A Cricket Blog
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I watched the 2023 World Cup Final in my living room at my dining room table. We had moved the table out of the dining room so we could unfold the leaves in anticipation of Thanksgiving dinner. I had woken up to India’s total and thought: we have a game here, don’t we?
In like the 10th over of Australia’s innings, a very good friend texted me to tell me that he was in Duluth, two hours north, because his father-in-law had died in the night. My friend has lost both his parents in the last two years. His wife has stage four cancer. It cast a pall over the game, the morning, the weekend. I felt so sad for my friend, for his wife, who is also my friend.
Australia batted on.
I had seen this before. We all had. In 2007. Gilchrist with the squash ball in his glove lacing balls around the ground. Now it was 16 years later and it was Travis Head. Against India. In India.
My partner came home with breakfast and we ate with our toddler at the table with the game on in the background. I felt sad. The game felt already over. The stadium was silent. The Indian bowlers looked exhausted; the fielders resigned. You could almost feel the whole of India deflating. Just one wicket, I thought, just one and we have a game again. But it just never came.
It was a sunny morning in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. Cool, autumnal, pretty. We’d had a good day, a good weekend, with good weather. And it was only Sunday and there was more to come. There is so much joy in my life right now. It’s almost too much at times. My son and partner went into the kitchen at around the 35th over, and played “cooking.” Their sounds and voices filled the whole house and became the soundtrack to the game as it rolled downhill to its inevitable conclusion.
Right before the Head wicket, which came far too late to save India, my toddler brought in a bowl of “soup” to eat — just an empty bowl with a spoon it. He warned me that it was too hot and he blew on it. I slurped it and told him it was delicious and he waddled back into the kitchen. Head flew out to deep midwicket. Maxwell ran out. And then the game was over. And the World Cup was over. I turned off the television and thought the same thing I always think:
I wonder where I’ll be in four years time?
In 2027, when the players trot out to the center of a ground in South Africa, I will be 51 years old. My son will be a first grader. And what about four years after that? I cannnot imagine really. It’s too far away.
So much can happen in four years. I have written that sentence so many times. But I never fail to feel the same melancholy at the end of every World Cup. Time has put a marker down. Cricket has put a marker down. And I cannot help but look forward and then look back and then look forward again; like I am crossing a street. Four years ago my life felt so different than it does today. Eight years ago feels like a dozen lifetimes ago.
Where has the time gone? Where does it all go? It runs downhill, like Australia batting in a World Cup Final. Like we saw in 2007. And again in 2015. And then again just last week.
Today I am sad. Today I am melancholy. Thinking about what will come, where I might be four years from now. I think that’s because today I am also happy. Content. Okay. And I don’t want that to end. In previous years I saw the change that four years might bring as welcome. Today, this time, I am not so sure. And the passing of time always haunts. The days speed up, the overs fly by, the runs accumulate with the years, and then we are doing it all again. The fact that Sunday’s final felt strangely familiar was, in that sense, a little comforting. Everything changes but not everything changes.
Here’s what I do know today, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, four years shy of the 2027 World Cup, three days past the 2023 final: I am thankful for this old game that causes me to take a few minutes, every four years, and think about where I’ve been, and where I’m going, and — most importantly — where I am; that reminds me to embrace each sunrise and understand that no matter what: time passes. All while I watch cricket in my living room at my dining room table, as my son and partner play in the next room, their voices filling my heart, as the sun gently slopes down at a low autumn angle through the bare trees on a Sunday morning, with so much weekend left to come.
As I type every four years:
What a gift this game is.
And so it’s another Cricket World Cup.
This is now the fifth one that I have experienced as a cricket fan. I discovered the game in 2007, came of age with it in 2011, enjoyed it as a seasoned fan in 2015 and again in 2019. And now it’s, somehow, 2023. A year that in my youth seemed so distant to appear fantastical is now the year I type almost every single day.
2023.
I write about the World Cup as a benchmark all the time. It’s a time for looking back, and looking forward, and — most importantly — looking around. It’s a beautiful morning today, here in Saint Paul, a beautiful fall morning. The cricket is on. I have the day off. The sun is out. The room is filled with natural light. Outside the trees and the grass are all still green but there’s a chill in the air, and the sun is at an angle that you would never mistake for summer.
This is the first World Cup that I have experienced in the early fall, one of the more magical times of the year in the upper midwestern United States.
In 2007 it was spring. In 2011 and 2015 it was late winter. In 2019 it was high summer. Now it is autumn. Deep blue skies, sweaters, steamy coffees, dry air, crackling leaves, the smell of woodsmoke, bold colors. A time of death and dying but also, somehow, everyone’s favorite season. For it is a time of change, of new chapters, of promises.
I think a lot about the change that has come over the last four years, and the four years before that. My entire life has been reinvented, and because of that I am happier now than I have ever been. They say that happiness is a byproduct of a journey, not a destination in itself. And while I tend to agree with that, I think contentment can be a destination, and contentment breeds happiness. And so here we are. At another World Cup. Another time to take stock. And wonder if we will be here for the next one. And wonder, if we are, how much will have changed this time around. A chance to live the examined life. All while the cricket is on. What a gift.
This morning, I don’t feel the need to rehash all that has happened in my life since 2007. But like all of you — like everyone — a lot happened in those 16 years. I am not sure if I take comfort in the fact that so much can happen in such a (relative) short period of time. I like my life right now. I don’t want it to change. But it will. And four years from now things might seem quite different. That “might seem” is wrong. Things will not just seem but will truly be quite different. Four years is a long time. A very long time. Life is short, they say, but it’s not, it’s very long. Add up the days, put them in a pile, and realize how much time we all really have, and while the days and weeks and even the years will slip by unnoticed, we are still changing, our lives are still changing.
This is the first World Cup where I want to guard against that change. Lock the gates, keep it out. It’s a new feeling. Previously, I would look back and then look ahead. Today, this morning, as the Dutch look to continue shocking the world, I just want to look around. And see what all I have. And wrap my arms around it so it never leaves.
Like I said, this is a new feeling. But not one born of fear or trepidation, rather one born of love, contentment, joy. New feelings.
I am also a realist. I know the change will come. But this time I am aware that it is coming. And while I might try to resist it, I also know that because I am guarding against unnecessary change, negative change — as much as possible — the changes that come will be good things. Progression. Onward. I will miss the parts of life that exist today that fall away, but they will be replaced by other, just as wonderful parts. It’s part of being a parent. I miss the days when my son just rolled on his back and those late night early foxhole days, when he was so small he could sleep on my chest, but they have been replaced with this whole person, this real human. This funny, kind, sweet, goofball who loves trucks and music and pancakes. This is the kind of change I want.
Four years always brings change. There’s nothing we can do about that.
The same is true for the game itself.
When the next World Cup happens — in 2027, in Africa, again in the midwestern fall — I will be celebrating my 20th year as a cricket fan. 20 years. Again, it seems like it should be more than that, considering all that has happened. But just 20 years. Add up all the days, watch the pile grow until it blocks out the sun. Many are saying that this is the last World Cup that will matter. That in four years time the ODI will have completely fallen out of favor, and will be seen as a relic of a time when we all moved a little slower, but of a time not long enough ago to make the demands of tradition. I tend to disagree with that. I think the ODI has proven that it has legs, that it will continue to be a big part of the cricket oeuvre. I have been wrong before, of course, and might be wrong this time, but cricket as a game has been battling against time, against decay, since it was invented. It’s always been a relic. And it’s been dying since the day it was born. I think the ODI will be just fine. Just like all cricket continues to be.
Four years will bring change, to us and to the game and to the format, but while those changes can and might and in some cases should be immense, those changes will snap into place and not even really be noticed and we will all tune in that fall and watch the cricket and read about how the 2027 World Cup is now the last World Cup to matter. Cricket changes. We all change. It’s just another lesson that the game can teach us. We change, we move on, time begs us to keep up, and we do. Somehow. Until we can’t. But that’s a story for a different day.
Today it is autumn. In one month my son will turn two years old. This is his first World Cup. In four years everything will change, and then change again. Four years ago it was summer. It was before Covid. Before I got better. Just after everything blew apart. And today I sit here basking in contentment. Four years will bring change, of that we can be certain, but all we can do is do what cricket does and has done and will do: adapt, let the day take us, guard against the enemies at the gates, and be thankful for every day we are out there, under floodlights, or under the sun, or waiting out a rain delay in the clubhouse, with nothing but the promise of more cricket to come to sustain us. More cricket, more time, more change.
I love the Cricket World Cup. May it forever guide us through the days.
When I was ten years old I had a friend named Max. Max had a sister. She was older — way older, like 10 or 12 years older — than Max and I. She attended college out-of-state out east and had a rabbit for a pet. And I was absolutely head over heels in love with her. I obsessed about her for at least a year, which is a long time for a 10 year old.
Now, nearly 40 years later, whenever someone mentions having a rabbit for a pet, I am filled with this warmth, this joy. The same joy and warmth that I felt when I thought about Max’s sister, whose name I do not remember, when I was 10 years old, imagining us both older, living together out east, and in love. I picture her at her parent’s kitchen table, home for the holidays, saying hello, and I am transported back to those wonderful feelings a first crush bring.
This crush and its connection to rabbits came up in conversation a few months ago and that’s when I realized something: the two connected me to my childhood in one very clean line. A single thread that has run through my entire life since I was 10. Over the years my timeline has been demolished by death and divorce and change — to the point where sometimes it felt like I had lived four or five different lives. There is a quote in Rachel Cusk’s divorce memoir, Aftermath, that hit home for me: “I want to ask her if it feels like real life yet,” she writes after witnessing a friend getting remarried after her own divorce. “Whether the feeling of aftermath can encompass even events whose nature it is the consequence.”
After all of my timeline disruptions it would take so long for life to feel like real life again. And even now when everything in my life feels settled, I still feel like my past is more than just a foreign country, that it belongs to someone else entirely. But then I think of the rabbit, and Max’s sister, and I realize that it’s just been me all along.
The rabbit, Max’s sister. And up until this past weekend, Stuart Broad.
**
I first fell for cricket in April of 2007. Broad had made his ODI debut the previous December, and then made his Test debut the following December. And so he has been there since the beginning. But, now, not anymore. Just like all the rest of the cricketers who had been there at the beginning but have now ridden into the sunset.
The last 16 years have been tumultuous ones in my life; change after change after change. But through it all, Broad has been there, connecting the dots. I would turn on England in a new home in a new life and there he would be, just like he had been in the old home, in the old life.
It was comforting. It was something stable in an unstable world. It’s something that cricket provides that other sports just can’t. Yes, cricket in so many ways is night and day different than it was in 2007, but Test cricket for all intents and purposes looks and feels and sounds pretty much the same. You turn on an England test in 2007, 2011, 2019, 2023, and if you squint, it’s the same game, the same sounds, and there would be Stuart Broad.
In 2007 I was 31 years old. I was married. I lived in a house in suburban Minneapolis. I had a dog. I worked in sales. It was a different, unrecognizable life. Today I live in the city. With my partner, Liz, and our 20 month old son, Louie. It’s tough to marry (for lack of a better word) those two worlds, those two lives, together. But thanks to cricket, it was easier, knowing that Stuart Broad was always out there, blond hair under blue skies, His long loping strides, his handsome schoolboy looks. It’s weird to say there was comfort in that, but there was.
But not anymore.
Now all the players that I bonded with in 2007 are gone. And with them a connection to a life before my divorce, a band-aid on my timeline. And that’s what I thought about this weekend reading through the obituaries on his career: gone is something from my old life. And in that way it made me feel a not overwhelming but very real sense of melancholy. Like, when you learn that a house that your grandparents lived in had been torn down. Or an old co-worker who you half-knew and kind of liked had passed away. Gone was a connection to an old life.
And maybe that’s true for everyone who has followed cricket for the last 16 years. Broad was always there, and there was a comfort in that. The world has changed so much. But Broad has always been there. Like so many other things, it was a comfort that we probably didn’t even recognize until it was gone.
**
England’s Test team on Broad’s debut reads like an old newspaper clipping, the kind you find in a desk drawer a decade later and wonder why you saved it, but are glad you did:
Cook, Vaughn, Bell, Petersen, Collingwood, Bopara, Prior, Broad, Sidebottom, Harmison, Panesar.
Each of those names tells a story. Not just of the game overall but of my love for the game, for Test cricket. These were the players that guided me through those first few years when everything in cricket felt new and even surreal but also somehow perfect. And there at number seven is Stuart Broad, and he fit so snugly into that role, of navigator for me and Test cricket. Barbie, they called him. Sure, Jimmy Anderson was already on the scene, and is still remarkably out there, taking wickets, but Broad making his debut right as I made mine made it feel like were starting the adventure together. He was instantly likable, just like cricket. In 2007 the world felt like it was opening up to me in a brand new way. And Broad was part of that.
It rained in Colombo over those five days. Broad took a wicket but that’s really it. Life went on. 16 years later he was still there. Everything has changed. But he was still there. I read through some emails from that time and they all felt so sad and I don’t know why. It was life and it was fine but I don’t think I was all that happy. It’s tough to remember. I once wrote “I remember being happy, and so I was happy,” but in reading through those emails and thinking about that time, I don’t think I was happy. In fact, I am pretty sure I wasn’t.
Today I am happy. The happiest I have been since I was nine years old. And Stuart Broad was a bridge between those two worlds. 2007, and 2023. Between happiness and unhappiness.
**
Athletes exist in some ways beyond age, beyond time, because they all wow us when they are so young, and are considered over the hill when they are not even close to being old, when they are still very much young. Broad, also, was not a superstar. He was a wonderful bowler, and a joy to watch, but his stats don’t make the jaw drop. Except when they do: he bowled a shocking 34,000 Test deliveries and snatched up a equally shocking 604 Test wickets. How? Because he was always out there. You turned on England and there he was.
As Jarrod Kimber pointed out in his newsletter tonight, Broad’s gift was taking wickets in bunches. Turning series and matches on their head with three, four, five wickets at a time. “His best days are an orgy of wickets,” wrote Kimber. And that I think is why he stood out for me. Because I didn’t get to watch that much cricket, but when I did, Broad was out there, and when Broad was out there, anything was possible.
I guess what I am trying to say is that like so many members of that England team above, Broad is, for me, cricket. He is — or was — what I love — or loved — about cricket. And since he was there at the beginning, where it all started, his orgies of wickets have become what I look for in Test matches, what I compare other bowlers against. Just like Cook and his handful of legendary opening knocks, Prior and his grit, Petersen and his flair. I read through those names and they are my introduction to Test cricket. And what a gift Test cricket has been. And now they are all gone.
Stuart Broad retiring isn’t a coming of age moment. It’s not the death of my childhood. He was not my hero when I was nine years old. But as an adult I stumbled on an old game, and that game followed me through 16 years of, well, life, and all that comes with it. He marked time, but he also stood the test of it. Always, it seemed, young; and always out there, running in, taking wickets in bunches, batting in the English twilight. Everything changes, and then changes again, and there through it all was Test cricket, and the bowler who introduced me to it, and made me love it.
**
When players of note from that era — 2007-08 — retire, I feel a real sense of loss, and change. I lean back and my chair and let the sad thought wash over me: I will never see them play again. Yes, there’s Jimmy Anderson, but Broad felt like the last one. Like, now, they’re all gone. Not just the England players, but players from all over the world. They’re all gone now. And maybe, I don’t know, that’s okay. As I said above: now I am happy. Happiness is not a goal, it’s the by-product of a journey. And these players and this game have seen me through this journey, and now I can set them aside, and move on. And maybe — and this is the sliver lining — see the game in a whole new light. Less of a game with which to mark time, and more like, maybe, just a game, a game that every day finds a new way to entertain.
But I still just can’t believe I’ll never see Stuart Broad bowl again. I will miss him. Just like I miss all the old greats from the year I found cricket and everything changed and brought me here, to this place where I finally feel settled, at peace, at home.
You were a joy, Stuart. Thanks for 16 years.
I was born in 1976. Not at the height of The Cold War — as it was more or less in its decline by then — but the world was still definitely in the thick of East vs West.
It was a scary time to grow up. There weren’t air raid drills in schools any longer by that point. but every school and every church had signs up about where to go in the event of a nuclear attack. By the time I was around six or seven I was well aware of the horrifying fact that Russia was our enemy, and that if they fired their weapons at us it would mean the end of the world.
My father talked about it a lot. Probably because he was frightened too. He would say that the governments knew how many people would survive an attack based on the number of shovels people owned. Because it was all down to how fast everyone could dig. I don’t know if that I was a joke or not. He said it a lot. It scared the crap out of me.
I would fantasize about successful summits between Reagan and Gorbachev, or of a force field that we could put up around our house in the event of a nuclear attack. I followed the real summits like they were ball games. I hoped and I prayed that cooler heads would prevail, that peace would come, that my family would be safe. It was a heavy burden for a kid to bear. And we all bore it. All of us. Like I said, it was a scary time. There were missiles pointed at us from submarines trolling along our coastlines.
And then, all of a sudden, it was over.
The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed. And it was over. And I didn’t think about it any more. The fear dissipated. The world was all of a sudden a far less scary place.
But those years left a mark. Nuclear disarmament was still a passion of mine through college. The peace sign we all are familiar with that has become a meaningless pop culture symbol emerged from the anti-nuclear movement. It’s the semaphores for N and D placed on top of each other. Nuclear Disarmament. That’s what I see when I see the peace sign. That’s all that I see.
Despite the marks the Cold War left on me, however, I still basked in the safety of the world. I took it for granted, of course, like everyone did. But looking back I like to think that I understood that Pax Americana was a golden age of sorts. We were lucky enough to live in uninteresting times. And while that was boring. and left us a bit unmoored as a generation, we were still darn lucky and I like to think we knew it.
Then came 9/11. And endless war. Iraq. Afghanistan. Syria. Obama’s drones. Trump’s bungling of foreign policy. Mass shootings. Even then, though, the world felt pretty safe. Safe enough anyway. Here in St. Paul, Minn., the world at least didn’t feel like it was on fire. We went to tap rooms and rode bikes and traveled and lived our lives. It felt safe, even if it really wasn’t.
But, as well all know, that illusion of safety ended. A global pandemic came and millions died. George Floyd was murdered and people tried to burn down my city. January 6, 2021 happened. And last night Minnesota time Russian invaded Ukraine and this morning I woke up and it felt like the world was ending.
There’s that amazing scene in Wim Wenders’ “Until the End of the World.” When Claire and William Hurt are flying in the little prop plane over the Australian Outback and the US shoots down the Indian satellite and the plane’s engine shuts off and everything is quiet. “It’s the end of the world,” says Claire. And then that Peter Gabriel song “Blood of Eden” starts to play.
It’s a perfect scene. Absolutely brilliant. And this morning I felt like Claire: “it’s the end of the world,” I said to myself out loud, using her same inflections. I wrote it in the journal I’ve been keeping during my parental leave. I said it to the baby. I said it in text messages to friends. Because it truly felt like it. There I was on the floor with the baby in his play gym, holding his little wooden rattle, and thinking the world was ending. In a lot of ways it still feels that way. Not ending like “Station Eleven” ending, but ending as we know it, as we have come to know it, during these many, many years of peace, even if that peace was an illusion reserved for the lucky few privileged enough to live where I live. It is still ending. Everything I thought I cared about felt meaningless. All I could consider was that my perfect little baby would never know a time of safety and security like I knew.
There was never a guarantee that today would look like yesterday, or that tomorrow will look like today, but I had hoped the fantasy would continue at least for a little while longer.
During the height of the pandemic, when the world also felt like it was ending, I took comfort like I always do in cricket. Because the game has survived so much. This is its second pandemic. There were the two world wars where Europe dissolved into madness and millions upon millions died. The game soldiered on. It kept going through it all. A constant light in the storm that was the 20th century and beyond.
The world might be on fire, but cricket pays it no mind.
And today was no different. South Africa are playing New Zealand as I type. In three hours Bangladesh will play Afghanistan.
There is always cricket.
But this time feels different. This time it’s reckless Putin with a nuclear arsenal; and Chernobyl; and China’s in league with Russia; and autocrats the world over feeling emboldened; and all of us staring down a decades long conflict between East and West; all while America is slowly splitting apart at the seams.
This time it feels different. Part of me believes cricket doesn’t see the other side of this one. Our grip on stability is too tenuous. The center is collapsing. The whole world feels broken.
But I will keep looking for the light it brings. The metronome of the matches on the other side of the world reminding me just how big this planet is. The game an anachronism that’s been fighting against time and history since it started. A pastoral game invented at the height of the industrial revolution. Europe burning and Europe burning again. And still: all over the world, a coin is tossed, and people run out for a game of cricket. The same game that survived so much. There is hope in that, I guess, a smidgen of hope, and that’s more than I am finding elsewhere tonight.
The run up, the delivery, a ball through to the keeper, and do it again. On this side of the world or the other. Over and over again. As Europe burns, as the fires go out, as it burns again. The game is relentless in its persistence. And so, I guess, is this big giant sad old world of ours.
Hug your loved ones tonight.
Last night I was sitting at my dining room table in the house I had purchased with my partner this past June, writing longhand with a fountain pen on a legal pad. David Bowie’s Hunky Dory was spinning on the stereo. The Christmas Tree in the corner was lit with those old style multi-colored bulbs you don’t really see any more. The whole room smelled of pine. In the dining room the overhead light filled the entire room with brightness, while the living room was flooded with darkness, lit only by the soft light of the Christmas Tree. Outside it was winter. It had snowed earlier and it was dark and bitterly cold, but there was no wind, and the whole world felt still, at peace, quiet. My sidewalk was neatly shoveled. Cars crunched in the snow as they drove past. And in the corner sleeping in his pack and play was my seven week old son, Louis.
*
Long time readers of this blog know that I suffered through a dark period these last few years. Divorce, depression, loss. Plus, of course, all of the other things we as a planet have gone through since March of 2020. The hallmark of my depression was the piercing, ever present belief that it was going to last forever. That fact that it was infinite was never in doubt, not for a second. I would feel like crap forever. Intellectually, I understood that that was not true, but in my heart and my gut I knew it to be otherwise.
Obviously, I was wrong. For while I still slip back and forth into darkness from the light, I am mostly out of the shadows now. I go through entire weeks without thinking about how terrible I feel. I speak about the depression in the past tense. Intrusive thoughts still exist — especially around the holidays — but they don’t stick. They slide right off of my back. For brief seconds, I cannot help but think to myself: here we go again, I am going to feel awful for a long time now. But almost as soon as the thought itself is formed, the feeling is whisked away. And I move on.
I am doing better. I am better. I made it to the other side; a side that I didn’t even believe existed for a very long time.
*
On that legal pad I was writing part of the ongoing letter to my son. I was telling him about winter. How it was upon us, and how it was just getting started. Bitter cold, terrible snow, darkness. Winters in Minnesota are just plain awful, I told him, in so many words, and pretty soon you will know this too.
And then I thought to myself — I wonder if he will live in Minnesota as an adult? Or will he depart to a warmer climate somewhere? San Diego, or Mexico City, or El Paso. Or maybe somewhere even farther flung? Paris, Monaco, Tokyo. Maybe he will still have winters but they will be different winters in a very different place? He’s only seven weeks old. His entire life is ahead of him. He could end up living just about anywhere. Right here in St. Paul or anywhere else on the globe.
But then I thought to myself: heck, so could I.
This is when I took stock as described in the first paragraph of this post. I looked around and I realized just how much my life had changed, and therefore would continue to change. Five years ago was December of 2016. My life was so different then that it’s hard to even believe it was reality. And my life now would seem like another planet to the me of five years ago. And so what could the next five years bring? They could bring anything, just about anything. My life in December of 2026 might look more or less like it does now, or it might completely different. Night to my day. No matter what, it will shock me in how different it is compared to my life today, and when compared to how I expected it to be.
Life is change. It is relentless and it is constant. Sometimes it is sweeping and other times subtle. Our lives tumble along and, God willing, we tumble along right alongside them. We go where each day takes us, and where each year takes us, and where each decade takes us. Life is, in many ways, very predictable. Each day, the sun comes up, we go to work, we go to meetings, we come home. There are meals and coffees and a few laughs. Then the sun sets, and it starts all over again. But each day is subtly different, and those differences accumulate. And then there are days that are not-so-subtly different, and those days pile on to the differences that already exist. Then one day you look around at your life and it is unrecognizable. And then you look again and you realize you are happy. And you wonder not how long it will last as you might have before, but instead you simply sit in awe at the idea of happiness being something that even exists, when for so many years, maybe your whole life, you assumed it was a myth. Not just happiness but appreciation for that happiness. Which is to say: contentment. Blessed contentment.
Our lives are but chalk on blackboards. Erased and rewritten with each passing minute. We don’t notice it, but it’s happening as sure as the earth beneath our feet is spinning. Yes, Louie could up end up living just about anywhere, but so could I. Minnesota winters might be in my rearview mirror come 2026. My whole world could change. Five years ago I was living an entirely different life. Now there is happiness. I would never in a million years have bet on that horse in December of 2016. But here we are.
Change is all that is guaranteed to us. Good or bad, it is a promise that is delivered upon, day in and day out. Five years from now my life might look more or less the same, but the differences from this moment right now, here, as I type in the basement of my house, will be monumental. There is no doubt in my mind. It’s thrilling. And a reminder to hang on as tight as I can to the happiness that surrounds me: my partner, my son. To keep them close. Take them with me as the change rumbles toward us. And it’s a reminder to all those that are struggling: it gets better. Your life will change. Just hang in there. Get to the other side. Trust me, it exists. It really does.
And so to answer the question that serves as the title of this post, a question posed by Jonathon Liew in the Guardian:
Will England ever be good at Test cricket again?
Of course they will.
I haven’t a single doubt.
The Edgbaston Test didn’t go all that well for England. Not well at all in fact. Sure, they were missing several key players. Maybe more than several. But they were still firmly walloped by a very, very good New Zealand team at what was formerly known as England’s fortress.
But there was still a lot to like. Mostly because of the people in the stands. I think even England fans can agree that the Test was fun from the first ball to the last because of the fact that the ground was lovingly filled with cricket fans. 20 somethings in fancy dress. Businessmen in a shirt and tie with a plastic cup of beer in the sun. The old timer with the radio attached to his ear. The young family with a kid on mom’s lap. And the songs. Oh those songs. The nearly non-stop singing. Choruses echoing around the ground all day long. From late morning to early evening. It was glorious. Every second of it. I wasn’t even there and I loved it. I was watching on a second monitor at my kitchen table as I tried to work and it was still the highlight of the last year and then some.
Everyone together. Rising as one. Voices lifted in song. It reminded me — and all of us — of what we were missing during the pandemic. Crowds. Being around strangers that feel just like we do. Thousands of them. All of us together. Tens of thousands of us. We are not alone. We’ll never be. We are part of something larger, we are part of a community of humans. All of us, at our cores, more or less the same. And today we are all here to sing and support this team that our grandfathers taught us to love.
It’s everything great about sports. It’s everything great about being a human. A reminder that we are all in this together. We all have hopes and dreams and sadnesses and heartbreaks. And today we are all here to cheer on our heroes in the sun. My brother next to me. My sister two rows down. Not family but simply my fellow humans. Let’s hug strangers and sing songs and remember why we all kept getting out of bed during the darkest days of the pandemic. And also why we kept getting out bed after inconceivable loss, black days that belonged only to us. When we are alone. When we discover what loneliness really is and why it kills people. But we soldier on, we get help, because we know that out there everyone is hurting, in their own way, or maybe getting better, or moving on. There are endings that are beginning and beginnings that are ending and everything in between.
**
There’s a moment when we realize we want to get better. It’s a powerful moment. We’ve all had it. We’ve all been there. After weeks or months or even years of feeling wretched and broken, we realize enough is enough and that we are ready to move on from the sadness, the pain, the gross feeling in our guts.
A few weeks ago I came across a band called Bleachers. I think Spotify spun them up for me because Bruce Springsteen sings on their latest single and I listen to a lot of Springsteen on Spotify. I liked what I heard. I sought out more. And I came across their big hit: “I wanna get better.” The record version is fun and poppy. The kind of song you want to hear in your car on a summer’s day when everything in the world feels all right and you roll your windows down and sing along.
But the real joy comes in the live versions I found on YouTube. Thousands of people, people of all shapes and sizes, all ages, all creeds, all colors, all screaming at the top of their lungs: “I wanna get better.” I would watch the videos with more emotion than I have felt in a very long time. All those people. Just like me. All who struggled or are struggling, and all want or wanted to get better. Loss, depression, anxiety … these are human emotions. They are not Matt Becker emotions. We all have our shit. All of us. And we all want to get better. I heard every voice, lifted, singing: I wanna get better. People just like me. People not like me at all. It was a powerful feeling. It blew me away. I am not alone. I’ll never be.
I discovered Bleachers and this song the same week as the Edgbaston Test and it was then I realized that the feelings inspired by both the crowds at the cricket and the crowds at the concert while not the same, were close. All of us together. Singing along. Looking around. Seeing ourselves. Seeing the same hurt and hope in other’s eyes that we feel in our own. We are humans. We are all together. Let’s sing.
Humans will always want to gather together. We all kept reading those think pieces in the New Yorker that claimed that office culture was dead. That the future of concerts was Zoom. That movie theaters were doomed. Rubbish. We need humans around us. We need to feel the same things together. We need those constant reminders that we are not alone. A lesson we all had taught to us by the Test at Edgbaston. I had tears in my eyes several times, even just watching on TV. We are back. We are together. We are cricket fans. And we aren’t alone.
In August of 2011 my wife and I attended a wedding in a small town in Wisconsin. The wedding party all stayed in this gorgeous old hotel overlooking Lake Superior. It was a perfect few days. All our friends together in one place for what turned out to the be last time. The weather was gorgeous. We ate, drank, hiked, slept late. We sat out on the balcony over looking the lake drinking beer and talking late into the night. We sang, we danced. And then on Sunday we got into our Subaru and drove the four hours home, through small town Wisconsin, an old friend in the backseat. We stopped only once. At a gas station somewhere. My friend got out and sat on a curb across the street and smoked a cigarette as I pumped gas. It was sunny and warm. We dropped him off at his mother’s house and we hugged goodbye.
That was four months after I started this blog. And right after everything just kind of fell apart.
And that’s the real story of this blog. Or, maybe, it’s the other story. That I started it in the middle of what for a long time I considered the best year I ever had. From the fall of 2010 until that wedding in August of 2011, it felt like everything in my life was clicking. And then after that, and since, I felt drifty, a little lost, like life is passing me by. And, I don’t know, not to be such a cliche, but just a little sad all the time. Some years are better than others, sure, but that weekend in Wisconsin truly marked, for me, the end of the one good year I got. The one good year in this whole mess of a life. And this blog started right in the middle of that year. Which at least partially explains why, now that I think about it, I keep coming back here, why I see it as a place of refuge, a place of hope. Because when I fired up this site on that morning 10 years ago now, my mind was at peace.
Looking back, it was not all wine and roses. There were moments in that year that were downright awful. Times of real pain, real heartache. real worry, real tension, real conflict. But for whatever reason I was able to focus on all the good happening around me. And while I tend to look back on days with rose tinted glasses, I don’t think I am doing that here. I was aware of how great those days were as they were happening. In the fall of 2010 at a party at our house I gave a toast and said out loud “these last six months have been our best six months.” And I knew at the time, after that wedding, or even during the same weekend, that it was coming to an end, that it was over. That the feeling of just being okay, of my mind clicking, of being able to just exist, and be all right. This week I marked the 10 year anniversary of this blog. In August I will mark 10 years of everything just feeling off. Of a life — my life — slowly collapsing. Like time is running out of me. Physically running out of me. And that it is taking the joy with it. 10 years. 700+ posts. Tens of thousands of page views. And so much sadness.
**
Running alongside me, during that year, was of course the game of cricket. The weekend in Wisconsin was happening during the fourth and final Test between India and hosts England. On August the 22nd, the day after we drove home, England finished off the four Test sweep. The rain soaked Test saw England win the toss and choose to bat and then score 591 runs (Ian Bell scored 235 of those) before declaring. England restricted the visitors to 300 in their first innings, forcing the follow on and then winning by an innings and eight runs. Dravid scored 146 not out in a losing effort in his first innings. Graeme Swann took 6/106 in India’s second innings. Strauss captained England, Dhoni captained India.
In April of 2011, when I started this blog, India had just hosted and won the 2011 World Cup. After the disaster that was 2007, this iteration saw life return to the one day game. Yuvraj Singh was the man of the tournament. Kevin O’Brien embarrassed England with one of the most aggressive displays of batting ever seen. 997 million people watched the final, which India won with just 10 balls remaining, thanks to the aforementioned Dhoni and his unbeaten 91 off of 79 deliveries. One of the great captain’s innings of all time.
The year started in September. With Ireland visiting Zimbabwe and losing two of the three ODIs played. The hosts wouldn’t win another ODI series until 2017, and wouldn’t win one at home until 2019.
Much has changed for all mentioned here. Zimbabwe have been lost in a sea of corruption and poor results. Most of the members of those England and India teams have retired. The names like a who’s who of cricketers from days gone by: Tendulkar, Dhoni, Dravid, Sehwag. Swann, Cook, Prior, Onions. Though the India squad also featured a young Virat Kohli who replaced an injured Yuvraj Singh for the third and fourth Tests. And the England squad was filled with players still out there today.
Sadly, and all jokes aside, the 2011 World Cup feels a long way from what is happening today in India. The country is being ravaged by the Coronavirus. And it appears like it is going to get a whole lot worse before it starts to get better. It comes from a place of privilege, but I can’t force myself to look at the pictures of what is happening there. I just want to look away. The whole world feels different. Mass graves. Funeral pyres. People dying in hospital hallways. 2011 doesn’t feel like 10 years ago. It feels like a million light years away. It breaks my heart. I hate saying things like that, since it feels so hollow. Real people are dying, real people are mourning, everyone is scared. But here in Minnesota, on this cloudy Sunday morning, my heart just aches for India, and thinking of the 2011 World Cup win just solidifies how much worse off we all are today. Ten years on.
**
This is the story of this blog. And this is the story I want to write. My life running alongside cricket. Cricket running alongside the world. Two recent posts ended with more or less the same sentence, describing the same idea: cricket counting the days, and urging us to keep up. It’s not metaphor, it truly is doing that. For me, in my life, and for all of us, even those people who don’t even know it. That’s the story of this blog. And that’s the story I want to write.
12 days ago this blog had its ten year anniversary.
10 years.
And I missed it.
I knew it was coming, and I had planned to post that day, but it slipped my mind and now it’s 12 days later. That about sums up how much effort I have put into this site over the last few months: vague plans followed by zero action.
10 years. 700 posts. Tens of thousands of page views (most of them on my post about how to cancel Willow TV. Thanks, Google.) Four mentions in Wisden (thanks, Brian). A mention in the Times of India. A retweet from Harsha Bhogle. Two dead dogs. A divorce. And here we are.
I started the blog on a spring morning right after the 2011 World Cup from my desk at work. It was a sunny, green morning. I had a window that looked into the backyards of suburban homes. Ducks would rest under the pine trees in the shade. An old retiree pulled weeds and mowed his lawn. The job I had at the time was terrible, but I miss it, I miss those mornings, those times, writing here. You can miss anything is something I say all the time. And it might be the only real truth that truly exists when it comes to being human.
In 2011 I had been a cricket fan for four years. It was only six years removed from the 2005 Ashes. Now it is ten years ago. A hair shy of a quarter of my life gone in the snap of fingers. Bam. Just like that.
Thanks, everyone, for reading. This is still a place that I am quite proud of.
*
To say that the game of cricket has changed over the last 10 years would be both an understatement and an overstatement. In 2011 the structures for what the game is now were firmly in place. The Twenty20 was king. The IPL was bullying the fixture calendar. If this blog had started just two or three years earlier, then the emergence of those two things would be the story here. But that’s not the case. Instead the last 10 years is really just the slow march of time, with the T20 and the IPL steamrolling everything in their paths. So what have I been writing about these last years?
There’s what happened in America, with the death of USACA and the growth of the game and the competitiveness of the international team. There’s the new Test Championship. And the last Champions Trophy. There’s Ireland and Afghanistan gaining Test status. There’s India, Australia and England muscling their way into almost total control of the global game. There was and is corruption at every single level of the game.
Sachin hit his 100th 100.
Sachin retired.
Test cricket had its 1000th match.
Ben Stokes happened. Virat Kohli took over the world. There was ball tampering and spot fixing. There was the year that saw two Ashes tournaments. Australia won a World Cup. England won a World Cup. Test cricket died, was resurrected, and died again, several times over. I saw kids playing cricket on a baseball field near my old house. A pandemic shut down the game completely at every level including even street cricket. The women’s game grew in leaps and bounds.
And gosh it feels like so much more must have happened. But right now it’s a blur. All that cricket, all those years, and now it’s like it never even happened.
Except it did. All that cricket. All that marvelous cricket.
And that is the real story of the last 10 years. Not the corruption or slow strangling of the first class game. Or The Hundred or World Cups decided on silly tiebreakers. But the game itself. And the people who played it. Men, women, children and everyone in between. From stadiums to beaches to alleyways to the park near my old house. People got up in the morning, walked outside, and played cricket. And some of us were lucky enough to get to watch the best of these cricketers perform, whether leaned up against a tree in a park, or sat in the luxury box of a stadium, or on our phones in bed in the morning before even first light.
There was just so much cricket that happened. Countless — truly countless — deliveries and overs and wickets and runs. The game has its problems, but the game is soldiering on, and these last 10 years of the game has proven that over and over and over again. People keep playing cricket, and people keep watching cricket. That’s the story here. The game continues to be declared dead, extinct, obsolete, but then it just keeps getting up off the mat. The last 10 years have seen the world change in ways we never could have expected. And sport has changed so drastically it’s almost unrecognizable. And cricket has morphed into the game it was primed to be in 2011. But through it all, through everything, the game just keeps going.
That’s the story of the last decade. It’s an optimistic tone that I didn’t expect to be able to muster when I started this post. But here we are. And here we will continue to be. Cricket marches on, and we are lucky enough to be here watching as it does.
Oh, cricket is dead? Try again, pal.
Is it sick? Sure. But everything feels sick now. The world and the sports played in it are going through massive sea changes, but it’s nothing we can’t handle, and it’s nothing cricket can’t handle. A Super League is going to destroy soccer? Wimps. Cricket has had a Super League for 150 years and is doing just fine, thanks.
10 years later. And cricket is still on in the background as I type this. And it’s great. I love it. I still love it. Every ball.
And that right there, now that I think of it, is the story of the last 10 years, and of this blog. The one constant theme that runs through every word typed. It’s about a love affair for a game. As I scroll through posts from the last decade that’s so evident it’s like I am hitting readers over the head with it. The game thrilled me in 2011, and continues to thrill me every single day.
I love cricket. And I hope to be saying that in another 10 years. Right here. God willing.
England’s performance in Asia this tour has ultimately been one that smacks of disappointment. It started off well, but then careened off course since the first test in India.
But still. This is a pretty good England team. I don’t think anyone can really doubt that. They won the World Cup 18 months ago. They are ranked fourth in the Test rankings which is not great but also not terrible by any stretch, and they are ranked number one in the T20 rankings.
They also have some once or twice in a generation talents standing out there most matches, and a little more than a smattering of talented and fun to watch young players. This team is pretty good, and the future looks positive. At least from my chair. Your mileage might — and probably does — vary. But no matter what your opinion, I think we can all agree that the English team we are watching this month is a country mile better than some of the English teams of the past.
The 1980s are seen by most as the dark ages for England cricket. Particularly the last half of that decade, as (saving newly promoted Sri Lanka) they didn’t win a home Test between September of 1985 and July of 1990. Sure, they won the Ashes in 1987. And had a couple nice victories here and there, but they were for the most part poor, and unsettled, especially after the rebel tours which saw players such as Graham Gooch suspended.
As always, the numbers don’t lie. Between 1980 and 1989, they played 104 Test matches and only won 20 of them. Like Kevin Bacon said in that movie from the 90s: “these are the facts, and they are indisputable.” England were poor in the 80s, and that is a fact that is almost impossible to argue, because quite simply the numbers, the data, the stats back it up. You can’t look at that period of English cricket subjectively, because the numbers are far too objective.
Numbers are cricket’s backbone. They are what tell the story. Despite all the witticisms, all the poetry, all the flowery language, the game is defined by wickets and runs, wins and losses. And because of the strength of this backbone, it is very difficult to look at bygone eras for poor teams with any sort of rose tinted glasses. You can’t talk your way out of what the stats say when it comes to cricket. They are too hardboiled into the very marrow of the game itself. The stats say England were poor in the 1980s, and so England were poor in the 1980s. Full stop. One does not look back at the Micky Stewart era and say something like, “Maybe it wasn’t so bad. In fact, I kind of miss those days.”
Life of course isn’t so black or white. We are complex machines of memory and time and regret. We can miss anything, us humans. Bygone eras become utopias in our mind. We look back and without the assistance of math and logic and data, we bend the truth around the negative, and feel our way through to the positive, which is where we choose to stay. “I am glad those days are over” is something people say, sure, but only when those days included the most dire of circumstances. Most times, the vast majority of times, we look back at days gone by and see them as simpler, easier, better. It’s how our brains work. I am not sure why we do it, but we all do it.
What I about to say is not meant to discount the real suffering of so many this past year, but the above can be proven by the simple fact that most of us — yes, most of us — will miss these pandemic times when, god willing, they are finally over. We will look back wistfully at working from home, learning to cook, spending time with our kids, all of it. We will look back and think: “That really wasn’t so bad.” Even though we have the data and the numbers to refute that claim — 2.57 million dead and counting — our brains can’t grasp that number the way we can cricket’s net run rate or runs per over. It’s too big, to abstract, and so we go back to the stories we tell ourselves, to the poetry, to the flowery language, the devices that cricket’s stories have learned to bypass.
My life has been, like most lives, a series of different phases. An episodic novel like Huck Finn. My brain looks for patterns in the wallpaper and divides my life up into chunks. There was the period before my dad died. The period after. College. Work. Marriage. Divorce. Growing old. I look back on all of those phases fondly, despite the fact that some of them were truly awful. High school, for me, was horror show. But I miss it. College was lonely and sad and boring. But I miss it. My marriage was flawed beyond doubt — which is proven by the fact that I left it — but I still miss that life, I still glorify that life. Despite the fact that I can remember the fighting and the yelling and the name calling and the days of silence following each storm. I remember that suffering, but I also don’t. I remember the pain of the years after I left, and that causes me to lift the life I abandoned into places of happiness and contentment that maybe it doesn’t deserve.
I don’t like this about myself. I don’t like it at all. I abhor that my brain exists in a constant series of regrets. “If only I could go back to the times before when I didn’t feel this way” ignores the truth that I felt worse before. But that truth doesn’t exist for me. At least not really. Not in any way that I can grab onto. And in this way I am jealous of cricket. Its ability to look back and see how things really were. Thanks to simple addition and division, the story of a season is told, and it’s a picture painted that cannot be undone. Of course, the joy of being human is that we are not reliant on data to decide how we feel about something. And so instead of wanting my memory to be more like cricket’s, maybe instead, again, I can learn something from its aggressive objectivism.
Or maybe I can’t. Maybe there isn’t a lesson here. Maybe I can’t overlay this old game on to my life and take something away from the result. Maybe all of the lessons that I thought the game was teaching me are useless and moot. But I don’t think so. I think some of the lessons have been accurate and helpful, just not this one. Cricket cannot help your brain understand the truth of its past. We look back the only way we know how. There are no numbers to help us write the story. All we have is the opposite of data: memory; flawed, human memory. Cricket’s only job in the evaluation of bygone days is to count. Count the days, count the overs, count the seasons. Show us that time has passed, that eras have passed, that history has been erased, rewritten and erased again. We can look back and think we were happier, and cricket will count the years and remind us how long ago those times really were, and then it will just continue to count. Time marches on. In one direction only. We can look back and think we were happy, and we can try to counter that with memories of hard days, but all that matters, really, is that the overs tick over, the seasons change, and time refreshes us, provides memories and leaves it up to us to interpret them.
England’s cricket team in the 1980s was not great. Today it is better. Maybe that’s all the lesson we need here. Time passes, and takes us with it.
Limited Overs 