Cracking up in VinceLand
Back by popular demand, the James Vince interview
The other day on Twitter (or X or whatever it’s meant to be called now) it appeared again and I was down the rabbit hole. James Vince batting at Perth on 55, 48 of them in boundaries, playing like an absolute filthy god of the game, when a 90mph delivery from Mitchell Starc hit a crack and diverted at right angles into his stumps. It still doesn’t look real, like it actually happened, because why would something so randomly cruel happen, I mean, what was the point of it, if we are existing in anything other than a hostile and directionless universe?
The greatness of that innings was, I think, heightened by the ludicrous way in which it ended. It seemed to say something more widely about the game itself, about how its rewards could never be taken for granted, that its ethereal pleasure would only ever hang by a thread. And yes, there was greatness in that innings, hints of it at least.
It was all part of the sliding doors experience of watching James Vince, who, just two games earlier, had run himself out in Brisbane while on 83, another very Vince-like manifestation of cricketing agony. This is a man who was dropped from the Test team for the final time after top scoring with 76 at Christchurch, and from the T20 side after top scoring with 55 in Bridgetown, who made his only international century – 102 against Pakistan at Edgbaston – after half the team got covid, who was at long on as a substitute fielder when England won the World Cup at Lord’s.
And that’s Vince really, there but not there. As I mentioned elsewhere on the Substack, I am pecking away at a short book about this state of Vinciness, and the Perth Tweet sent me back to it, and the only time that I have encountered the man, which was a phone interview for Wisden Cricket Monthly, also during the time of covid. James Vince was in his car on the way to the supermarket, killing two birds with one stone. I dug it out of the file, and thought some of it could go up here, so take your seats for an edited version below.
There was one question I really wanted to ask him, and did, that isn’t in the piece because, well… the question was about the innings in Brisbane. He went in after four deliveries of the third over of the game when Alastair Cook was dismissed, and Mitchell Starc’s first ball to him was this mad, swinging Yorker that Vince blocked so casually and with so much time that it looked like he was playing French cricket on the beach.
‘No,’ he said, equally casually, after I’d spent time and effort describing it. ‘I don’t remember that…’
Here’s some of the piece:
It’s easy to get lost in Vince land, in those alternative galaxies where the bad things that happen to James Vince don’t happen at all, because watching him bat is one of the game’s misty-eyed pleasures. Followers of Vince are the jittery acolytes of batting’s fragile beauty, and his grace at the crease can overpower judgement. Adjectives plod behind that cover drive, not quite up to the job of framing its majesty. But Tweet out his name and watch them come at you: the pragmatists, the stats men, the disenchanted, the legions who see life and cricket in black and white. Vince is catnip to them, with his apparent propensity for tantalising twenties and thirties and casual, vacant dismissals. All of these woes are so avoidable, they say, if only he’d be something different, something other than James Vince.
He knows it, of course. On the car phone, his voice drifting in and out with the signal, he knows what’s coming because it comes every time he is interviewed.
“I don’t think it’s unfair…” he says. “The only thing that frustrates me is that people think it’s lazy or a lapse in concentration or whatever, which it isn’t in my own head. I don’t go and get myself in and go, ‘oh well, I’ve got twenty, I’ll just get out now…’ That’s the only frustrating thing, people think I’m almost doing it on purpose…”
Vince can appear diffident both on the field and off, but it’s a mistake to see him that way, to confuse diffidence with shyness and a natural uncertainty. You can’t just saunter out on the first morning of an Ashes series and stroke the ball around without having something about you, especially when the world is unconvinced by what you have to offer.
“Had I not taken that run [at Brisbane], I felt pretty good at that stage and I might have got 150, then everything is different,” he says. “Because I didn’t manage to kick on and get a hundred when I did get myself in, I guess sort of highlights those other dismissals more.
“I don’t think about it too much right now. I don’t blame it on luck because there were games where I played bad shots and stuff. I could have done more myself. It’s not a bitterness at all but I do look back – or like now when we’re talking about it – I think, ‘yeah, if Lyon misses’…”
But how it appears from the outside is nothing like it is from within. Batsmen are either fighting or riding the unconscious mind in their impulses and urges, and split second decisions can have lifelong consequences. Vince’s interior terrain reflects this. Several times as we speak, he tries to describe it: “The feeling of how I feel when batting is different to how it looks, is the easiest thing to say…”
And then: “Moments where you think everything is just going perfectly are quite rare. You might get it a bit more in white ball cricket when the ball’s not moving around much and you feel like you’re timing every ball perfectly. In four-day cricket you might have phases where you feel really good and then one ball just does something that puts a bit of doubt in there.”
He talks a lot about confidence, especially during his two trips into the Test team, and contrasts that with the feeling of being established and free at Hampshire, where he is the captain and beloved of the fans. He describes obsessive practicing, over-thinking his dismissals, trying to hold onto his self-belief when his faults are picked apart in public.
“There are so many different factors,” he says. “I think confidence is a big one. I was always quite a shy kid, and I think a lot of batters – well I still struggle with sometimes feeling… I can sometimes focus on the negatives a bit too much.
“From the mental point of view, if you go through a county game and play a bad shot, you move onto the next game. You try not to do it again. The mistakes you make in international cricket get talked about fifty times more. So then you’ve just got to really back yourself, or identify what you do need to work on and try and shut away some of the outside noise.”
If he has one regret, it’s that he was close to working everything out. “I think actually when I got dropped from the side I was in the best place I’d been. Did an Ashes tour and did okay, then went to New Zealand, didn’t play the first Test when we got rolled at Eden Park, then got maybe a thirty and a seventy or eighty in the second dig, and then came back, summer started. I scored 200 against Somerset at Taunton, and the squad was announced the next day. It was the first time in my mind I was relatively confident about selection, then Ed Smith phoned and said I wasn’t in the side and I’ve not played since then. Probably as I was just starting to feel my way in and get used to it a bit was when I stopped playing, so it was quite hard to take.”
James Vince remains cricket’s equivalent of a Rorschach Test. Interpret his game however you want: ultimately your reaction tells you as much about yourself as it does about him. To focus on the nick-offs, the endings, the disappointing shots is to turn away from the beauty of the game – to feel and see something made precious by its transience. James Vince, at some point and given the chance, will play an innings we’ll never forget.
“So,” he says as we finish the call, “was I what you expected, or were you expecting something different?”
Yes and no is the only real answer I can give him.
Really enjoyed this. Not only well expressed, but written with love.