable in the limelight. If you knew nothing of his achievements, you would pass him in the street without a moment's thought. And he would be happy with that.

As Read stops by a well-known local sports photographer, who graciously allows his son to look through his camera's all-seeing lens, you can't prevent your mind going back to the time, more than twenty years before, when you last saw him play for Devon. He was just a kid of 16 then, with a burgeoning reputation in his native Torbay, and the same preternatural assurance behind the stumps which would see him to more than one thousand dismissals in first-class cricket. He could always bat too; not especially stylishly, but with an innate ability to seize the moment. This is a man who knows what it is like to play in front of full houses at Lord's and to win one-day trophies; to play Test cricket in the West Indies, in Australia, in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. But, for good or ill, for most of his career, his natural home, his place of work, has been the county circuit, with its grounds, its devotees and its constantly evolving cast of participants.

English county cricket is a secure and civilised world. An environment which few would wish to leave behind, but for different reasons, these are two players, at distinct points in their careers, who want, or even need, to do so. In Read's case it is the march of time, with Westley it is the need to see if he can be what he has always wanted to be.

Every season, indeed every match, of an English county season is full of vignettes like this, and, as the light changes as autumn sets in, and the leaves begin to turn, they settle in the mind. One player's horizons beginning to expand, but simultaneously on the point of faltering, another's narrowing, fading, reverting.

Neither of them is especially upset about this, although, as he leaves the scene of one of his Test match failures, Westley's mind will be flooded with doubt and concern. And as Read is applauded to and from the crease on the occasion of his final game at Trent Bridge, he can be excused a moment or two of wistful sadness, even if it is usually no more his way than that of any other professional sportsman.

From the Victorian era onwards, so many aphorisms, truisms and cliches have been uttered about the qualities and values of the game of cricket that it can sometimes be hard to be sure where realistic appraisal ends and romantic fiction begins. But the English county game, especially when played over four days, continues, even in its marginalisation, to embody something unique, and, in its way, beautiful and life-affirming.

At the heart of this are the players, with all their hopes, fulfilments and regrets. When the 2018 county season begins, Chris Read will be elsewhere and he will have nothing but fulfilling memories and, perhaps, a few regrets, while Tom Westley will still be there, at Taunton, or Chelmsford or even Worcester, full, again, of hope.

Journeys

As I get older, as I watch more and more cricket - well, more and more cricket and more and more rugby union, for these are the sports which dominate my consciousness during many of my waking hours - I become increasingly aware of, and fascinated by, the nature of the journey (this is the type of expression which people employ to describe their progress through reality television programmes, but for once it feels like the right expression to use).

Not just my journey, although if you stop to consider it there can be a sense of your advancing life being measured out in eighty minute or four and five day segments, but the lives and careers of those fortunate enough to be employed to live out the dreams of those of us who were never good enough to fulfil them for ourselves.

Earlier this month, at the ageless Cheltenham College ground, where Gloucestershire have played since 1870, as the home side completed a comfortable two-day win over Glamorgan, a marquee at the College Lawn End contained a range of men for whom the journey through a cricket career isn't an abstract product of the imagination. For these people it is a facet of memory.

The gathering is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Professional Cricketers' Association; some of the union's founders are here, along with a range of others, all of whom are former professional cricketers. Some are instantly recognisable, in spite of the inexorable passing of the years, others are people that you assume did important things - in some cases before you were even born - but you have no idea who they are.

JT Murray, your best friend's boyhood hero, still stylish and quipping at 82; Vanburn Holder, evoking memories of New Road summers forty years past; Graeme Fowler, a man who faces down intangible demons daily; Pat Pocock, genial and ruminative. Others: Duncan Fearnley, maker of bats for the stars; Neal Radford, still with the looks that so captivated a female friend during his Worcester heyday; MJK Smith, with his perpetual air of distracted diffidence.

And there is poignancy.

A man in a motorised wheelchair leaves the tent, accompanied by his carer. We don't notice him at first, and he is moving away from us before his identity registers.

It is Winston Davis.

The last time you can recall seeing him in the flesh, he was playing for Northants at Luton during the summer you graduated from university, the summer, now rapidly fading into time's mists, when England had five captains. Even then he was better known for what he once did in the World Cup, one of the few times he got a game for the West Indies. You'd heard about him, of course. The fall from a tree in Saint Vincent which cost him the use most of his body.

Journeys can change, or end, in so many ways.

For most of the players on the field, those journeys show little sign of ending. For some, relatively speaking, they are only just beginning.
In the modern, reflexive, intolerant, shoot-from-the-hip world, professional sportsmen cop more abuse than most. As with so many other dialogues, it is the product of limited and inadequate understanding and awareness, and what often seems like a calculated and deliberate lack of empathy.

On the face of it, the life of a professional sportsman is all roses; 'Peachy Creamy', as Lesley Sharp's character Louise was fond of saying in Mike Leigh's Naked. But this is not all it is.

Yes, you can earn your living doing something you would be happy to do for nothing, even pay your own money to do. Yes, you can travel the world staying in the best hotels (although a life on the county circuit - the life led by most of the men in the Cheltenham tent - may not quite match up in this regard); if you are a cricketer you may never experience winter. Yes, you will get the girls. Being young, being fit, being famous, being relatively rich, are powerful aphrodisiacs.

Conversely - and these are important things - while you may get paid so much more than the lads you knew at school, in their office jobs or on their building sites, they don't have to concern themselves with the fact that if they have a bad day at work they will be scrutinized and criticized in the papers, on the radio, on TV, or by the trolls who populate the World Wide Web. They build you up, of course they do, but boy they will knock you down.

Also, your mates outside the game don't, in most cases, have to worry about their career being summarily ended by an injury, by a dramatic loss of form, or, perhaps, by the yips. Redundancy can come, but it will not usually entail the need to embrace an entirely different way of life. The need to commute, to work in environments where a majority of your colleagues are female, or to experience the strip-lit torpor that settles over a characterless office on a winter afternoon when darkness settles at ten past four and the rain is hitting the windows with hypnotic force, driven by a howling wind.

This is a different way of being; something which most of us have to embrace, even if we once held ambitions, or in most cases fantasies, of doing what professional sportsmen do.

Sometimes it will take until they have to exist outside the games they have known so well for a sportsman to appreciate what they have. Others, those with an uncommon maturity or breadth of perspective recognize it early, but for many it takes their career to be on the wane for them to truly know what they have. Then comes fear, and the rage against the dying of the light, whether it be swift or protracted. Sometimes you see this outside sport but in most cases it is retirement which is welcomed rather than feared. The rage comes later, as age and infirmity cloud the horizon and the end of a life, not just a sporting career, approaches.

The men in the Cheltenham tent have been through all that and have lived to tell the tale; youthful promise, careers of varying lengths and achievements, retirement, the need to find, and become used to, an alternative way of life. Some will have been more successful as players; others in the afterlife.

Cheltenham, with its encapsulation of a certain type of distinctively English idyll, always does this to me. When I returned to the ground in 2015, after seventeen years away, it was Stephen Peters, his long stint in the county game in its very last throes, who set me thinking about the nature of cricket careers and their conclusions. How is it that you adapt to the change from a life, with all its precariousness and pressures, where your places of work include arenas like this, to an existence which, while it is more stable, can never be anything other than more mundane.

The answer is that you probably never really do. When I see Ken Palmer at Taunton, 80 years, 866 first-class wickets and countless hours of umpiring behind him, he looks happy enough, but it is easy to imagine how he misses his lengthy involvement in the game.

For those of us who perpetually occupy the land beyond the boundary ropes, the way we experience the game is different. We have enjoyed some of the most exciting, joyous and uplifting moments of our lives on cricket grounds, but we have never shed blood, or much sweat, or many tears while doing so. Ours is a more limited experience, but it is no less profound. And it will continue for the rest of our lives.

Some of the occupants of the Cheltenham marquee were among the founder members of the PCA. They didn't just play the game for a living; they created something which has stood the test of time.

There are journeys and then there are journeys.

For now, for Winston Davis, the journey from one end of the ground to the other is all that is on his mind.

When the Eye has Gone

The retired sportsman, missing the acclaim of his career, is a familiar trope in sporting literature. It is true of those who made it, and it is true of those who did not.

I could have been a contender.

In the case of Colin Milburn, there was no 'could have been'. He was very much a contender, and then some. Although my memory of cricket and cricketers increasingly, and somewhat worryingly, seems to me to resemble that of the Ancient Mariner, I am too young to remember his heyday, although I have a vague and uncertain recollection of his fruitless comeback attempt in 1973 and 1974. But there is abundant folk memory, and literature, and the recollections of those who do remember his best days. It is clear that he could play. Really play.

Certain days and times have worked their way into the wider cricketing consciousness. Hooking the fearsome Wes Hall for six on the way to an unbeaten second innings century at Lord's in his second Test match in 1966; 243 in a day for Western Australia against Queensland in late 1968, an innings which Sir Donald Bradman memorably described as one of the greatest played by an Englishman on Australian soil; the car crash which cost him an eye and a career in May 1969. His later fading from view and his death at the age of 48.

Anyone would miss playing sport for a living. How many jobs are there in which you are well paid to do something you would happily do for nothing, and people - sometimes tens of thousands of people - will applaud you for doing things which you might not find all that difficult, but which they cannot do (however much they long to)? A few years of that and the world as it is inhabited by the rest of us starts to fade into the recesses of memory. If, that is, you ever knew what the real world was like anyway. If all you have ever done for work is sport, the adjustment will come even harder, and its effects will be all the deeper.

If you have played for as long as you can, and you know your time has come, it is easier. If you find, with shocking finality, that your career as it was is over at 27, it is never going to be easy.

This was Colin Milburn's life.

Dougie Blaxland's play When the Eye has Gone, in which Milburn and a host of other characters are played with powerful versatility by Dan Gaisford, is currently touring many of the grounds on which Milburn made his mark fifty years and more before. It comprises a series of vignettes (if that is not too subtle a word, and it probably is) from his life and times, in which his progress from the then fallow first-class cricket territory of County Durham to the game's heights and back, is charted. Here is Milburn in the school playground, pretending to be a late-career Wally Hammond facing Ray Lindwall; there he is as a young pro, taking the great Les Jackson for a ton on a Buxton green top; here he is impersonating 'Jim' Swanton as he passes Olympian judgment on his clumsy fielding; there are the would-be voices of Arlott and Trevor Bailey and The Don; here is the boundary-edge sage at Burnopfield who tells him he'll never be as good as his father; there is his mother, dusting furiously as she advises him not to neglect his schoolwork. The medics; the eye surgeon, the nurses, the doctor repeatedly warning him about the blood pressure and cholesterol levels which would lead to his death. The hollow jokes and the forced bonhomie.

The pint glass of gin and coke.

Gaisford infuses the play with relentless energy, an impeccable Geordie accent and a bullish, confrontational style, which leads you to suspect that you are watching someone who has lost everything but cannot possibly bring himself to admit it. For Milburn, as for so many ex-sportsmen (and others) life looked better through the bottom of an empty glass.

For anyone who (as I do) spends long hours watching cricket and other games on modern satellite television, it is often possible to drift towards the impression that you are watching a series of adverts for rival online betting companies, with a little cricket or rugby mixed in. There comes a time when you start expecting to see Ray Winstone's head in your dreams. As a result of repetition I hate most of these adverts with a passion, but one phrase (inserted, one assumes, to please whatever regulators take an interest in such things) has a tendency to stick in the mind.

When the fun stops, stop.

But what if you are forced to stop while it is still the most fun you could ever have?

Living in the Age of Root

The Nevil Road ground, in the tired northern suburbs of Bristol, was never anyone's idea of one of the world's great cricket theatres. It's been smartened up a bit recently, but back in the late nineties when it began to host one-day internationals, it was a prisoner of its own featurelessness. Crammed between rows of terraced houses and a Victorian orphanage, when there wasn't much of a crowd in - which, frankly, was most of the time when Gloucestershire were playing - for all its antique associations with Grace and Hammond and Jessop it never made the pulse quicken.

There were other days, though. Between 1999 and 2003 I went to a series of ODIs there. I saw Shoaib Akhtar bowl one of the quickest spells I've ever seen, I had an early glimpse of Chris Gayle, and I saw Sachin Tendulkar make the only serious runs I ever saw him get (I usually watched him in Lord's Test matches). And I saw Ricky Ponting. Oh yes, I saw Ricky Ponting.

In the game between England and Australia at the ground on 10th June 2001, England won the toss and batted, making 268 in their 50 overs. Marcus Trescothick made runs, Nick Knight made runs, Ben Hollioake, in his final summer, made a few at the end in partnership with Owais Shah. By the standards of the day, it wasn't a bad score. Well, we'd all seen worse. This was England, this was one-day cricket, and it was a long time before 2015.

Australia lost an early wicket - Adam Gilchrist - which brought in Ponting. The memory is still there, vivid in its clarity: I've got no idea which of the bowlers it was, probably Gough or Mullally, but Ponting, from a guard on or over the crease line, took the biggest stride you could ever see and played a forward defensive stroke of such utter and complete impregnability that only one conclusion was possible. England weren't going to get him out that day.

They didn't, or at least they didn't while it really mattered. He made 102, setting up a last over victory that never seemed in much doubt. This was Steve Waugh's Australian side, after all.

That's something worth noting about great players. The attacking strokes are one thing, but often, aside from their frequency, they are little better than the shots which mere mortals play less often. But the reason lesser players play them less often is because they don't get the chance. They're out. Show me a great player without a solid defence and I'll show you someone who isn't a truly great player.

In those days England didn't have players like that. Within a short time we had hopes for Ian Bell, never ultimately fulfilled; then there was Kevin Pietersen. Great? Well, maybe. Near great, at least, but a genius who impressed in a different way. KP could defend, of course, but it was the strokes that had you, never the impression of invulnerability.

As an England fan in the nineties - even one who was easily old enough to recall the pomp of Botham and Gower - there was a tendency to see anyone who showed any promise at all through the prism of what they could be; even who they could be. I remember seeing Alex Tudor as a seventeen year-old, loping in and bowling with chilling speed and bounce from the Old Pavilion End at Taunton. I thought he was going to be our Curtly, our Courtney, our Ian Bishop. But, for many reasons, it never happened.

Even longer ago in place and time there was Mark Ramprakash, coolly steering the Middlesex chase in the NatWest Final as an eighteen year-old. I was up in the Tavern Stand that day, and yes, we all thought, this is a great player in the making. And in every way aside from the making of Test match runs and centuries, it was. But, when you're dealing with cricket at its most rarefied level, that is what matters. It is not the ice crystal purity of your technique, it is not your longevity against county bowling attacks - that means little to anyone brought up in another part of the world - or your hundred centuries; it is what you achieve in Test cricket, it is what you achieve in one-day international cricket, it is what you achieve in Twenty20 cricket.

Joe Root can do all those things. And how.

As with any outstanding player, watch him early in his innings. Quality, even against the very best bowling, shows through early. Indeed, against the very best bowling it needs to, or you will be gone. As anyone knows, Root has all the attacking strokes anyone could ever require, and the discretion to deploy them when they are most needed, but, when he first gets to the crease, especially if he is facing someone bowling well, his class is characterized by the way he keeps them out. The forward strides are there, but less impressively than with Ponting; with Root it is the backward defensive which defines him. A precise, easy movement of his right foot, back and across his stumps. Precise and easy, not clumsy and rushed, on account of his supreme reflexes. The head and eyes level, sniffing the bouncing ball. A straight, level blade, with the ball hitting the middle and dropping dead at his feet. It is a stroke which makes a statement. A statement of impregnability, of moral permanence, while also speaking of thousands of hours facing bowling machines and net bowlers, and seeing off real attacks in testing conditions. Firstly in his native south Yorkshire, then elsewhere in the north of England, then around his own country, then around the cricket world.

Of course, this is not all Root has. For all that his early stoicism impresses, it is only, as it must be for any batsman, a fall-back. If the ball is there to be hit, whether it is a half-volley or a half-tracker, it will be hit. Depending on circumstances, and the state of the game, and the quality of the pitch, and how Root is playing, it will be dispatched either over the ropes for four or into the crowd for six.

Occasionally Root gets these things wrong. Like anyone else alive, and anyone who has ever batted, he can fall prey to misjudgement born out of tiredness, or distraction, or over-confidence. At Lord's against Pakistan in the summer of 2016 he plays two really bad shots, leading to his dismissal in both innings, and contributing to an England defeat. As he walks off, he curses himself. This should not happen. It cannot be allowed to happen. Six days later, at Old Trafford, he makes 254 against the same opposition. Unlike many another player, he learns from his mistakes. At that level of the game it is the only way to stay alive. Someone who batted with him during those matches, James Vince, knows that only too well. He will spend many quiet times reflecting on it for much of the rest of his life.

In batting, in cricket, in life, it is one thing to have the capability to do well. It is another to do so, and another still to do so again and again and again. It is wonderful to be living in the age of Root, but thoughts of Root's predecessors in the England team, and why they did not do what Root has done, continually intrude, even if their times have now been left behind. I tend to subscribe to the orthodox view that Ramprakash simply wanted it too much, while Ian Bell never fully realized how good he was capable of being. Root has these things down pat. He desperately desires success, but he doesn't let it consume him. He has tasted it and he knows he will taste it again over the many years that he will spend in the England team. Brooding, assuredly, is not his thing. The most repeated image in the mind's eye when one thinks of Root, apart from his strokes, is that of him smiling, joking and laughing, and it is these unselfconscious displays of enjoyment that have made him so popular. He is still little more than the young boy who loved batting and who subsequently found that he was very good at it and that people were prepared to pay him to do it and admire him for it. It is the type of good fortune that all of us would love to have, and we feel that if we did we would enjoy it for all it is worth. Joe Root does.

All of this is unforced. Technique can be inculcated through coaching; temperament cannot. I have a vivid memory of getting ready for work on a December morning in 2012, with the fourth Test from Nagpur on television in the background. As ever on these hurried, dark mornings, the game was incidental, but I had some time to watch which coincided with the early stages of Root's first innings in Test cricket. With spinners on at both ends, this was a test (and a Test) in the traditional Indian idiom, but there was an immediate feeling of assurance and calm about Root as he stroked his third ball from Piyush Chawla through the covers for three, and rapidly followed it with his first boundary, off Ojha. As with Alastair Cook, on the same ground some seven years before, there was a feeling of instant permanence.

Nearly four years later this has not been lost. And it will not fade for a very long time to come.

Taunton, 22nd September 2016

It starts at the railway station.

This has seen many things since the trains came to the south-west in the nineteenth century, but in the era of four day County Championship cricket it has seen nothing like this. Play starts early in September, so people's natural rhythms are disrupted. Earlier trains have to be caught, bags have to be packed more hurriedly, food and drink have to be procured. Getting off the 9.33 from Exeter is to enter a shuffling, mildly hurried serpent of humanity with one thing on its mind.

As always in circumstances where there is excitement, and anticipation, and tension, humour is never far away. There is plenty of laughter here, as people are optimistic about the outcome of this day's play, but uncertainty and trepidation take hold when they think of what might happen elsewhere. The problem is that nobody knows what will happen. And what happens will determine how they approach the rest of their cricketing lives. Either Somerset will have been County Champions for the first time in 2016, or it will have been yet another glorious failure in a recent history of glorious - and less glorious - failures. Nobody wants that, but the possibility is on everyone's mind and it will have to be confronted in due time.

The short walk to the station is hurried and suffused with chatter. This is a natural reflection of the significance of the day and the importance of comradeship. Nobody wants to face the possibility of disappointment alone or enjoy what seems likely to come today without the feeling that others, many others, are doing the same. There is, however, little chance of that.

It continues at the ground.

Walking to a seat in the Somerset Stand, the atmosphere is distinctive and intoxicating. As someone who was there, and who will never forget it, it reminds me of The Oval on another September day in 2005. The season is fading, but this is big, so big, that any sense of loss, whether literal or metaphorical, is postponed, at least until tomorrow afternoon.

As Rogers and Davies and Trego build the lead through the morning, and early alcohol is consumed, the level of noise among the crowd increases. 'We are all in this together' is what it says. And, as Rogers goes in at lunch with the latest, and what will transpire to be the last, of his seemingly eternal sequence of centuries, he is richly applauded. People know that he is a batsman of very high class, but more importantly that he is a good man whose presence at the helm of this side has been pungently influential in bringing them, and us, to where we are. For anyone who cares to notice, there is a valedictory air to the way in which he lifts his bat and salutes all the ground's corners. He has done this 76 times in all, but he knows that he will never do anything like it ever again.

For Rogers, and for us, though, nostalgic reflection is for the future. For now there is a match to win.

For the first hour or more after lunch, the attention of many switches to Lord's, where Yorkshire are inching towards 350 and a fourth batting point which will enable them to be champions if they win their game against Middlesex. With their score on 349-9, the players leave the field for bad light, then rain. The tension increases again, although Somerset hold the reassuring knowledge that they have more than four sessions to bowl out a Nottinghamshire side that will need to equal the highest score ever made to win a first-class match. For the away team's players, a sense of defeat has been in the air for days, if not weeks, and after tea, their slide is inexorable, their loss inevitable. No final day will be needed in this game.

For the next twenty-four hours the ultimate fate of Somerset's season rests in the hands of twenty-two of their fellow professionals - people they know, people they have played against and with, people they like, people they dislike - who are plying their trade elsewhere.

The Somerset players lap the ground. They are applauded by all and they thank those who have made this possible, even if it isn't yet clear what it is that has been made possible. It could be the most glorious of triumphs, or it may not. We, and they, will find out tomorrow.

Viewing this from the very back of the new Somerset pavilion, the sense of elation and pride is there to be relished, as is the view. It is the greatest thing that these seats now allow a panoramic view of northern Taunton and of the Quantock Hills, but something they also give is a broader view of the sky.

Big skies are more commonly associated with places like Nebraska or East Anglia. Here, so the legend goes, they can be unsettling in their way, but, while this is unlikely to ever be the case in undulating Somerset, they have different resonances. As the temperature drops slightly, and the altostratus clouds build in, the even, pale nature of the light emphasizes that autumn and winter are coming. Some of us will be back tomorrow, but most of us will be elsewhere until next season.

For many of us, this has been a day of days.

Thousands of Runs Unscored (17th April 2016)

I've been writing here for a full ten years now. I've seen and commented on a few things in that time, but nothing, nothing at all, has moved me as much as the story that has unfolded around James Taylor over the last few months. The humour, maturity, perspective and dignity with which he has dealt with something which would have shattered a lesser man, has been a remarkable thing to witness.

These were my thoughts in April of this year, just after the news had broken.

James Taylor is a batsman. That is what he does. Or, as of last Tuesday, that's what he did. Batting, something he has done since he was little - well, he's always been little, but you know what I mean - has gone, in the beat of a defective heart, from being both what he does best and the source of his income, to something he used to do but which he cannot, for circumstances beyond his control, do any more.

This is a profound source of sadness. To Taylor, of course, and to his family and friends, but also to many cricket followers, most of whom have never met him.

Cricket is like that.

In modern professional rugby union, players are forced to retire before their time with increasing frequency. It happens so often that it barely causes comment, still less any great outpouring of sentiment or regret. It happens in football too. Always has done. Time and the game move on with barely a backward glance.

Cricket is different. Players sometimes die young, but comparatively few have to retire early. The tragic deaths of Ben Hollioake and Philip Hughes, and the circumstances surrounding them, are etched on memories throughout the world; young lives abruptly ended, careers curtailed with thousands of runs unscored, wickets not taken, hours in the field denied.

Although losing the ability to do the thing that you are best at is awful, it is not as bad as dying. Hopefully Taylor has a long and fulfilling, if sadly compromised, life ahead of him. But he will always be susceptible to thoughts - early on spring and summer mornings, and as the evening shadows lengthen on cricket grounds - of what was and what could have been. Memories of Shrewsbury School, of early games at Grace Road, of taking that double hundred off Surrey that everyone talks about, of digging in amid the chaos caused by Pietersen's genius at Headingley, and of batting long for the Lions in the cloying heat of Dambulla. Thoughts of the innings at Manchester and Sharjah and Durban, and the magical short leg catches at the Wanderers, and what they might have led to in the era of Bayliss and Farbrace.

Amid the doubts and quandaries which never seem to go away - over spin bowlers and opening batsmen and levels of public engagement - these are times of renewal and optimism for the England team. They are finally, after longer than many people have been alive, getting to grips with one-day cricket, and, in Joe Root, Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler, they have three cricketers under the age of 26, all of whom who, in their own ways, are world-class.

Taylor may never have quite made it into that category, but there was enough about him, from the way in which he instantly adapted to county cricket, to the way he took the knocks and the rejections and the redundant jibes about his stature, and came back stronger, to suggest that he could have had a long and successful career in international cricket. The summer of 2016 may have decided which way his career would go. Instead, it has ended before the summer has even begun.

There are few things better than being young and being good enough at a sport to make a lucrative career out of it. Most of us would settle simply for being able to play a single off-drive or pull like James Taylor, let alone hit the ball clean out of Headingley as he once did, or manage a run chase as he could. We wouldn't need to be paid to do so. Just doing those things would be enough to take our lives to a higher plane. But, in an instant, Taylor has been forced to leave that world behind and retreat to the foothills of life which the rest of us occupy. Nothing will ever quite feel as good again.

There is a salient lesson in life's unpredictability there, but, while most of us can only dream of having been a contender, James Taylor will always know that he was.

Coming Home (2nd February 2014)

This piece was the product of thinking about what Alastair Cook must have felt like, both during England's doomed 2013-14 tour of Australia, and after returning home. You can never really know, of course, but you can make a judgement based on what you've seen and how you think you would feel.

You would feel grim, and it would take you a long time to recover from the experience. It was that kind of tour.

It is still early in the year in southern England. For those of us who have been here all winter it does not seem cold. But still the rain lashes down. Everything looks dirty. The entire country feels as though it is drowning.

Alastair Cook notices this. He feels the chill and does his England blazer up. Alice, his wife, has brought him a heavy overcoat from home; he puts it on and turns the collar up. As the beads of water drip down the car window, the realisation sets in that he is home. For months, those killing, unforgettable months he has spent on the other side of the world at the focus of what is perhaps the most savage and pitiful defeat English cricket has ever known, the weather has made little impression on his consciousness. It has been hot, of course it has been so hot, but he has been there before and he is famous for never breaking sweat. The only thing disorientating or unusual has been the intensity and clarity of the sunshine, and the burning dryness of the air. All this is gone, now.

As the car leaves Heathrow Airport behind, images of defeat cluster his mind. It is a chilling montage of lost tosses, dropped catches, poorly executed strokes and the harsh, unforgiving glare of the camera eye. Unwanted post-defeat interviews in soiled kit, with thousands of Australians leering and jeering and laughing. Mark Nicholas, a preening martinet in a tailored suit, firing the questions with a forced mixture of levity and accusation. Why? Why? Why? Airless press conferences with all the Aussies there, Conn and his mates, with their crude and tedious jibes, laughing behind their notepads as they mock the fact that England's only truly successful player was born in New Zealand.

Nothing has prepared him for this. Not the gilded childhood, singing in the St.Paul's choir, nor those adolescent summers piling up runs on the school ground at Bedford as public schoolboys in museum piece caps bend to his will. Not the previous winter's glory in India, defying tiredness, searing heat and the weight of the past. There have been times these past few years when it has seemed as though Cook may be superhuman. We now know that he is not.

He was almost dropped by England once. But then came the Oval century against Pakistan, and the rest is history. 100 consecutive Tests and counting. Today, with jet lag setting in and defeat on his mind, he feels every one of those games in his legs and in his mind. The comforts of home cannot come soon enough.

The key turns in the lock. The house is warm. The bags are left in the hallway. Now, at last, a time to shed the layers of formal clothing crumpled by hours of international travel. A time to reflect on what has happened to him, and to the team which he has captained.

As the days turn into nights and back to days again, with Cook barely recognizing their passing, the recollections have an unwelcome tendency to come thick and fast, a bit like the Australian attack on one of its many good days. Cook relishes the opportunity to get away from everything - from holding a bat, from thinking constantly about bowling changes and field placings, from people, with microphones, or with beers in their hands, asking him 'why? - and he enjoys the serenity and security of being in his own space. He watches television, he reads a little, he talks to Alice, he sorts through the mountain of tedious paperwork which has arrived while he has been away. He spends some time outside, with the farm animals which have failed to register his departure, his absence or his return. This is how he likes it. He has been noticed far too much over recent months, usually for the wrong reasons.

But, as the activity lulls, the memories and anxieties return. In an instant he is back at the Adelaide Oval, late in the day, his mind and body scrambled by the relentless heat and noise, by the batting of Clarke and Haddin and Harris, and by his team's threadbare bowling. He is facing Mitchell Johnson, who is bowling to him as quickly as anyone has ever done. He sees the ball, but in an instant it is through him as his reactions, slowed by tiredness and stress, fail to cope. He hears his wicket break, and then, a heartbeat later, he hears the roar of the Australian crowd. In a sense this is flattering, as it signifies how highly his wicket is prized, but he knows that. He has no need for flattery. He needs runs.

Another time he is back in Perth. The heat has not receded and his team, theoretically, are chasing 504 to win. This time it is the hulking frame of Ryan Harris which confronts him. He sees the ball better this time as it doesn't quite have the pace of Johnson's delivery, but it swings in slightly through the air before cutting away off the pitch and hitting the top of his off stump. He knows he couldn't have done anything more to counter it - few left-handed batsmen alive could have done - but it cuts to the quick even more as it is the first ball of the innings and he knows that in all probability the Ashes are about to be surrendered.

These are extracts; he also recalls dropped catches, poor strokes, captaincy decisions. While his confidence - the sort of confidence which derives from a life of almost unbroken success - has been affected, when it comes to his batting failures he knows very well that he can bat. He always could, and the numbers are in the book. Form is temporary, class is permanent, all that. But captaincy is different. He hasn't done very much of it, and it shows, both on the field and off. He knows that what he has said about wanting to continue in the job, at least in Test cricket, is genuine and heartfelt. He wants the chance to show that he is capable of improvement. He wants the chance to help bring his England side back from its darkest hour. He feels, with Andy Flower, a man he likes and admires, still in charge, that better times lie ahead. Come the early summer in England, the pitches will be green, Jimmy and Broady will be fresh, perhaps Finny will be back, Stokes will be there. He knows how Sri Lankan and Indian batsmen play the seaming and swinging ball in English conditions. In his mind, for all its concerns, there is hope for the future.

A few days in, Cook is lazing around the house when the doorbell rings. Alice is nearer so she goes to the door. There is a brief, and, to Cook, inaudible, exchange of pleasantries. Then she calls to her husband:

“Alastair, Andy Flower is here to see you”.

A Day at the Cricket (12th September 2013)

As I mention in the original intro below, this, a distillation of personal memories from the last day of the 2005 Ashes, was written on the eighth anniversary of the day. I can't pretend that some of the style doesn't owe a nod or several to Christian Ryan, but I feel it adds up to a pretty accurate representation of the way I experienced the day, and what I felt. They're memories which will last a lifetime.

The final day of the Oval Test match between England and Australia in 2005 has, in the years since, achieved semi-mythical status as the most memorable day of the most memorable Test series most of us have ever had the pleasure of watching. I was at The Oval on that day, having paid just £10 for the privilege. On the eighth anniversary of that day someone reminded me that those eight years had gone by, and it prompted me to pour out some of the random memories which have occupied a small corner of my mind's eye ever since. As a day at the cricket, it had its moments.

A short, fitful, uneasy sleep. Up before 1.

Wash, shave, dress. Get the bag together. Don’t forget the ticket. The £10 ticket. Bought in the spring and now as prized as gold dust. You could sell it for a hundred times as much but you never would. Taxi into town. On the coach to London by 2. More semi-sleep. M5, M4, along the Embankment and into Victoria. London is dry, cloudy, humid.

There is tension in the air. In London, even at 6.15 in the morning, there always is. The tension of the incipient working week, of course, but something else. The tension of expectation. Of anticipation. The Ashes will end today.

Side street café breakfast. Over Vauxhall Bridge. Down to The Oval. People are everywhere. Touts and their would-be clients. How much?

God, this is different. Perhaps this is what 1953 was like.

Into the ground and take your seat. Block 18, Row 24, Seat 568. Right at the back in front of the gasholders.

The players net, do their fielding drills. The noise rises as the ground fills. After the players have left, some broadcasters walk across the pitch from the old pavilion to the new OCS Stand, where their commentary boxes are located. They are cheered.

In a sense this is surprising but then again not. This is the mood of the day. And they are Tony Greig, Geoff Boycott and Ian Botham. Richie Benaud, of course, is less conspicuous. But this is his day. He will be cheered by the whole ground later.

10.25. Bowden and Koertzen. Australian fielders, led by Ponting. Chewing gum, meaning business. Then Trescothick and Vaughan. Hopes of a nation and all that.

Warne on straight away. This is chaos. Second ball, full-toss, Vaughan, always elegant and alive to the chance, hits it straight for four. The ground erupts.

McGrath at the other end. A maiden to open. Soon Lee is on too. Erratic, but high pace. Boundaries come at both ends.

Two overs only to Lee then Warne is back. He will bowl long today.

McGrath gets Vaughan and then Bell, first ball. This will be mighty tough. Now Pietersen is there. No hat-trick, just.

Trescothick holds out against Warne but it is hard, so hard. Later Haigh describes him as being ‘like a London bobby trying to quell a riot’. The description fits like a glove.

Pietersen settles in. We know that he is good but how good? Today will tell. He is dropped. Warne off McGrath. Next over Warne is hit for six. Salt in the wound.

Then Trescothick goes. To Warne, of course, lbw.

Now Flintoff is there. The summer’s hero of heroes. But this is not his time. You feel he cannot last and he doesn’t. Warne gets him and England are on the brink.

Time for consolidation. Collingwood gets his head down. Sniffs the ball as he was taught to do on the capricious tracks of the north-east, far from here in place and time.

Lee bowls a bouncer. 93.7 mph. Pietersen, desperately hurried, arches his back and jumps to evade it. Shit. The mind scrolls back to the West Indies, years before. Hearts beat faster.

Lunch. It is needed.

Early afternoon. Sun. KP opens out. Really opens out. Lee is hit for six, then six, four, four. The boundary boards in front of us take a battering, as does Tait. He tries to save the runs but is left on his knees, head down, gazing into the dirt like a boxer taking a count.

Collingwood is still there. Virtually scoreless but no matter. Pietersen will provide the runs.

Then Collingwood goes to Warne and Jones to Tait. Trouble.

England must bat the day to secure the urn, but the doubts are strong now. Someone has to stay with Pietersen. Giles?

The afternoon wears on. Warm for September and racked with anxiety. Giles and Pietersen bat. And bat. The overs tick down. Safety draws closer. Pietersen’s ton is passed and the possibility of relaxation starts to present itself. But not now. They must bat some more, and they do.

It goes on. Giles ungainly but full of guts and common sense, Pietersen turning the screw with flamboyance. The overs tick down and things start to look good. Then very good. Giles is hitting fours now. The Ashes are coming back.

With the pressure released, it feels like time to go to the bar. But it has been drunk dry. Three bottles of Red Stripe is all they have. Take them, drink them.

Back to the stand. Now people are happy. Langer fields on the rope, further down. He smiles through gritted teeth as the songs and jeers crank up and the Spanish flags are waved. This feels special. Like a time you will remember well enough to write about, years later.

Pietersen goes, but his job is done now. As is Benaud’s. It is announced and the ground rises.

Giles and Hoggard stick around for a bit. After Giles finally goes for a quietly epic 59, England subside, but no matter. It is done.

Australia bat, but time and light are against them. They cannot win. The Ashes are England’s again.

Presentation. Fireworks. Lap of honour.

Darkness falls.

Back to Victoria in a muck sweat. On to the coach. Exeter in the early hours. Taxi home. The driver forgets to engage the meter, but you pay up anyway.

Bed for a few hours then up for the open-top bus and Trafalgar Square.

Cricket in England has never been like this. You wonder if it ever will be again.

Eight years on, you’re still wondering.