Month: January 2020

Lately I have been using the Calm app.

Six weeks ago, I would have told you it was millennial nonsense designed to keep people addicted to their phones and provide a false sense of accomplishment. But I would have been wrong. I use it every day — mostly for the guided meditations, which I find super helpful — but also for what are called Sleep Stories. Yes, they are bedroom stories for adults, that you listen to as you fall asleep. Ridiculous, I know.

But here’s the thing: they really work.

I have never been a great sleeper. I have struggled with it my entire adult life. I have both a difficult time getting to sleep, and a difficult time staying asleep. It’s been awful, especially over these last few years. Truly awful. I think I slept for a grand total of like 30 hours in June of 2018.

But with the Sleep Stories, I fall asleep literally within seconds. And while these last few days I have been waking up again in the middle of the night, that feels like a temporary setback. And when I do wake up at 3am, I just put another Sleep Story on, and do my best to drift back off again. I cannot recommend this app enough. It’s honestly the best app I have ever spent any money on.

Included in the Sleep Stories is one called ‘A Cure of Insomnia? Cricket Explained.’ Of course I rolled my eyes. “Typical American nonsense,” I sighed. “Cricket is NOT boring.” But then I thought that maybe it was just voiceover actor reading from the Laws of Cricket. I mean, I think we can all agree that with the right actor even the most diehard of cricket supporters would fall asleep to someone reading this out loud:

The pitch is a rectangular area of the ground 22 yards/20.12 m in length and 10 ft/3.05 m in width.  It is bounded at either end by the bowling creases and on either side by imaginary lines, one each side of the imaginary line joining the centres of the two middle stumps, each parallel to it and 5 ft/1.52 m from it.  If the pitch is next to an artificial pitch which is closer than 5 ft/1.52 m from the middle stumps, the pitch on that side will extend only to the junction of the two surfaces.  See Laws 8.1 (Description, width and pitching), 8.4 (Junior cricket) and 7.2 (The bowling crease).

Right?

Then I saw that the voiceover actor was no slouch. In fact, it was BBC Test Match Special mainstay Henry Blofield. He had been covering cricket since early 60s, retiring at the age off 77 in 2017. Blofield lived and breathed cricket his entire life, eight decades worth. This wasn’t some American reading the Laws of Cricket, but a cricket head of state.

And so I listened to it. Not while trying to fall asleep, but on the elliptical machine at the gym, lest I fall asleep in the middle of it.

It was delightful.

It was great to hear old Blower’s voice again. He had obviously written the piece with an American audience in mind — he quoted some Americans (Bill Bryson, Groucho Marx) and their hackneyed opinions that the game was boring — and the lingo was all very much for beginners, but other than that it was great. He doesn’t just read the laws of cricket, but rather takes the listener to a match (along with Groucho) and talks about the experience and simulates wickets and runs in order to explain the rules. Near the end he just gives definitions of cricket’s most obscure terms, which is where even I started to drift off a little bit, despite the fact that I was on an exercise machine. He really transported the listener to another time and place, which all the Sleep Stories tend to do, and in that sense it was a very good one. And so it wasn’t the game itself that was putting listeners to sleep, but rather the style in which it was written. This made me feel better.

Furthermore, Blofield made a couple more arguments against the idea that cricket is boring. He said that like all sports — and all things everywhere for that matter — cricket is better enjoyed when you understand the rules, and very few people outside of the 12 Test playing nations (and even lots of people in those nations) understand the basic ins and outs. Honestly, it can take a lifetime to even scratch the surface of the game, which also adds to its intrigue for those of us lucky enough to know the basics.

But he also said that what Americans don’t understand is that cricket is not meant to be watched like other sports. You go to the game, you talk to the person next to you, and you drift off into your own head as the rhythm of the game happens in front of you.  And in that sense, it is also like the other hallmark of the Calm app: meditation.

I have been listening a lot to Alan Watts’ lectures, especially on the field of meditation, and throughout them I cannot help but think of the experience of watching a game of cricket, even on the television. Your mind wanders, you are free and open, focusing and not focusing at the same time. Watts talks about how in meditation you focus on the breathing because it’s something you can focus on that is not a concept, and that it is one of the few actions that is both voluntary and involuntary, therefore telling our brain how arbitrary the division between the two is.

None of this may resemble the cricket you know and love, the cricket of sixes and yorkers and boundary line catches, but when you step back and think about, it is. When you are watching this great old game, the pace of it — like your breathing — allows your mind to wander to other things, despite the fact that you are still somehow focused on the game. You are both there and not there. Aware and not aware.

We are all floating in a tremendous river and the river carries you along. Some of the people in the river are swimming against the current, but they are still being carried along. Others have learned that the art of the thing is to swim with it. You have to flow with the river. There is no other way. You can swim against it, and pretend not to be flowing with it. But you still flow with the river.

When we are watching cricket, we are flowing with the river, and I think that is something we can all agree on.

Today in Minnesota we all awoke to fresh snow. Not the pretty, fun kind, but the sloppy, icy, foggy, horrible kind. The weather has been unseasonably warm, which is fine — I will take 33 degrees F over negative 33 degrees F any day — but with the warmth comes the gray, at least on the really cold days we get blue sky and sun. This winter has been simply gray on gray. And it is only January. There is so much more winter to come. Blizzards, sub-zero cold and more blizzards are still on the horizon. I remember winters when it snowed in May.

But today I woke up to this email from the Sussex County Cricket Club:

80 days. Just 80 days until the County Championship is back.

I get that that is actually a long time — almost three months — but seeing that number in print gave me a bit of hope. For while I also get that April in England probably means bone chilling damp cold and wind, I can’t help but think of green and blue and short sleeves and summer, summer, summer. Oh, glorious summer.

There’s something to be said for living in a part of the world where there are seasons. Sure, days like today are rough. And everything is just more difficult. But it always feels like you have something to look forward to, especially in the winter. No matter what, there is change on the horizon. Even if your life feels like it is stuck in neutral and you are in a bottomless rut with no end in sight, you know in your heart that a change is going to come. No matter what. A change is going to come.

Little reminders like the email this morning on this dark January day are reminders not just of cricket, or the Championship, or the summer to come, but that time is moving on, the world is moving on, and we are moving right with it, God willing, we are moving with it. And with that moving comes time, distance, growth, healing. It also might bring new heartbreak, new loss, but on mornings like today, those feel far away. Right now all I can think of is summer, and hope for the good things that it might bring a long with all the change it is going to bring. Right now, today, the cricket fields are brown, white, cold, damp and empty. In 80 days they will be full of this great old game and the people who love it, basking in what is hopefully a warm spring sun, and a field of green, and a sky of blue.

There is always change. That is apparent every time a new season begins to loom on even the most distant of horizons. And that knowledge brings hope that our lives might change right along with it. And even if they don’t. Even if we remain in the rut we’ve been in for what seems like years because it has been years, then at least we know that soon there will be short sleeves and sun on shoulders, and the gray will break into blue, and the sounds of cricket will once again fill those empty fields.

Change is always coming.

 

 

 

It’s day three of the third Test between South Africa and England at Port Elizabeth. The match started in the middle of the night on my watch. That nothing time when it’s still the night before but also when it’s already the next morning. 3 a.m. or so. When the world still isn’t sure what it wants to be. Night still has it in its ceaseless grip, but there is already a disruption in the stillness of the hour previous that cannot help but speak of morning, Sometimes in this strange hour, I lie awake and take comfort in the fact that cricket is happening somewhere. Somewhere there is something as soft and light and perfect as people dressed in white playing a game on an expanse of green under a warm sun.

It was around three in the morning a few days when my dog got me out of bed. He hadn’t been feeling quite right: drinking too much water, not eating his food. And he had to get outside to take care of what was obviously an urgent need. I live in an apartment and I couldn’t fathom him having an accident on the landlord’s nice hardwood floors, so I got up and put long underwear on and a hat and a sweater and jeans and socks and boots and a winter jacket and I put his harness on him and hooked up his leash and told him he was a good boy and we went out the backdoor onto the porch where he would hang out with me in the summer as I read and down the backstairs into the alley and the snow was dirty and cold and the whole world was dark but there was a hint of traffic and we walked around the quiet block and he went to the bathroom the required amount of times and we hustled back inside and I gave him treats and told him he was a good boy again and stripped off my clothes and crawled back into the still warm bed. And then it was night again. And we slept.

**

My ex-wife and I had adopted Robbie in the fall of 2012. England were touring India. On Nov. 15 India battered their visitors and won by nine wickets. Eight days later England returned the favor, one-upping their hosts and winning by 10 wickets. Every England fan remembers that second game. After India put up a par score of 327 in their first innings, England came to bat just before lunch. And then Alistair Cook batted out the rest of the day. All while I slept. He was calm and patience. A captain. It took 134 deliveries for him to reach his half century. He gave England what they needed: time.

I remember waking up with the dog after Cook’s innings. A Sunday morning, 2012. It wasn’t 3 a.m. like last week, but a more reasonable hour, when night was all but gone, and the day was fully in charge. Robbie was young and full of life and everything seemed okay. I checked the Test score on my phone as he wandered his new yard in search of the smell that would give him impetus to go. I saw that Cook had batted all night. And I smiled.

That was more than seven years ago. So much has happened since. The England XI that day looked like this: Cook, Compton, Trott, Pietersen, Bairstow, Patel, Prior, Broad, Swann, Anderson and Panesar. On the other side India sported the likes of Gambhir and Sehwag and Yuvraj Singh and Dhoni and of course the great Tendulkar, still a full year away from retirement. Those teams are almost unrecognizable today, just seven short trips around the sun later. That’s how much change there has been in cricket. Which only hints at the amount of change in my life, in your life, in all our lives. In 2012 we had just reelected President Obama. Today we are two days away from President Trump completing three of his four years in the Oval Office.

Time. Change. Life.

Through it all, through everything, through divorce and hardship and new jobs and new presidents and retirements and World Cups and moves and sadness and joy — through it all, everything — Robbie has been there. Quiet, sweet Robbie. A stable rock in a sea of change. His calm eyes guiding me home to a place that was safe and okay.

**

On Sunday night around 10 p.m. Robbie came stumbling out of the back bedroom. We had been watching a movie. He was shaking and panting. He threw up. And he kept shaking and panting. It was snowing outside. There was a 24 hour emergency vet just down the street. My partner went down and cleaned the cold, white snow off of her car. I put on Robbie’s harness and connected his leash and told him that he was a good boy. There was still light in his eyes. He seemed to be excited to be going somewhere. We went out to the porch and down the stairs just like we had countless times in the last 18 months. I led him to my partner’s running car and opened the back door. But he was shaking too hard to get up onto the seat. So I picked him up and put him in the back and he turned around and lay down and felt almost immediately asleep.

I will spare you the detail. There was a gall stone, and a tear in his pancreas, and nodes in his stomach and bile in places where there shouldn’t be. He stayed the night at the vet’s, we went back to our apartment. In the morning my ex-wife went to see him. He was going in for his ultrasound soon. Shortly before noon my ex-wife called me and told me that we were going to have to put him down. I kicked a chair. And cried out in anger. It was not the reaction I expected. Anger. But that’s what it was.

I met her there. The vet led him into a little room with us and a blanket and a couch and we sat with him and told him that we loved him and he seemed confused and drugged up and he looked a thousand years old. We cried and wailed and questioned. When we were ready the vet came in. He had an IV in his little ankle. The vet game him a muscle relaxant and a tranquilizer and then a third shot that would be his last. She put a stethsocope to his heart, and a few seconds later he was gone. We said goodbye. And left him laying there. On the cold ground. Silenced. Just a shell growing quickly cold, his spirit releasing into the ether.

Dear, sweet Robbie. The only constant in a world of change. Gone forever. It was — and still is — an incomprehensible loss.

Today at Port Elizabeth, South Africa, at the bottom of the world, England trotted out a completely different XI players than they did against India in 2012. Except for one: Stuart Broad.

Through all of that change mentioned above, Robbie had been there, but now he is gone. But Broad is still here, a memory of a memory of a time gone by. When Robbie was young. When I was young. When the whole world was young.

My dog is gone, and I can’t believe it, and I miss him so much. But just like many other times in my life since 2007, I find a slight, almost imperceptible comfort in the sport of cricket. For while the whole world has changed — even Robbie, the one constant for the last seven years of upheaval, is gone — Stuart Broad is still there. Still steaming in, all blond and quick. Many sports have players playing today that also were playing in 2012, but how many are playing for the same team, in the same uniform? Stuart Broad is. Still running in for England, in the stark whites, taking wickets for his country. And that is one more reason why cricket rises to the top: the dominance of the international game means men and women wear the same kits, with the same teammates, in the same home grounds, for years. Sometimes decades. A part of sport that no longer exists.

I know it is silly — maybe even a little odd — to take comfort today in the fact that Stuart Broad is bowling for England in South Africa this weekend. But when loss hits home, you take comfort where you can find it. Life has been all change, but through it all, Broad has been there. And I will hang onto that for as long as I can. And I will remember Robbie circling his new backyard seven years ago last fall, and how the night before Cook had batted all night long, while Stuart Broad — 26 year old Stuart Broad already somehow a seasoned veteran — sat in the clubhouse in Mumbai, 2020 a million miles from his mind. The same Stuart Broad that is still there today, in his England whites, a static presence in a blanket of difference.

Cricket is the giving tree, always providing some new comfort, all we have to do is look. History and time march on, but cricket is always there, and sometimes the same players are there, too, despite all the change, all the loss, we can still tune into a Test match and remember that some things are the same, that some things haven’t changed. We take peace where we can find it, and today I am finding it in the 11 overs bowled by a young man who doesn’t even know my name, who has always been there, and might be there for just a little while longer.

Life is change. But not always. And Stuart Broad has reminded me of that.

God speed, Robbie. You were a king among dogs. You were the best of all of us. You taught me patience, and resilience, and that to forgive is to love. I miss you more than I will ever be able to say.

And God bless you, Stuart Broad, thanks for still being there under blue skies.

I have been playing the game Go a lot lately. My partner, Liz, picked up a board that a friend was giving away, we pulled it out, played for literally like 30 seconds, and I was hooked.

It’s an old game, and I like all things old. And it’s nearly limitless in its possibilities and its room for magic. 361 pieces, 361 spaces on the board to the play them. And you can play them anywhere, at any time. There are no rules like chess that dictate what pieces can play where and how and when, all the pieces are the same and they can all do anything. The games are long, building slowly over time, until territories quietly start to emerge from what looks like chaos. And the best players of the game are artists. They don’t just want to win, they want to create something beautiful.

All of this probably sounds familiar.

And so I have been eating and breathing the game for the last two weeks. It’s all quite similar to how I fell in love with cricket all those years ago — 13 this April, in fact — especially considering I am trying to kick an addiction again, just like I was in 2007.

To feed my cravings for all things Go, I have downloaded practice apps, and ebooks, and played countless games with Liz at home and in taprooms. I have subscribed to newsletters and followed Instagram accounts. And at some point I will summon the courage to attend the Minnesota Go Chapter’s open gaming afternoon at a bar in South Minneapolis.

And earlier this week, I watched a movie about the game called AlphaGo (available for free on YouTube here in the states, just be sure to turn the captions on, because there are no subtitles when people are speaking Korean). The movie is about a company called DeepMind who believe they have finally found the computer gaming holy grail: a system that could challenge the best players in the world at Go.

All those that came before failed. The game was too complex, and required a sense of style that computers just couldn’t replicate. The famous computers that played Kasparov and other chess masters merely had millions of different chess moves uploaded to their mainframe. This didn’t work in Go. The scenarios were just too numerous. But DeepMind had figured it out. Not by teaching the computer — AlphaGo — how to be great at the game, but by giving it the tools to teach itself. AI. Machine learning. Real science fiction stuff.

The company scheduled five matches between AlphaGo and the person widely seen as the best Go player in the world, Korean Lee Se-dol. Go aficionados were confident that a computer could never beat their beloved champion. But that’s just what it did. Besting him in game one, then playing one of the greatest Go moves of all time (“move 37”) to win game two, then winning again running away in game three. Lee Se-dol, however, made the greatest move of all time (move 78, aka the Hand of God) to win game four, before losing again in game five.

At first the reaction to AlphaGo’s dominance was the anticipated but unfounded fear about the rise of the robots, destroying humanity as we know it. But cooler heads prevailed. The doomsday folks were reminded that AlphaGo was a human endeavor, designed by humans, coded by humans. The algorithms that allowed it to learn how to play Go were written by people, not by robots. AlphaGo was humanity’s achievement, one that could save lives when the technology is applied to science or medicine, not the harbinger of a Matrix style apocalypse.

Instead, the general reaction was that Go had entered a new phase. Lee Se-dol was a 9 dan Go player, the highest achievable ranking. But AlphaGo played like a 10 dan, or an 11 dan. A player that other human players could emulate and therefore become better players. Lee Se-dol himself called his defeat a “win for humanity.” The biggest change in style invented by AlphaGo are what were called “slack moves.” Seemingly unnecessary and silly and bad moves that no human player of any caliber would ever make. But that’s because all AlphaGo cared about what was winning. It didn’t matter if it was by a half point or 40 points. It just wanted to win. And that drastically changed its style. The movie ends on a high note of human accomplishment, and the dawning of a new age for the 4,000 year old game. A narrator says that AlphaGo would define Go’s next thousand years, and he meant that in hopeful way.

Unfortunately, all that hopefulness appeared to be for naught, at least as far as Lee Se-dol is concerned. He retired from competitive Go matches last fall at only 36 years of age. He said that he was retiring because no matter how good at Go he got, the computer would only get better. It had been three years since his 4-1 defeat to AlphaGo, but in those three years the computer had only gotten better. In fact, DeepMind recently released AlphaGo Zero, a completely self taught machine that is even better at Go than its predecessor.

And so what is next for Go now that its greatest player has concluded that there is no hope for any human to ever beat the machines created by humans? The game is still wildly popular, and for many years to come it will be just fine. But slowly, and surely, as the machines suck the humanity — and therefore the art, and the poetry — from the game, the game will die. 4,000 years of Go could be erased within our grandchildren’s lifetimes. Is that the worst case scenario? Maybe. But it is hard to see it any other way. For one brief moment — move 78, the Hand of God move — humanity had a shot, and then it was snuffed out.

****

Cricket, too, is dying. We all know that. It’s slowly being driven into pulp by big money and corrupt leaders and a world that is simply moving on. But the good news is that it’s not where Go is. At least not yet. Sure, we have DRS and statsguru and computers crunching every number possible in order to give players and teams the slightest of advantages, but when the coin gets flipped, there is no computer on the other side of the bowler. It’s 22 humans — flawed, beautiful humans — battling it out on the pitch. You can deconstruct the game mathematically as long as you want, reproducing simulation after simulation, but no matter what it’s people who have to play the games. For now, that is heartening. For while cricket might slowly be drifting off to ashes and dust, it’s not there yet, thanks to one the thing trying to kill it: its humanity.

I know there are a lot of Go fans and players who wished they weren’t living in the age of AlphaGo. But as cricket fans we are currently doing that. So let’s enjoy it. Let’s mourn cricket when the machines take over, and when the game finally loses every last drop of its poetry, but until then, let us give praise and thanks for the 22 flawed humans that provide us daily with so much frustration, joy, heartache and awe at what we are all capable of. We humans, we impossible few, we broken, impossible few. Stardust somehow writing poems with bats of willow and balls of leather.

Joni Mitchell wrote her hit song “Big Yellow Taxi” while on vacation in Hawaii in 1970. She opened her hotel room curtains and saw the sea and the mountains but also a never ending parking lot. Hence the lyric, “they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.”

The song is, at its core, an environmental protest song, but it also has a personal side. Most famously this side can be found in the final verse, about a taxi taking her lover away from her. But the chorus that runs throughout the song can only be seen as personal, a lyrical moment we can all nod our heads and agree with, whether it’s a forest or a lover or an ocean or a home:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Till it’s gone

Don’t it always, indeed.

I first heard the song when I was in college on a Joni Mitchell live record which I listened to over and over again. A few years later on the drive back from my bachelor party with my brother and my friend Derek we were listening to the new — at the time — Counting Crows record, Hard Candy. The album is a wistful goodbye to times long gone. It opens with the lyrics:

On certain Sundays in November
When the weather bothers me
I empty drawers of other summers
Where my shadows used to be

And closes with:

Fly away to someone new

But it actually doesn’t close there. As my friend would point out, a cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” was a hidden track on the album. We didn’t listen to it that day, which is probably for the best, for while it was one of their biggest hits, it is incontestably one of the worst songs of the decade. But I digress.

On that car ride home from Mankato to Minneapolis, I felt the weight of change on my shoulders. To the point where it was almost giving me a panic attack. There was a pressure on my chest as the miles ticked by, spiraling me into melancholy. For once, for one of the rare times, not just for me, but for everyone, I knew what I’d had, and I knew it was going away, and that I was going to miss it. I knew what I’d had before it was gone. Life was changing, the world was moving on, and I had no choice but to go along with it. Let the waves carry me into the unknown black.

And then to paraphrase Charles Portis: time just got away from me. And so much else that I didn’t know I had left me, and left me forever. Or I left it. “We can miss anything” is something I say all the time. And it’s true. We don’t know what we’ve got, until it’s gone, and then we can’t get it back.

Cricket is different.

Today I read a great piece from Jonathan Liew in the Guardian about Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson.

There is, naturally, a slight risk of alarmism here. Test cricket is not going anywhere for now. But time – and television – eventually did for the music hall and one day it will come for Anderson and Broad too. Savour them, yes. But feel, too, the immenseness of what they will take with them: not just two battered bodies or a cluster of golden memories but very possibly a way of life.

In cricket, we know what we are losing. We know every time we watch a Test match, or listen to a first class match on the radio, we know that we are listening to something that is going to leave us, maybe even in our lifetimes. We know what we have, and we know what we are losing, and so we savor it as best we can. All of us do. And I have often thought that that is why cricket blogging is so important: we are bearing witness, we are writing cricket’s obituary, even as it still lives and breathes. We see it slipping away, and so we are writing about it, recording its last breaths, not just so people a hundred years from now will understand, but to give cricket — beautiful old cricket — the long, loving goodbye it so richly deserves.

And it’s another lesson from cricket for us all. At this moment — right now — we all have more than we will ever have again. All that is around us will one day go away. And if we can step back and see the last old masters plying their trade — in cricket or anywhere  —and realize how great it is, then maybe while we will still miss it when it’s gone, we will know what we have before it is. Which is a gift I think we would all accept. No matter how you feel about your life, you will miss these days. Savor them. For in that savoring, comes contentment, and from contentment comes happiness. For if we enjoy what we have before it goes, then we will have a chance to say goodbye, and when life changes, we won’t regret having missed what came before those changes.

I will be tuning in, and watching Broad and Anderson, bowl against time and aging, and I will recognize that they — and bowlers like them — are going away, probably forever. And we must all enjoy them for all that they are, before they disappear like steam into the dry winter air. We will miss them when they are gone. We will miss these days when they are gone. We know they are leaving. Cricket is no different than life, and we need to hear its lessons, and to find joy in the now, instead of always looking around the corner for what’s next.

Cricket is more than a game. If we let it, it can teach us so much. It can teach us how to say goodbye. It can teach us that life is fleeting. And it can teach us to savor the moments we have, for we will miss them all when they go.

Into each and every life some rain has got to fall
But too much of that stuff is fallin’ into mine
And into each heart some tears got to fall
And I know that someday that sun is bound to shine

A lot of the time, I don’t mind the rain. Sure, sometimes I have gotten caught out in it on long bike rides, and yeah that sucks. And other times whole weekends of outdoor fun have gotten washed away in days’ long rain. I remember an Art-A-Whirl a few years ago. It’s this two music and art festival in Northeast Minneapolis. All beer and bands and studios. It’s always a great time. It feels like a smaller, less corporate version of South by Southwest. But that one year it rained all weekend. And yeah, again, that sucked.

But most of the time I don’t mind it. I get really terrible sun guilt, and if it is sunny I feel like I need to be outside doing … something, anything. Even in the dead of winter. And if I’m not outside doing something I get all this anxiety. It’s truly awful. But if it is raining, then it’s okay if I just sit inside and read or watch cricket or read and watch cricket or whatever I want to do. I was an indoor kid growing up, and rain helps me feed that old beast now and again. And so a rainy day and a window and a mug of coffee with a little booze in it and a good book is just fine with me most of the time.

As cricket fans, though, we all know that rain is the devil. Nothing makes our heart sink like seeing a few drops of the nasty stuff start to spatter on players’ shoulders. Or when the camera pans up to the sky and it’s dark and menacing and awful. Or, the worst, when we tune into a match that we had been looking forward to, and we are greeted with this:

Makes my heart sink just looking at that.

Whole matches have been lost to rain. Whole series. One stands out, when England retained the Ashes in 2013:

To quote myself, as I am want to do:

after all of the press conferences, pre-match interviews, warm-up matches, predictions, and back page after page of punditry and statistical analyses and team selection dust ups and injuries … after months of anticipating… after everything … it’s over. Just like that. On a gloomy Monday afternoon in Manchester. With the covers on the pitch and the players in the clubhouse.

Cricket fans hate rain. It’s a cricket killer. It’s the old enemy. Before the corruption and the greed and The Hundred, there was rain. There has always been rain, and there always will be.

But.

Sometimes the clouds part. And the covers come off. And the umpires do a light reading and check the outfield and all looks good. And there’s a call for a restart in 25 minutes. And the sun comes out from behind a cloud and burns all the white and gray into blue and green. And the fans drift back to their seats. And the players trot out into the golden day. And it’s only one o’clock in the afternoon, and all that waits in front of us is more cricket. An endless sea of joy in this grand old game.

Are those afternoons made brighter, better, more enjoyable because of the rain storm? I will give that a hesitant yes. It’s easier to enjoy something when it’s been given back after you thought it was gone forever. And with cricket, we all know that the rain could come at any time, even in the UAE — just ask the American cricket team. Every game could see the covers come on at any moment. So it’s both a relief when the game comes back, and a reminder that nothing is guaranteed forever.

But what’s is guaranteed is that at some point the rain will stop, and the sky will clear, and the covers will come off. It was not sunny forever, and that’s how we know it won’t rain forever.

It’s another lesson cricket can teach us, if we simply let it:

The sun always shines again. Maybe not this afternoon, maybe not even tomorrow, but it will shine again. And there will be cricket. And there will be joy. Nothing in cricket — and nothing in life — is guaranteed … except that.

Sometimes, we turn the TV back on, and see this:

And those are the days we should cling to when the skies grow dark and the camera pans up to black and blue and the umpires look worried. Because the days above always come again. Always.

My skies are clearing, everyone.

But there’s one thing I know
The blues they send to meet me
Won’t defeat me, it won’t be long
Till happiness steps up to greet me

**

Side note: a huge thanks to Declaration Game — a great blog run by a cricket nut who knows and sees the game very well — for his kind words about this here site:

Quoting now:

I will end this round-up, in imitation of Wisden, with my nomination of the World’s Leading Cricket Blogger of the Year – aka the blogger whose output has given me most reading pleasure in these last twelve months. Limited Overs is the work of Matt Becker who, from his home in Minnesota, bridges the personal and the global meaning of cricket, with a tender mix of emotion, humour and sincerity.

It blows me away that people read this site at all. And it blows me away even more that people seem to like it. Seeing this yesterday was a real shot in the arm for me and my writing and this blog. I love writing here, and I don’t want that to ever stop, and kind words like this make it so much easier.

Thank you to everyone who reads, comments and retweets. Happy New Year.