Month: April 2021

In August of 2011 my wife and I attended a wedding in a small town in Wisconsin. The wedding party all stayed in this gorgeous old hotel overlooking Lake Superior. It was a perfect few days. All our friends together in one place for what turned out to the be last time. The weather was gorgeous. We ate, drank, hiked, slept late. We sat out on the balcony over looking the lake drinking beer and talking late into the night. We sang, we danced. And then on Sunday we got into our Subaru and drove the four hours home, through small town Wisconsin, an old friend in the backseat. We stopped only once. At a gas station somewhere. My friend got out and sat on a curb across the street and smoked a cigarette as I pumped gas. It was sunny and warm. We dropped him off at his mother’s house and we hugged goodbye.

That was four months after I started this blog. And right after everything just kind of fell apart.

And that’s the real story of this blog. Or, maybe, it’s the other story. That I started it in the middle of what for a long time I considered the best year I ever had. From the fall of 2010 until that wedding in August of 2011, it felt like everything in my life was clicking. And then after that, and since, I felt drifty, a little lost, like life is passing me by. And, I don’t know, not to be such a cliche, but just a little sad all the time. Some years are better than others, sure, but that weekend in Wisconsin truly marked, for me, the end of the one good year I got. The one good year in this whole mess of a life. And this blog started right in the middle of that year. Which at least partially explains why, now that I think about it, I keep coming back here, why I see it as a place of refuge, a place of hope. Because when I fired up this site on that morning 10 years ago now, my mind was at peace.

Looking back, it was not all wine and roses. There were moments in that year that were downright awful. Times of real pain, real heartache. real worry, real tension, real conflict. But for whatever reason I was able to focus on all the good happening around me. And while I tend to look back on days with rose tinted glasses, I don’t think I am doing that here. I was aware of how great those days were as they were happening. In the fall of 2010 at a party at our house I gave a toast and said out loud “these last six months have been our best six months.” And I knew at the time, after that wedding, or even during the same weekend, that it was coming to an end, that it was over. That the feeling of just being okay, of my mind clicking, of being able to just exist, and be all right. This week I marked the 10 year anniversary of this blog. In August I will mark 10 years of everything just feeling off. Of a life — my life — slowly collapsing. Like time is running out of me. Physically running out of me. And that it is taking the joy with it. 10 years. 700+ posts. Tens of thousands of page views. And so much sadness.

**

Running alongside me, during that year, was of course the game of cricket. The weekend in Wisconsin was happening during the fourth and final Test between India and hosts England. On August the 22nd, the day after we drove home, England finished off the four Test sweep. The rain soaked Test saw England win the toss and choose to bat and then score 591 runs (Ian Bell scored 235 of those) before declaring. England restricted the visitors to 300 in their first innings, forcing the follow on and then winning by an innings and eight runs. Dravid scored 146 not out in a losing effort in his first innings. Graeme Swann took 6/106 in India’s second innings. Strauss captained England, Dhoni captained India.

In April of 2011, when I started this blog, India had just hosted and won the 2011 World Cup. After the disaster that was 2007, this iteration saw life return to the one day game. Yuvraj Singh was the man of the tournament. Kevin O’Brien embarrassed England with one of the most aggressive displays of batting ever seen. 997 million people watched the final, which India won with just 10 balls remaining, thanks to the aforementioned Dhoni and his unbeaten 91 off of 79 deliveries. One of the great captain’s innings of all time.

The year started in September. With Ireland visiting Zimbabwe and losing two of the three ODIs played. The hosts wouldn’t win another ODI series until 2017, and wouldn’t win one at home until 2019.

Much has changed for all mentioned here. Zimbabwe have been lost in a sea of corruption and poor results. Most of the members of those England and India teams have retired. The names like a who’s who of cricketers from days gone by: Tendulkar, Dhoni, Dravid, Sehwag. Swann, Cook, Prior, Onions. Though the India squad also featured a young Virat Kohli who replaced an injured Yuvraj Singh for the third and fourth Tests. And the England squad was filled with players still out there today.

Sadly, and all jokes aside, the 2011 World Cup feels a long way from what is happening today in India. The country is being ravaged by the Coronavirus. And it appears like it is going to get a whole lot worse before it starts to get better. It comes from a place of privilege, but I can’t force myself to look at the pictures of what is happening there. I just want to look away. The whole world feels different. Mass graves. Funeral pyres. People dying in hospital hallways. 2011 doesn’t feel like 10 years ago. It feels like a million light years away. It breaks my heart. I hate saying things like that, since it feels so hollow. Real people are dying, real people are mourning, everyone is scared. But here in Minnesota, on this cloudy Sunday morning, my heart just aches for India, and thinking of the 2011 World Cup win just solidifies how much worse off we all are today. Ten years on.

**

This is the story of this blog. And this is the story I want to write. My life running alongside cricket. Cricket running alongside the world. Two recent posts ended with more or less the same sentence, describing the same idea: cricket counting the days, and urging us to keep up. It’s not metaphor, it truly is doing that. For me, in my life, and for all of us, even those people who don’t even know it. That’s the story of this blog. And that’s the story I want to write.

12 days ago this blog had its ten year anniversary.

10 years.

And I missed it.

I knew it was coming, and I had planned to post that day, but it slipped my mind and now it’s 12 days later. That about sums up how much effort I have put into this site over the last few months: vague plans followed by zero action.

10 years. 700 posts. Tens of thousands of page views (most of them on my post about how to cancel Willow TV. Thanks, Google.) Four mentions in Wisden (thanks, Brian). A mention in the Times of India. A retweet from Harsha Bhogle. Two dead dogs. A divorce. And here we are.

I started the blog on a spring morning right after the 2011 World Cup from my desk at work. It was a sunny, green morning. I had a window that looked into the backyards of suburban homes. Ducks would rest under the pine trees in the shade. An old retiree pulled weeds and mowed his lawn. The job I had at the time was terrible, but I miss it, I miss those mornings, those times, writing here. You can miss anything is something I say all the time. And it might be the only real truth that truly exists when it comes to being human.

In 2011 I had been a cricket fan for four years. It was only six years removed from the 2005 Ashes. Now it is ten years ago. A hair shy of a quarter of my life gone in the snap of fingers. Bam. Just like that.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. This is still a place that I am quite proud of.

*

To say that the game of cricket has changed over the last 10 years would be both an understatement and an overstatement. In 2011 the structures for what the game is now were firmly in place. The Twenty20 was king. The IPL was bullying the fixture calendar. If this blog had started just two or three years earlier, then the emergence of those two things would be the story here. But that’s not the case. Instead the last 10 years is really just the slow march of time, with the T20 and the IPL steamrolling everything in their paths. So what have I been writing about these last years?

There’s what happened in America, with the death of USACA and the growth of the game and the competitiveness of the international team. There’s the new Test Championship. And the last Champions Trophy. There’s Ireland and Afghanistan gaining Test status. There’s India, Australia and England muscling their way into almost total control of the global game. There was and is corruption at every single level of the game.

Sachin hit his 100th 100.

Sachin retired.

Test cricket had its 1000th match.

Ben Stokes happened. Virat Kohli took over the world. There was ball tampering and spot fixing. There was the year that saw two Ashes tournaments. Australia won a World Cup. England won a World Cup. Test cricket died, was resurrected, and died again, several times over. I saw kids playing cricket on a baseball field near my old house. A pandemic shut down the game completely at every level including even street cricket. The women’s game grew in leaps and bounds.

And gosh it feels like so much more must have happened. But right now it’s a blur. All that cricket, all those years, and now it’s like it never even happened.

Except it did. All that cricket. All that marvelous cricket.

And that is the real story of the last 10 years. Not the corruption or slow strangling of the first class game. Or The Hundred or World Cups decided on silly tiebreakers. But the game itself. And the people who played it. Men, women, children and everyone in between. From stadiums to beaches to alleyways to the park near my old house. People got up in the morning, walked outside, and played cricket. And some of us were lucky enough to get to watch the best of these cricketers perform, whether leaned up against a tree in a park, or sat in the luxury box of a stadium, or on our phones in bed in the morning before even first light.

There was just so much cricket that happened. Countless — truly countless — deliveries and overs and wickets and runs. The game has its problems, but the game is soldiering on, and these last 10 years of the game has proven that over and over and over again. People keep playing cricket, and people keep watching cricket. That’s the story here. The game continues to be declared dead, extinct, obsolete, but then it just keeps getting up off the mat. The last 10 years have seen the world change in ways we never could have expected. And sport has changed so drastically it’s almost unrecognizable. And cricket has morphed into the game it was primed to be in 2011. But through it all, through everything, the game just keeps going.

That’s the story of the last decade. It’s an optimistic tone that I didn’t expect to be able to muster when I started this post. But here we are. And here we will continue to be. Cricket marches on, and we are lucky enough to be here watching as it does.

Oh, cricket is dead? Try again, pal.

Is it sick? Sure. But everything feels sick now. The world and the sports played in it are going through massive sea changes, but it’s nothing we can’t handle, and it’s nothing cricket can’t handle. A Super League is going to destroy soccer? Wimps. Cricket has had a Super League for 150 years and is doing just fine, thanks.

10 years later. And cricket is still on in the background as I type this. And it’s great. I love it. I still love it. Every ball.

And that right there, now that I think of it, is the story of the last 10 years, and of this blog. The one constant theme that runs through every word typed. It’s about a love affair for a game. As I scroll through posts from the last decade that’s so evident it’s like I am hitting readers over the head with it. The game thrilled me in 2011, and continues to thrill me every single day.

I love cricket. And I hope to be saying that in another 10 years. Right here. God willing.