Jonathan Wilson
An agony only cricket can create
No other game makes you crave updates, no matter how trivial, when you are denied live coverage
Jonathan Wilson
05-Nov-2015
I didn't, in all honesty, pay much attention to the second Test between Pakistan and England. I was trekking in the Simien Highlands in Ethiopia, where there was neither Wi-Fi nor a phone connection, and by the time I got back to Gonder and looked at my laptop, it was the fourth day and England were already two down and in deep trouble.
They had lost their fifth wicket by the time I went out the following day and my assumption was that the game was over. A few hours later, as I left a restaurant, I saw four kids playing on a dusty, pebble-strewn flat area, at either end of which were dilapidated goalposts.
But they weren't playing football. Rather one of them held a plastic water bottle and the other three took turns to lob a small stone at him, whereupon he'd hit it in the air and the others would try to catch it. The four came running over. One grabbed my hand. "Hundred birr," he pleaded. "Buy football."
Full postMy first five-for
It's rare when you're at a certain stage of life to do something for the first time, but it can happen
Jonathan Wilson
06-Oct-2015
Eventually you reach an age at which everything is about age, when you start to look back at what you have achieved rather than forward at
what you might achieve, when you're no longer straining for the summit but trying merely to delay the descent, knowing all the while that one false move could plunge you off the mountain altogether. It's rare then, as you skitter on the scree of mortality, to do something for the first time, but last month, I took my first ever five-for.
No longer are the best figures of my life the 4 for 22 I took bowling leggies for a house 2nd team on the rutted playing field beside the Deaf School in Newcastle in 1990 (two caught behind, one caught at point, one bowled with a full toss). They're now the 5 for 36 I took
bowling - bowling what, exactly? I'm not entirely sure: let's just say "slowly" - for the Authors against the Bodleian Library at Warborough
& Shillingford, a ground so picturesque that we were watched briefly by tourists from New Zealand on a Midsomer Murders tour.
Given I spend most of my life imagining I'm surrounded by the sort of brief player profile the BBC used to project in yellow italics around
cricketers in the eighties, this is a seismic change. I'm not sure it has fully sunk in yet, largely because it was so unexpected.
Full postThe travails of a middle-aged cricketer
When the bad days outnumber the good, and the aches and pains hasten your decline, you wonder if each game might be your last
Jonathan Wilson
30-Aug-2015
I was called "middle-aged" this week.
I am middle-aged, both temporally and temperamentally, so I can't really complain. (I'm 39 but suspect I haven't yet reached my natural age, the age I was born to be. I played earlier this summer for the Times Over-40s, qualifying on residency.) Still, there are certain truths it's better not to have thrust straight at you.
"How," she asked, "do you as a middle-class, middle-aged white male find covering women's sport?" I realise that could sound aggressive but it was a perfectly reasonable question in the context of our ongoing discussion. Still, it stung. Middle-aged? Me? What made it worse was that we'd just spent the day playing cricket for the same side. She'd seen me at my athletic best: swooping to my left to intercept a ball at short fine leg; a heroic slide and pick-up on a wet outfield to keep a possible two to a one; bowling five really quite sprightly overs.
Full postWhere were you when...
As Stuart Broad ripped through Australia, one writer found himself in an electronics store, surrounded by TVs, none showing the cricket
Jonathan Wilson
08-Aug-2015
You always remember where you were, and you're so rarely where you'd hope to have been, so rarely with others who care as you do. When seismic - to you - events occur, you're so rarely with those who share your devastation or exultation, so often surrounded by others eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
Given how much cricket I've watched over the past 30 years, both live and on television, the answer to the question where were you when… should be "sitting in front of the telly", or, perhaps more accurately, "sitting at my desk pretending to work near the telly". It never is.
Where were you when Steve Harmison bowled Michael Clarke with a slower ball? I was in a taxi leaving Wycombe v Carlisle with a Pakistani taxi driver who hated cricket.
Full postThe purity of make-believe childhood cricket
There was a certain honesty in matches we played against ourselves as kids, recording it all in scorebooks as we went along
Jonathan Wilson
13-Jul-2015
The more I think about it, the more I realise I was not a normal child (in truth, I'm probably not a normal adult either, which is why I spend so much time alone staring at rectangles). By chance the other day I saw a picture of the early '80s version of a game I once had, the one whose box featured David Gower leaning cheesily on Ian Botham holding aloft his Duncan Fearnley. I was transported immediately to my bedroom floor one Friday night, when I was, I suppose, about eight.
Some friends of my parents had come round with their two sons and I persuaded them to play Test Match. Other kids didn't come round much. Then, as now, I wasn't a huge fan of other people. That night - and this seems remarkable now - we didn't play against each other. Rather I had a number of series ongoing - usually between teams of animals, so the dogs, for instance, were captained by the uncompromising middle-order terrier Ian Yappell and the feline side by the portly and accident-prone biffer Mike Catting - and the other boys and I took roles in that: one player batted and the other two took it in turns to bowl overs at him until he was out, at which everybody shuffled round a place. I recorded everything meticulously in my scorebook - which, obviously, nobody else was allowed to touch.
Players didn't win or lose: they facilitated the playing out of the fortunes of completely imaginary teams. If ever there was a dispute as to whether somebody was out or not, it would be settled by a compromise that, in retrospect, seems ridiculous: out in real life, not out in the scorebook, so we'd all shuffle round while the imaginary batsman was reprieved and continued his knock.
Full postLong hop or peach?
A ball can be both; it all depends on how you look at it
Jonathan Wilson
23-Jun-2015
Something it took me a long time to understand about cricket was that almost everything is relative. It didn't seem to make sense to me that when a West Indies quick was bowling short, it was worthy of praise, even terror, and had batsmen hopping around, but when some English seamer did it, it was bad and tended to be beleaguered square of the wicket for four.
Part, of that, of course was the commentators' need for explanation. This is true across all sports: nothing can ever just be. If a bowler bowled a ball on middle and leg and the batsman missed it, he was getting due reward for aiming at the stumps: "You miss and I'll hit". But if it was worked into the leg side, the bowler was guilty of bowling "too straight". And of course if the batsman had missed it, he'd be guilty of having "played across the line", an offence I was aware was extremely grave long before I knew what it meant.
My great breakthrough in trying to comprehend football tactics was that, as the Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure observed of language, everything is dependent on something else. We can draw general rules because certain aspects tend to stay the same, but there are almost no absolutes. It's becoming increasingly clear that the same is true of cricket. A bad ball in one circumstance can be a good ball in another.
Full postThree drops. Should I worry?
Does confidence play a role in catching? Even if the statisticians say otherwise, it certainly feels like it does
Jonathan Wilson
11-May-2015
The batsman went back and cut the ball firmly. The trajectory was downward, but not downward enough. The ball was coming straight at me at backward point and it was going to carry. I stayed down, ready for what should have been a regulation catch. There was a line of dark trees beyond the boundary. As the ball passed across them, I lost sight of it. The next thing I knew it was crashing into my groin. Technically, it wasn't even a drop as I hadn't actually laid a hand on it. The batsman was out two balls later. The missed chance didn't bother me too much; I knew what had gone wrong, and while it was frustrating, it was at least explicable.
That was the first game of the Authors CC tour to Rome, which we lost by 30-odd runs to Campanelle. The next day we were back at the same ground, just off the Appian Way, for the main event, against the Vatican. Warming up, I dropped a simple catch up and to my left. It was a horrible drop, a snatch. A couple of minutes later, the batsman hitting catches for us top-edged the ball straight into the air. I rushed forward to try to take it, he shouted, and I slammed on the brakes as he smacked the ball straight at me from about four yards. Half-ducking, half-trying to catch it, I pulled off what would have been a remarkable reflex save had I been playing in goal, tipping the ball up over an imaginary crossbar as I flung myself backwards. But I didn't catch it.
The Vatican batted, and after 11 overs were 70 for 4. I was brought on to bowl my loopy offbreaks. My first ball was too straight and was worked into the leg side for two. The second ball dipped nicely and the batsman chipped the ball straight back to me. I took a simple catch: 72 for 5.
Full postWhen was the last good World Cup?
A six-week long tournament with a handful of tight finishes? Who can call that a success?
Jonathan Wilson
06-Apr-2015
The fault is probably mine. When you work in a sport, the tendency, perhaps, is to assume everybody is as wrapped up in it as you are; to believe your obsessive knowledge of the subject is normal. I think the football World Cup is too big and too bloated, that it would benefit from being scaled back with a more stringent qualification process, but I still watched every game it was possible to watch, made my notes and drew my conclusions. The cricket World Cup was rather different, and perhaps it's because of that it came as such a surprise to see it being so widely hailed as an overwhelming success.
The first I saw of the World Cup was Martin Guptill and Brendon McCullum laying into Nuwan Kulasekara and Lasith Malinga. It was 3am in Mumbai and I was struggling to adapt to the time difference. I was then struggling on a treadmill in the hotel gym as Steven Finn took the most pointless hat-trick in history against Australia. That was some Valentine's Day. I watched India v Pakistan on a big screen at a wedding where the lone Pakistani guest was mercilessly patronised.
Time passed.
Full postThe wicket I took on a Test ground
It only changed a nine-wicket defeat into an eight-wicket one but the memory will live forever
Jonathan Wilson
17-Mar-2015
I spent most of last week in bed, much of it with a temperature over 40, and while I'm on the mend now, for a couple of days I was very ill indeed. So ill that I could barely sit up, while my head was throbbing so much, my capacity to think so impaired, that I could do nothing much more than lie and whimper and stare at the ceiling.
Consciousness becomes a slippery beast in such circumstances: life becomes one long, disturbing nightmare. There was somebody called Bernard who kept trying to arrange things, and had a big blue circle with red and yellow markings to demonstrate what he wanted. Every time I had a flash of lucidity, I told myself Bernard didn't exist and that I was imagining him, and every time I drifted off, there he was again. What made it worse was that I was sure he was wrong.
For some reason Bernard disturbed me, so I began to try to focus on happier things, to force my brain along certain safe channels. The problem was that I couldn't really concentrate, so I'd be thinking about the outline of chapter five of my book on Argentinian football, or about the scene in Neighbours when Joe mistakenly thought Harold had made a move on Mrs Mangel, or about some ham I ate in Lisbon once, and there would be Bernard with his blue circle getting in the way. What I needed was something with a number of staging posts, so I could navigate from one to the next, pause, and start again. Which is probably why I ended up obsessing about the over.
Full postA trip down 2005 lane
There is nothing in sport quite as good as the realisation that the success you've almost written off as impossible is actually happening
Jonathan Wilson
01-Feb-2015
It's been hot in Bata this weekend, almost unbearably so, the humidity so intense that to step outside is to feel like you're being covered in a vast warm, wet blanket. A couple of nights ago I slept in what was effectively a squat. There was no lock on the door, no power, no water, no air-con, no Wi-Fi. There was graffiti on the walls, kids playing video games loudly, a stench of sour milk and mosquitoes everywhere. When I got up, having managed perhaps three hours' fevered, broken, uncomfortable sleep, it's fair to say I wasn't in the best of moods, even if I had dreamed Sunderland had beaten Manchester United thanks to a late winner from Dwight Yorke.
I walked to a local hotel, begged and badgered and eventually got a room, which was a huge relief given they've all been booked out for most of the Cup of Nations so far. I had a shower, which made me feel a little better, then two coffees and some toast, which made me feel a lot better, and then, having made my way to the stadium for the two Cup of Nations quarter-finals, found that somebody had tweeted a link to all 89 Australian wickets to fall during the 2005 Ashes. As squally showers strummed on the roof of the stadium and everybody tucked into cheese and ham sandwiches, that made me feel a whole lot perkier.
This was home and it was pleasingly familiar: Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones reverse-swinging it round corners, Steve Harmison's slower ball on the Saturday evening at Edgbaston, the run-outs, diving slip catch after diving slip catch. Inevitably, you remember where you were when each fell: at a wedding at Bamburgh Castle during the Lord's Test, at Wycombe v Carlisle and then on a train to Cardiff during Edgbaston, at a hotel near St Alban's waiting for England footballers on the final day at Old Trafford, at Trent Bridge for the whole of that Test, bar the five hours when I had to dash off to cover West Brom v Birmingham; pounding out mile after mile on a treadmill in the gym during the nervy denouement at The Oval.
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