Cricket Described

All things must end. The over. The spell. The session. The day. The match. The series. The rivalry. The career. Cricket is a series of small beginnings and endings, linking into a chain of greater ones, moving with a gentle inevitability. Tied inexorably together, across the seasons, the eras, entwined with the history of cricket itself, they form the almost endless, intoxicating tales of the game we love. They splash colour, context and layers that draw us in. The arc of a team, of the individual career, can follow us like a shadow, weaving itself into the fabric of our own lives. So when they’re gone, it isn’t just that player that’s forever changed, but us too.

Each year has its own finality. Yet 2024 felt bigger than usual. Not just the headlines: the icons and legends. But smaller, less known finishes. The finality, the loss that’s felt, touches the onlookers and protagonists alike. Each impact felt, relative to your distance from it. Even if the worlds either side of the boundary orbit far from each other, the gap feels barely there when we watch, listen and read of their deeds. The most elemental magic of the game, and its most vital moments, write us into that story, however small our part. 

James Anderson was the shadow cast over the summer of English cricket. For the red ball followers, it felt the biggest hole imaginable. A chasm. The James Anderson Canyon: yawning depths beside the broadness of ‘Broad’, the valley over from Cook Crevasse. England landmarks already of the past. Casting back to that unreal mid-May week, there it was: like a grey cloud over the first weekend of the summer. Even now, the nation is not entirely ready to accede. He could still do a job in Brisbane, some say. Unbelievably, Nasser Hussain was his first Test captain, borne from another era altogether. Yet it felt like Anderson had always been there. Stood at the top of his mark. A metronomic, reliable, comforting vision. It’s ok, the world is going to hell, but here’s James Anderson from the Nursery End. All is well. But no longer. What happens now?

To countenance that end is to have to accept it, and to accept a change in ourselves, too. Ten months on there’s still a ripple of that shock on the surface, like the echo of a detonation of something. However ephemeral sport can feel, it often reflects something deeper in us too, even if we may not want to admit it. And it is grief. It comes in many guises. When the greats go, or when the promise in a career is snuffed out, something tangible is lost. Less solid than the constant numbers or the highlight reels. With Anderson, it’s the realisation that he will never run up to bowl in an England shirt again. Final chapters await tantalisingly with Lancashire this summer, but when a person so constant is written out of the main plotline, the story is forever changed.

The path through the void it leaves is not easily plotted. As the years advance, all of this feels more telling, more introspective, more unsettling. Parenthood teaches us about renewal, and you start to look back as much as forward. Careers are suddenly referred to in the past tense, already a memory. As we confront the harder losses in our own lives, we are reminded that nothing is permanent. That losses bleed into each other, our own mortality reflected back in the mirror. Anderson will be around for many years yet, we hope, blossoming into his own post-career life – hopefully more Ponting than Pietersen – but things will never be the same again.

Smaller shockwaves cracked through the year, too. The marks they leave occupy different spaces, but that absence is still there, to those that care for what they meant. Liam Norwell, Warwickshire’s hero, immortalised in 2023’s 9 for 62, the saviour from relegation. A player whose injuries robbed him of a different, brighter ending. Or Michael Burgess, another Edgbaston stalwart, leaving the game way too early at 30. The names may not be familiar, but to those at the county, it will have felt the cruellest of weeks, as they both exited a day apart. Lesser stories fade faster than the greats. Sport carries on, but life is very different on the outside of the oval. The game moves on quickly. But the chronicles of the states, counties, clubs and regions are often the oldest of them all.

David Warner was no such local legend. 2024 was the end of a protracted and at times performative swansong, as he waved goodbye over the first half of the year. In true Warner style, even then teasing he was still available, not quite ready to fully accept reality, perhaps. For all the world-beating averages at home, he flourished in many places, just as he struggled elsewhere, too, particularly India. In England, he’d met some of his most storied opponents. North of the English Channel, the elbows and blond hair of he who shall not be named felt he had Warner on a perpetual string, darting around the wicket again and again. Seventeen times is an all-time bunny to match Atherton and McGrath, but Warner, like the Lancastrian England captain too, was so much more than just that duel. 

A stellar, all-format career that will always divide – based on your location, or maybe the view of 2018’s messy descent of the Australian team – he was a player that transformed what a Test opener was. He wrote his own headlines and the Australian delight was matched by misery abroad. Off the back page now, it will be an adjustment of his own to wrestle with. Last seen raging against the dying of the light in the less venerable surroundings of Dubai this year, the SCG, it isn’t. His chequered story has years to run, back at Lords this summer, even as Australian cricket mulls over his shiny new replacements. From that farewell, young upstart Sam Konstas’ path stretches out into the future like the yellow brick road, bends and pitfalls at every turn.

Ravichandran Ashwin’s exit was as foreshadowed as it was untimely. The spinning sage feels a huge loss to the game as much as he is to the Indian team; a man who thought endlessly about the game, his art of spin, and how he could move it forward. So often cast aside by management who perplexingly saw a place for only one main spinner in their team, as every other country’s fans wished they could have him for their own. He is another whose statistics – that cold, unfeeling record of every player that cares not for memories or feelings – are both impressive and yet leave so much on the strip. More wickets were there, more bewildering spells, all with that smile and lightness that endeared him to many beyond the burning intensity of India’s cricketing multiverse.

A unique proponent of the skill, he spun the ball in ways others could only imagine. Constant tweaks to his game – the run up, the wrist, the fingers – shifted the ground beneath his opponents’ feet. He must have been a glorious nightmare to contend with. One of the game’s great thinkers, he can now watch his thirtysomething compatriots toil on against the neverending tide of young Indian talent nipping at their heels, tilting at one last glory. For English fans there exists a particular pang of sadness, never to be soothed. For the England team, relief. Franchise cricket is his remaining stage, and surely more chapters to write in the yellow of CSK.

More tragic exits chequered the year too. They made us think again about careers, and that contrast of promise unfulfilled, lives shaded by hardships. The sliding doors of success and failure. The forks in the road. Will Puckovski was an Australian superstar in the making, who suffered the growing effects of many concussions so greatly he finally retired in the summer of last year. His arc was one of hopes repeatedly dashed. Even when the outcome felt inevitable, blind faith was clung onto, right up until there was no way back. It’s why comebacks and second stages of careers evoke such emotion: the end is pushed back, at least for now. Sport is forever built on the warmth of the most human stories. But happy endings do not belong to everyone.

A teenage debutant for Victoria averaging 45 in the Sheffield Shield, he’d almost made his debut in 2019. His lone Test, two years on at the SCG, was still at the point that alternate futures felt possible. Despite struggling with concussion since his teens, the 62 in his opening innings brought with it such promise. As each further break from the game arrived, the parallel timeline of a 50-cap starlet hung in the air with true melancholy. Sport is a cruel business, but there’s a different anguish to a career that promised so much but ended too soon. 

Josh Baker and Graham Thorpe’s tragedies hit hardest of all, bringing with them introspection and true, untainted grief. Baker was a rising star for Worcestershire in England. A slow left-armer who could bat who made his debut at eighteen, he was weeks into a new three-year contract and a bright future, when he collapsed and died from an undiagnosed heart defect. His 70 wickets in the professional ranks frozen in time, an unwanted memorial to a county that spent its season mourning, his number 33 on their backs for the rest of that summer. The doors that abruptly close feel some of the saddest we remember.

With Thorpe, it seemed unfathomable that one of the game’s toughest players could have suffered so much and ended his own life so tragically. If Warne’s loss was the biggest for the Australian cricketing public, then for many around that age, this was the English echo of that. In the 90s and into the 2000s, Thorpe seemed at the centre of so many good things in a thankless period for the most fragile of Test sides. In another era he could well have been 30 Tests and thousands of runs further on than he was, yet he was destined to wade through losses, fighting for draws when many offered so much less resistance. Averaging a scarcely believable 44 against all-time attacks, spin or pace, was the height of skill. To Surrey fans, he was a hero: a player of class, with his own economic, effective style, never more thrilling than his pull on one foot, or his off drive, on the walk. He is missed so dearly.

That he suffered so harshly with depression, and seemed to have so little support for it, clangs with a dull note in an era now where so much more care for players exists. It’s naive to expect him to have led a different life were he born two decades later – depression cares little for circumstance – but the loss that’s felt, the tears shed when the worst is confirmed, truly sting. The honesty and love his family still held in the middle of that desolate period give us all cause for thought. Tell the people you love how much they mean to you, for it is the most important thing we can give to each other.

The years turn. English cricket seasons spark in the cold green of April, and fade in the golden sun of September. Bat hits ball across the hemispheres. We are reminded how sport often echoes the grander narratives. We age, and we see what we thought was here forever, leave us in ways that we expect and shock us in ways we don’t.  Cricket has been the backdrop to so many lives. Its many events, moments, and plotlines; the highs and lows mirroring our own. It marks the passing of the years, both in joy and sadness. We hope for the former and fear for the latter.

The endings we see, the bookends of a career fulfilled, or cut cruelly short, never seem to feel easier. Never so hard as the wartime periods, those generational tragedies that robbed so much more than cricket. Each year, we drift in parallel to those hazy summers and damp winters, counting them off as we go, our lives knitting together with players’ as we celebrate their wins and losses and consider our own. When things end, it brings a finality for us all to deal with, from the softer blows to the most painful of all. There are few things in sport as exciting as the start of something: that glow of promise, the shiny new name and the rush of potential. And fewer still as difficult as the closures, and our coming to terms with things we wish were any other reality. Cricket teaches us more about the human condition than we realise.

Life is a series of arrivals and departures. And the endings in cricket will always make us think about what we have lost, and what comes next. But there’s always hope: new beginnings, new stories. A new season is coming soon to refresh us all.