Being Outside Cricket

Not really an Ashes preview, but I thought it was as good a time as any to pick up the keyboard.

It’s the Ashes Down Under. The pinnacle of the game in my eyes. The ultimate location for the oldest test contest. The one that brought the mysticism of Radio 3 coverage, the “how did they get the highlights from Australia to England in that short a time” wonderment (I was a kid, I didn’t know about satellites) and being concerned that neither Hobart or Darwin got a test match when all the other state capitals did, and Melbourne twice in 1978/9. The memories of watching the first live coverage – no, not Sky in 1990, but BBC in 1983 – from the warmth of home and that decision against England when Mel Johnson blatantly cheated in not giving John Dyson out.

These memories are lost in time, like tears in rain. To quote Rutger Hauer. What do we have now? A farce within a charade within a comedy. An England team turning up, playing one practice match against themselves, and then straight into the first test. I seriously do not care if they somehow get it right on the night. This is bizarre stuff. You can give me all the assurances under the sun that you are taking this seriously, but that doesn’t exactly ring true. Hope is not a strategy.

For the first time since the Ashes were fully televised live I will not be able to watch. I don’t have TNT or Discovery + or whatever, and have no intention of getting it. Sky Sports is so infrequently switched on in my house it actually makes no sense keeping that. It’s not that I’m not interested in cricket, far from it, it is just that I am not THAT interested. I have had practice of following other series on text or maybe the radio, so not that arsed to see it. This isn’t just for cricket, but pretty much all sport these days. I was a total sports nut, now, although still of interest, I just can’t raise the enthusiasm any more.

A dozen years ago we were setting out on the test series that changed my life, and I never left my home to watch it. In fact, I really couldn’t watch us get annihilated. I think the most I got out of that actual series was liking one of the songs used in a montage. What happened after, well, the impacts are still being felt by me on a personal level even now. Even after a long time out of the cricket blogging game.

There is a lot about How Did We Lose In Adelaide and Being Outside Cricket of which I am immensely proud. I stood up for a lot of people, and realised I wasn’t alone in the way I felt about how cricket was run and the scapegoating of Pietersen after a diabolical tour. I don’t regret feeling the way I did, even though KP has been a less than sympathetic “hero” since that day. Indeed, another crass tweet which had the unfortunate problem of being true confirmed this. The establishment pulled in favour of the nice boy, and not the temperamental one. It promoted the posh figure and demonised the ostracised. It turned cricket supporters against each other. It put me on the path to mental gymnastics that I could not fathom. I’m paying for it now. One of the contributors if not the cause.

When I think of what went on, it seems mad. Like being woken up at 8am on a Sunday morning by a DM from Jonathan Agnew saying “Ha! You missed that didn’t you…”. Like one prominent journalist asking for a meet up, and for me to name the location, and I couldn’t be 100% sure if it wouldn’t involve violence. Like another meeting me for a drink and saying “I don’t know why you let Pam Nash bother you. No-one who matters reads her. They read you.” The interactions with clowns like Andy Bull, Russell Jackson, the chap from Liverpool Echo, Harry Gurney (now that was a man with an outsized opinion of his own genius), Derek Pringle and more besides. The mystery blocking by Simon Wilde. The friends on the up and then turned on you when you weren’t looking which included a lot of those who took the instruction to “move on” when told, lest it disrupt their ability to make money out of the game. Revolutions that lasted as long as their attention spans, and who were about a quarter as funny or perceptive as they thought they were. Their little clique, where we weren’t so much a noisy neighbour, as the nuisances to tell them they were who we knew they were.

I am ashamed of a lot I did. People who know me will tell you I am an introvert, someone who doesn’t like people feeling bad vibes towards me. For me to invite the attacks was massively out of character and the attention I got was as powerful a narcotic as any cigarette or alcohol. I wanted the anger to fire my anger, because my writing was better as a result. But did I need to be so bloody arrogant? So off with people? So trenchant. Nice pieces, things I genuinely loved about the game, never resonated. My rage machine did. I was, even I confess, a really good angry writer. I am a pretty decent emotional writer. When neither matter, I am ordinary. The fact is, I’m bluffing now. Although I love to write, I don’t and never have, thought I am any good. Other people tell me I am.

What I suspected at the time, and which has been confirmed, certainly post-pandemic, is I have mental health issues. I suffered a breakdown during covid, and since then I have had bouts of chronic and serious anxiety. It is a terrible feeling knowing that unless a miracle occurs I will never be able to go to a test match in England again – it was hard enough going to a county game last summer. I am terrified of crowds. Of Waterloo Station. Of people bumping in to me. Of queues. Of people. That means I just can’t face a test match, nor the airport for a tour if I could afford it. It’s absolutely crippling, and I hope solvable, but the issues have been with me for a long time now.

What I recognise now from the post Ashes in 2014 was a mania borne out of anger, and I was out of control. I knew that this wasn’t me, but the focus I put on it turned me into a character that I wasn’t. The amount of people who looked at the actions through their prism telling me I wanted attention, I wanted to be a journalist, I wanted fame, were so wrong. I wanted attention from my crowd, no-one else. I never wanted a job in cricket, and as most of the snipers appeared to want to be in the game they couldn’t understand why I was doing what I was doing. As for fame, Lawrence Booth will tell you how I had to be convinced to meet him, and he wasn’t what he expected. That first meeting with him terrified me. I’d been horrible to him, and he was kind to me. I felt worse than I expected. The same with Nick Hoult and Chris Stocks. Both really good company, both I had been rude to as a keyboard warrior.

I changed my writing as my interest in test cricket waned, and the Tom Harrison, Andrew Strauss and all the others revolution has put in place the utter fustercluck we have now. Test cricket is still the best form of the game, and it’s not even close, but T20 and its bastard offspring the Hundred have led pretty much where we thought they would. 50 over cricket is arguably in worse shape than tests. In ten years, tops, we’ll probably see next to no test cricket, and we’ve been so conditioned to the arguments that we probably won’t be bothered when it happens.

I went to non-league football. I persuaded myself I really cared about it, but then the club that I fell for stabbed me in the back. I deserved it, for being a sucker enough to believe them. With it friendships were shattered, the seven or eight of us who went with the club through a couple of turbulent seasons were cast aside. The board has since been replaced with a soulless entity that has no clue what that club meant. While I had moved away, I still went up to see them, but when I was told to leave in October 2024 (or get a thump, if I didn’t), I saw two things. My angry writing (and believe me, it was toned down compared to before) still strikes nerves in a way I never understood, and that I can’t do that any more. I like my team down my way, but in the words of a song “I’ll never fall in love again” with something that can stab you in the back and the heart.

Which brings me back to the Ashes. A friend of mine is on the aeroplane out as I write to get his first taste of the Ashes in Australia. There are pangs of jealousy. I did that 20 years ago, and while the first trip was great, the second one was after both my parents passed away and I was a human wreckage. Then there is huge huge embarrassment. Even if I wanted to, even if I had the money, I could not do it. I could not get on the aeroplane, not because I am scared of flying, I am scared of the crowds at the gate. I would breathe faster. I would shake. I would shiver. I would get emotional. I would feel pain in the chest, nausea, stomach pain, ankle pain. Pure panic. It hinders my work, it hinders my recreation. If I don’t know where to park for a football match, I don’t go. I have become someone who can’t take advantage of what life has to bring.

Do England have a chance? Probably not. There is a lot of hopium about, but I don’t see it. Maybe the first test is a good opportunity, but there will still be four more. The bowling looks weak. Both in terms of recent performance (Gus Atkinson has to revert to mean) and in durability. Sure, Australia are down Cummins and Hazlewood, but they still have home advantage. The batting will do well for Australia, but there are too many question marks on this England team. I think it is more likely to be 5-0 than it is a 3-2 win to England, for example. We don’t play for draws, the weather probably won’t save us anywhere, and when the wheels fall off this England team, away from home, it becomes a procession. Especially in Australia. I hope I’m wrong, but hope is not a strategy.

The other stuff that surrounds it is dull to me. Malcolm Conn is still an irredeemable arse, and how British journos don’t just ostracise him, I will never know. It’s not an act. It’s the show. TNT’s coverage will probably be as awful as everybody else’s. The tests will probably last 4 days apiece, unless we make Australia bat again. We’ll see, as always, that we might be the whingeing Poms, but christ, it takes one to know one. They are still moaning about murray mints and ball changes. No, we aren’t moaning about a run-out. Without fail, Aussies seem to mention it first. No Australia, facts are facts. We may have been humped on out last three visits, but we have won an Ashes series overseas more recently than you have, But yes, you are a better cricket nation than us, which will always make us underdogs.

A mixture of me and cricket. Always what blogging was about. Deeply personal, life impacts, the pleasure, and there was some, and the pain. The pleasures have been working with Sean, Danny and Chris to make BOC required reading for a while, knowing it had a limited shelf life. The pleasures were the commenters, who saw what we were doing, who were fiercely protective of the “brand” and would provided a ferocious response to anyone brave enough to challenge us. You had to have your A game. Of course, this became “why would I bother with those idiots” in some quarters. We know. We saw you. We got to know what type of people you were. The pleasures were the camaraderie with certain bloggers and social media types. The pleasures were in watching test matches and knowing that this blog brought daily reports to you of them. Of our attempts to cover the women’s game. Of live blogging opening days of series. Of being a source of our views, that we knew resonated.

I am ashamed and proud at the same time. I know I did things I should not have, I know I was playing a role. I was scared and excited. I feared reaction, and yet needed it. All contradictions. If you asked me now would I have done it if I’d known what would happen? I honestly can’t answer that, but probably yes. Knowing that what praise we got was through gritted teeth, like getting pages in the Almanac. That was decent. I remember I pulled HDWLIA and was on the bus home when Lawrence DM’s me to ask me what the hell I was doing, as he’d just sent the Almanac to print, and we had a large part of the blog report. No word of a lie, I told him to delete it. He ignored me, but he did edit it! Because it mentioned that HDWLIA had gone. Crazy times. The shy attention seeker.

So it is time to sit back and watch the cricinfo score updates and see stupid stuff on Twitter. That’s the Ashes now. For me a sideshow. An outlier. A game that matters to someone who doesn’t. As the title of the song from the lyrics of this article bame goes, I am just spinning around. My head is all over the shop. Life is really nice outside of London, but the hubbub is not when I am in it. That’s where we are right now. If you are still excited I am truly envious of you. I wish I could care as much as that again. Maybe I will if it is close. But life is so different now, sport is so commercial and so not for me any more, that it just doesn’t seem likely.

Thanks for reading my self-indulgent claptrap. Be well everyone. I can be found on my various non-league blogs, a load of nonsense called Stuff, and on Twitter. Thanks to all. Not goodbye, but maybe more of see you if it gets better. The prospect of that is slimmer than my chances of getting back down to under 92kg (which I did 18 months ago).

Thanks.

Dmitri.