Jonathan Wilson

The first time this year you had fun playing cricket

08-Aug-2016

You get back from the Euros in France exhausted, under-exercised and bloated. You have four days at home before a walking holiday in Austria and Switzerland. A team you've played against are short and ask if you can fill in for a T20. You agree, offering the pre-emptive excuse that you are essentially foie gras on legs.

It has rained and the outfield is slick. In the first over, the ball is edged above and wide of you at backward point. You chase, fall readily into a slide for the first time since you damaged your shoulder at the end of May, gather the ball smoothly and, as you keep sliding, have the wherewithal to toss the ball to a team-mate. It feels vaguely professional. You are encouraged.

By the final over you are stationed on the square-leg boundary. A ball is pulled to deep midwicket. Sprinting to your left, you think you will cut it off, but it skids on the damp grass. At full tilt, you throw yourself into the path of the ball. It skips up, is diverted a fraction squarer. At full length, you reach up your right hand and, just as the ball is bouncing over your torso, knock it down into your chest. Your shoulder sticks in the grass. Your body keeps going. You pivot up on your neck, like Jurgen Klinsmann in the 1990 World Cup final, spend an age with your legs off the ground, then flop to earth, the ball somehow wedged in your unusually paunchy midriff. You have been ungainly and spectacular, and have saved two.

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Cricket equals pain

Your body hurts, your mind rebels, and your spirit can't handle the world changing around you

Jonathan Wilson

27-Jun-2016

The end of the ground furthest from the pavilion falls away sharply, dropping perhaps ten or 12 feet in the ten yards before the boundary. You have netted well. You feel good. You are looking forward to bowling. You swoop cleanly on a couple of balls edged towards backward point. You smell wickets. You are due. This is your time.

The ball is edged through a vacant third slip. You give chase. Your body for once feels right. Your chase is fluid and quick. The ball accelerates down the bank. You dive. For once, you time it perfectly. About two feet from the painted line, you make contact on the ball with your right hand. After twice being defeated by awkward bounces the previous week, the firm slap of leather on palm is welcome. The grass is greasy from the morning rain. You keep sliding. The ball has stopped and gets further away as you keep going down the slope. There is a pleasant sensation of weightlessness.

You clamber to your feet, scuttle back to the ball and lob it in. The batsmen have run two. Nobody is quite certain what has happened. Because of the slope, they can't see you. You are believed but that's not really the point: you have just pulled off the greatest piece of ground fielding of your life and nobody saw it.

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I'm not ready to retire, even if my body is

Redemption, fate and hope are words that swirl around in the mind as the dreaded day looms closer

Jonathan Wilson

04-Jun-2016

Because you've been ill and haven't been to the gym in ages, you don't cancel your training session the day before you go on tour. This is a terrible mistake. You are erratic in the first game, struggling with your run-up, but get a questionable lbw with a flatter, quicker one. You are not bad enough to prevent a victory by three runs.

The pitch for the second game features a significant right-to-left slope as you bowl. It's the penultimate Saturday of the football season. Sunderland are down 1-2 against Chelsea when you go out to field. You tell yourself you'd willingly bowl abysmally if Sunderland come back to win.

Your run-up disintegrates entirely. Your first over is abysmal. Your second is better, and from the second-last ball, you dive to your right and deflect a crisp straight drive onto the stumps, running out the non-striker. You are not sure how deliberate it was but you claim it. Your third over is good and you get another lbw with a ball that drifts in and straightens down the hill. You go to pot after that but are not bad enough to prevent a win by 25 runs. Sunderland have implausibly scored twice in three minutes to win 3-2.

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The ball you're always trying to bowl

When your shoulder is sore, your shin protests, you feel like death, and you play cricket - hoping to produce the devastating dipper you long for

Jonathan Wilson

01-May-2016

Your tour of Sri Lanka was chastening. You come back early to try to protect a job that you end up losing anyway. You are beset by an irritating background illness that you fear may be serious. You keep going to the gym but you know you're not performing as well as you ought to be. You wonder, again, about retirement.

The first fixture of the season creeps up on you, first slowly and then in a rush. Suddenly there are only two weeks left. You get up at dawn and drag yourself to the nets so there'll be nobody else there. You bowl 200 balls at your rucksack. A lone Labrador goes mad watching you, hurling itself with apparent glee into the outside of the net every time you bowl. It comes out OK.

The change you made to your run-up last season seems to have reduced the tendency to drift down leg. You proudly map your progress in footmarks on the dewy astro.

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England lost? No worries

Can a lifelong supporter of written-off teams handle seismic victories?

Jonathan Wilson

04-Apr-2016

I did want them to win it but, in all honesty, it wouldn't have felt right if England had won the World T20. It didn't feel right even that they were in the final.

Even putting aside all the arguments about franchises and structures and bouncy castles and cheerleaders and other peripheral nonsense, and why England lag behind the rest of the world, it didn't feel right.

It didn't feel right on a visceral level. As a Sunderland fan and reluctant Englishman (my great-great grandparents were a diverse bunch who wound up on Wearside or Teesside in the late 19th century in, with what now looks like bleak historical irony, a quest for work, I could have been blessed with the lyrical melancholy of the Irish, the wry pragmatism of the Scots, the persistent irritation with Marc Wilmots of the Belgians, but instead got the post-imperial self-loathing of the English), I'm not sure any team I support belongs in a final.

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Pre-qualifiers are good, but the structure could do with a tweak

Having a qualifying round in the World T20 is not a bad idea, but it wouldn't hurt to have two more sides go through to join the top eight

Jonathan Wilson

13-Mar-2016

I'm writing this with Zimbabwe v Afghanistan on in the background. The stadium in Nagpur is near empty, the pistol shot of Mohammad Shahzad's cut echoing in the sunshine. On the bench Mohammad Nabi nods cheerily in isolation. A man in sunglasses beats two clapper sticks together, and three more, faces diligently painted, brandish an Afghanistan flag, but around them are thousands of plastic seats in primary colours. It doesn't feel much like a World Cup, and that, perhaps, will be seen as vindication to arrange the World T20 as it is arranged. It shouldn't be.

Football has just elected a new FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, a key strut of whose campaign platform was increasing the World Cup from 32 to 40 teams. His main opponent, Sheikh Salman, offered only to make some European sides play playoffs against sides from other confederations to justify the fact that they have a disproportionate 14 slots at the tournament. That's disproportionate in that around a quarter of all European sides play at the World Cup; if you based the distribution of teams on either past performance or the FIFA rankings, there would be far more European sides.

The football World Cup is already bloated. What should be a glorious festival becomes an exhausting slog, for fans and journalists alike.

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Why do remorselessly excellent players get faint praise?

In cricket as in life, we favour sharp drama and narratives of redemption, doing the Stewarts and the Gooches of the world a disservice

Jonathan Wilson

13-Feb-2016

There is a drama that has recently been released on the BBC iPlayer about snooker in the early '80s and the defining rivalry between Alex Higgins and Steve Davis. It is simultaneously brilliant and awful, featuring some laughably bad dialogue but also a stunning recreation of Higgins's career-defining 69 break in the 1982 World Championship semi-final against Jimmy White.

For those of us of a certain age, it's a hugely evocative piece of work. It transported me back to my grandparents' living room, watching snooker on their huge TV, eating cheese Stottie sandwiches and wondering why they drank tea and not coffee.

As a piece of drama, though, it failed for, I think, two reasons. Higgins is the hero, fey, reckless and charming but drawn to drink and destruction. But his trajectory is too familiar: the arrival from nowhere to win the 1972 World Championship, the struggles, the redemption through marriage and a child to come back from the wilderness and regain his crown in 1982, followed by the descent through alcohol and abusiveness, his insistence he was "the People's Champion" becoming more and more empty until everything is lost.

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We won at the P Sara

The Authors notch up their second victory away from home, with a little help (sort of) from your correspondent

Jonathan Wilson

29-Jan-2016

It's all about the team.

That's the key thing to remember. It's all about the team. And we won a game. For only the second time ever overseas, the Authors won. Actually we won two games, although, for annoying work-related reasons I came home before the second one.

It was, in that sense, our most successful tour ever. We went to Sri Lanka, played five games in heat and humidity that felt ferocious but we were told was gentle, won two of them, acquitted ourselves honourably in the others. We continued our sponsorship of the gifted young Pathum Nissanka, who is now a Sri Lanka Under-19 batsman, and began sponsoring the enormously gifted Lihini Apsara, who plays for the women's U-19 side. We saw the pitch we provided for Amarasuriya College two years ago, gave them the proceeds of a quiz run in conjunction with The Nightwatchman to buy further equipment and then lost to both their present team and their Old Boys side. It's about more than the team: it's about the wider community of cricket.

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Talking shop with a pro

The perils of getting into a detailed discussion about your technique and game with an expert

Jonathan Wilson

21-Dec-2015

"If you can't turn it in Galle, you can't turn it anywhere," Vic Marks said, wisely.

I can't turn it anywhere. I know that. I don't try to. Turning the ball is dangerous. It goes all over the place. But that wasn't really the point. The point was that here I was, a couple of glasses of red into a newspaper's Christmas lunch, discussing the mechanics of my bowling action - or, perhaps more accurately, my "bowling" "action" - with a former England spinner. Hilarious tales of abjection I might have got away with - anybody can laugh at failure - but this had got worryingly technical worryingly quickly. Genial as Marks is, this was excruciating, like a man discussing his rancid home brew with Jean-Charles Boisset.

This is a danger of media events: there are always talented people there. I still shudder with mortification at the thought of reeling up to Barry Davies at a book launch and launching into my full repertoire of Barry Davies impressions. "When will they learn, Barry? When?" He finished his pint and left.

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Why unfairness makes cricket special

It's the only sport that expects its athletes to perform feats they are bad at, and where the conditions can turn a match on its head. Let's not lose that

Jonathan Wilson

01-Dec-2015

I don't like change. I never have. If it was up to me, Ian Botham would permanently be taking his mullet for a charity walk, Manchester United would be underperforming with predictable inconsistency under a manager who spent more time on the sunbed than the training pitch, and David Taylor would still be snooker's world No. 16.

I just about acknowledge the ageing process as inevitable, but sport ideally should be reproducing the storylines of the mid-eighties. Richard Ellison should be winning Ashes Tests single-handed; Vasily Rats should be belting 25-yard drives into Mexican nets; Sandy Lyle should be fluffing chips, beating his head on the ground and then winning the Open.

There's a short story written jointly by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares that imagines a world in which sport has been abolished and replaced by radio commentators reading out scripts. The older I've got, the more sensible this seems. Imagine the sense of well-being of getting up in the morning to find out what's happening in the Test in Adelaide.

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