I once was a Grasshopper
The new season stirs memories and invokes dreams
If (like me) you haven’t partaken in any winter nets over the last few months then the next few weeks will likely see you rummaging under the bed, in the loft, the car boot or the cupboard under the stairs to locate your cricket kit.
I’ve never been much of a kit fetishist. Bats? Well that’s a different matter entirely, but pads, gloves, spikes, helmets etc have never really got me going. Much less the bag that holds them.
Growing up my older brothers and I shared a kit bag, a capacious holdall that would comfortably house all our cricket kit and extended paraphernalia. I’m pretty sure it is still stowed somewhere in our parents house, much to mum’s resigned disgruntlement. It’s lucky she doesn’t know about the festering unwashed whites screwed up in the end compartment.
The aforementioned holdall was wheeled out every year, a duffle might’ve made an appearance for a few seasons but one thing I can say with certainty - we never used a coffin. Too unwieldy. Too serious. Too archaic. Turning up to a match with a rigid coffin on wheels would’ve been like arriving at secondary school with a briefcase and a monocle.
Thinking about it now, it’s quite apt that the same word is used to describe both the thing that could house your corpse when the ultimate innings of your life comes to a close and the thing that houses your cricket kit. The game after all is synonymous with loss, failure is written through it. Batting in particular can never be conquered, all innings come to an end at some point whether they’ve seen runs or not. Every time you get out it’s another small death - ‘a petite mort’ but not in the ‘sexy’ French way.
All of which is to say I purchased a new cricket bag last summer. For the previous few years I’d been using one of those blue Ikea sacks to haul my kit around. A new low, perhaps, but maybe something else was at play?
***
Chris Morris tells a story about working with Peter Cook. Morris, the English writer, director, actor and satirist (not the rubber-limbed South African all-rounder) met Cook in 1994 - the year before the latter died aged 57 - after years of alcoholism finally took their toll. The two men made a radio show together - Why Bother - a series of improvised interviews between Morris (in a similar role to his caustic interviewer/anchor as heard in On The Hour and seen in The Day Today) and Cook’s character - Sir Arthur Streeb Greebling.
The show recalls Sir Arthur’s early years in which he was sent to prison at the age of four (by his father) and goes on a similarly surreal vein from thereon in - back to Sir Arthur’s days of ‘extreme comfort’ in a Japanese POW camp and his attempts to mediate in the Rodney King LA riots. Cook revels in Sir Arthur’s flights of dark fantasy, be it his habit of strangling business partners or detailing plans to capitalise on his discovery of the fossilised remains of the infant Christ with the help of the bods at BMW, Honda and Sony.
Morris was blown away by Cook’s mental agility despite his shambolic appearance.
“I held out no great hopes that he wouldn't be a boozy old sack of lard with his hair falling out and scarcely able to get a sentence out, because he hadn't given much evidence that that wouldn't be the case.
But, in fact, he stumbled in with a Safeways bag full of Kestrel lager and loads of fags and then proceeded to skip about mentally with the agility of a grasshopper. Really quite extraordinary.”
I think that by using a battered Ikea holdall as my cricket bag I was trying in some way to emulate Peter Cook and his carrier bag of Kestrel. The Scandi sack was also perhaps indicative of how the game, playing the game that is, had slipped down the pecking order in my life over the last decade.
I no longer owned my own bat, my pads were won in a raffle and ten years of bloating meant that most of my old whites were embarrassingly obsolete. Appearances at the wicket were ever fleeting but, despite all this, I still fancied my chances of rocking up to a game and being able to ‘perform’. In my youth it was a source of pride to be able to do the business out in the middle on a hangover, more impressive still if you remained under the influence. Hair of the dog runs, teetering on the trapeze between risk, recklessness and reward, somewhere between Ollie Milburn and Oliver Reed.
Ten years later and my increasingly sporadic appearances at the crease were still blighted by sleep deprivation, less often as a result of too much revelry but thanks to Martha, our two year old daughter.
Despite not playing regularly for years I had the misplaced arrogance to think nothing had changed. The game had other ideas. Runs were scarce - ah well, sometimes that happens. More horrifyingly, routine catches were now dropped and it became apparent that I could barely throw, forced to bowl or underarm the ball in from the deep like one of the impossibly old codgers we used to take the piss out of when we were younger. The runs were still scarce. Ah. Each humiliation was further reinforcement – I was no longer much cop at cricket. Unlike Peter Cook, I was in fact entirely as crap as my baggage suggested.
It was a rapid and brutal descent from initially wanting to cultivate an image of dishevelled ringer, of hoping to appear scruffily insouciant - the opposite of “all the gear no idea” - to the realisation that actually, I couldn’t get away with blagging it. Far from it, there was no talent left to phone in. It’s only cool to look like you aren’t really trying if the end result is still success.
And yet, despite the new bag, investing in other bits of new kit and the odd winter net, there was no dramatic improvement in my performance. The runs are still scarce. Some days that’s fine, cricket is distraction and comfort. Other days it is still really annoying, the failures seep and linger.
You won’t hear me say it doesn’t matter anymore, it plainly does. My palms go clammy as spring loam under a low sun with the thought of innings still to play, the runs still out there unmade. This time of year affords a daydream or two.
They say having a child gives you perspective, show you what really matters in life. Well yes, that may be the case in many ways but not getting any runs is still a sickener. No amount of toothy smiles or parental epiphanies have changed that.
***
I did manage to get a fifty last September, playing erratic shots to even more erratic bowling. Jesus, it felt good. Halfway through the knock I saw Tori, my wife, arrive with Martha - toddling around the boundary in a way that immediately recalled Steve Smith. The urge to go and see them both was strong, but so was the idea of another few overs at the crease, to make some elusive runs. They wouldn’t mind, just a few more minutes, that dodgy spinner is warming up again…
When I did get out (thanks to an annoyingly good diving catch, I certainly didn’t give it away on purpose) Martha ran onto the pitch to greet me. A special moment captured on camera by a teammate*, made, I’m embarrassed to admit, all the sweeter by the runs.
Young children, like pets, don’t care how successful or otherwise you are. They greet you with unadulterated love at the door no matter what the day has entailed. But, as I strolled off the field that sunny afternoon with my daughter in one hand and my bat in the other and she laughed and giggled and looked at me with those blue eyes, I could tell she knew that for today at least, her dad had not been a sack of old lard, but a grasshopper.
* Cricket broadcaster, podcaster, writer and all round bon viveur Adam Collins was the teammate who took the original picture. In the pub one Friday night a few weeks back, apropos of nothing, he presented me with the above print in a frame. An incredibly kind thing to do.
** Fisher Classics are fantastic, check them out. They also do the design work on Gideon Haigh and Sam Perry’s peerless Substack - Cricket et Al.***
*** Check them out too… but do swing back here, Jon’s next piece will be out tomorrow.