Hey there! Here are some of my favorite recent posts. Please contact me with any thoughts or questions at matthew.becker@gmail.com.
1.
Walk me out into the rain and snow
Excerpt: This is the power of sport. To pick us up and place us down somewhere else. There are days when I think of it as a gift. And there are days when I do not. But it brings memories like cannon fire, because those losses are always in the fall, when all we know is loss and decay, when we cannot see the green that will come, cannot even imagine it. We grieve collectively, always, all the time. And then we move on. We look out the window, and wait for spring.
2.
I want to write my words on the face of today
Excerpt: And that I will hear the lesson that cricket is so desperately trying to teach us: that nothing is forever. Not even sadness. One day you will look up and it will be mid-afternoon and Chris Woakes and Jos Buttler will have batted you back into the game, seemingly out of nowhere. If God forbid I am ever out walking at dawn again some day, so close to the edge that I can smell the river below, I want to remember that. Woakes and Buttler batting in the long shadows, reminding everyone that things can get better. Even on day four when you’re five down and one wicket away from the tail, it’s not over, change is on the horizon, just hang in there.
3.
Excerpt: The cricket match that I think about when I think about this is the 2015 World Cup final, and the moment that broke the game that came so early, the bowling of McCullum by Mitchel Starc. Only a handful of deliveries into the game and Starc cleaved the game into two halves: before the McCullum wicket and after the McCullum wicket. The game after that felt like it was already over, a coronation of Australia rather than a competition between the two teams. And the before bled effortlessly and endlessly into the after, and the promise of the final seeped away into the night.
Limited Overs 