Cricket

No place for the faint of heart, Headingley, and certainly not for some sketchy Sri Lankan batsmen at the back end of a cold damp week in May with the two best seam bowlers in the world swinging away. Nobody liked it much on either side, which makes Jonny Bairstow’s big 140 all the more spectacular. Test matches in May are silly. This isn’t the hottest place in the world at any time. I mean, did you catch the opening of our very own IPL, or the Natwest T20 Blast as you might know it? While I watched Essex take on Surrey in the warmth of my sitting room, Sky’s Nasser Hussain and Rob Key were pitchside, fully togged up for Everest base camp. You practically got frostbite watching them. More than six Tests in an English summer is a bit much too.

A few years ago a motivational speaker brought out a smart little book called Legacy: What The All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life. Everyone wanted to know how a tiny country miles from anywhere could dominate the world’s hardest team sport for so long. A lot of it, the book said, boiled down to humility, believing in the collective, going the extra yard, and, crucially, ‘no dickheads’. Better people make better All Blacks, was the message. Now the world is trying to learn from the Leicester City playbook.

Well the sun is out, the sky is blue, and poor Boris Johnson is taking such a pounding from Matthew Parris and Petronella Wyatt that it makes the battle of Kursk look like an Easter Parade. Plenty to be cheerful about, then, and nowhere more so than in this blissful sporting spring. First, the T20 World Championship is producing cricket to make your hair stand on end. England’s men and women are racing through the tournament, and the men’s last- over win to beat Sri Lanka and reach the semis was spellbinding. England hadn’t reached three figures by the 15th over, but finished on 171. It was enough (just) after Sri Lanka’s captain Angelo Mathews led a brilliant fightback from 15 for four.

Two great men have just bowed out from their chosen trades and it is bloody sad. The New Zealand cricket captain Brendon McCullum and the journalist Hugh McIlvanney might not seem to have much in common but they both made the world a better, more joyful place. I sat up until the small hours a few of weeks back watching McCullum: it was his last Test, in Christchurch, against the old enemy from across the Tasman Sea, and his side had been put in to bat. McCullum has redefined what it means to be a batsman and for his farewell he wasn’t going to leave anything in the pavilion. He proceeded to score the fastest Test century in history, 54 balls, with jaw-dropping skill, grace and aggression. But his achievement is far greater. His teams played with freedom and sportsmanship.

In the north of Antigua, just by the medical school, is a neat little cricket ground. It was a bit overgrown and bedraggled when I drove past the other day, but the small stand was still there, the changing rooms, the peeling scoreboard, and the sails of the kite-surfers dancing skittishly out on the Caribbean. It was all different in 2013 when a team of us from the UK played in a T20 match against a student side. The mid-afternoon start was breezy, the outfield rugged, but the ground was quite full of youngsters who had come to watch their friends give a pasting to a bunch of ageing overweight English guys. They weren’t disappointed. We knew we were in trouble when their opening bowler’s run-up went back to the boundary.

And then there were none. The retirement of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the great Guyanese batsman, is the end of an era. He is the last of the old guard; the last of the great heroes from a time before the razzle-dazzle of the new 20/20 cricketing era. The last connection, too, to the time when the West Indies inspired terror, not pity. He was the last of my own Hornbys and Barlows; the last of the 1974 cohort to slip into the night. The torch will now be carried by other, younger, men. Many of them will prove to be wonderful but it will not be quite the same. My contemporaries no longer play test cricket. It is hard to think of a cricketer who, in recent times, has had to endure so much for so long with so little reward.

England’s cricketers won a remarkable Test match inside three days in the bearpit of Johannesburg, a victory that put them 2-0 up in the four-match series, with only the final Test to play. It is a remarkable achievement by Alastair Cook’s team because, before a ball had been bowled, most judges expected South Africa, the No. 1 ranked team in the world, to claim another triumph by right. In particular it was a wonderful tribute to the public schools which sharpened the skills of the star players. Stuart Broad, who took six prime wickets for only 17 runs on that tumultuous third day, reducing South Africa’s second innings to rubble, was educated at Oakham. Joe Root, who scored a superb century to set up the bowlers, was a sixth-former at Worksop College.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, decided to allow ministers to campaign for either side in the referendum on membership of the European Union, once his negotiations had been concluded on Britain’s relationship with the EU. The government said it was commissioning 13,000 houses to be built by small builders on public land made available with planning permission. Junior doctors decided to go on strike after all, starting with a day next week, after talks between the government and the British Medical Association broke down. In an extraordinarily drawn-out reshuffle, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, replaced Michael Dugher as shadow culture secretary with Maria Eagle, who was replaced at defence by the Trident-hating Emily Thornberry.

So long, then, to another thrilling year of sport in which the full range of human possibility — from the dismal frailties of the recidivists who run world football to the brazen brilliance of Japan’s rugby players — made for an intoxicating mix. It began and ended with two epic highs. Back in January, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson made the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite, the most difficult route in rock climbing, taking 19 days in all. A truly awesome achievement. Most of us could barely get off the ground; Yosemite is 3,000 ft high. Then, almost at year’s end, another high: the only people who recall Great Britain’s last Davis Cup victory are at least 90 years old. Now all of us have something to tell the grandchildren.

In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after Botham turned 60, the 44-year-old me thinks he’s an arse. And that makes me sad. The world is a simple place when you’re ten. There are heroes and villains, victories and defeats. The very best victories are the ones that were nearly defeats. Headingley 1981, for example. No need for the details — you know them already, not just from the match itself but from the hundreds of documentaries made about it since. I still lap them all up like an addict, silently mouthing along as Richie Benaud describes Botham’s six going ‘into the confectionery stall and out again’.

From ‘W.G.’, The Spectator, 30 October 1915: The late Dr. W.G. Grace had become in his lifetime a legend, and he is likely to remain a legend as long as Englishmen play games. Never was such a cricketer; and it is almost safe to say that there will never be such a cricketer again, for the perfection of pitches and the high organisation of the game have left less scope than there used to be for a man to achieve so great a mastery over his fellows. In this respect cricket is like war; in first-class cricket, as in war among first-class Powers, there is the same human material for personal ascendancy, but there is less opportunity for ascendancy to be practised… It is not stretching the fancy too far to trace the effects of ‘W. G.

The roar of the Premier League is beginning to drown out everything else in sport (there’s even Friday night football now: another blissful resting place occupied. Shouldn’t we ring-fence some time — greenbelt-style — that football can’t colonise, say 2 a.m. on a Monday, that’s preserved from football’s endless development?) But while there’s a chance, let’s not lose sight of a great Englishman and a great English achievement. This Ashes series has not been a good contest; they often aren’t. But with his modesty, determination and resilience, it has been a personal triumph for the captain Alastair Cook.