Cricket and Me

I have hardly played any crickets in my life! I played cricket at an extremely low standard at school and in the garden as a kid. My catching is very much of the Phil Tufnell / Devon Malcom standard and my batting is much worse. As a parent I now spend hours in the garden playing cricket with my son.

But I absolutely love cricket and have been lucky to have watched an awful lot of it. I also enjoy writing about it. Perhaps the best thing about cricket is that it is such a rich game, with so much room for opinion.

Where did it start?

I am an ardent Englad fan but I do wonder how! I was a 80s and 90s child and England were rubbish most of the time.

Perhaps it was Lancashire that set me on the path to cricket. I vividly remember watching the Benson & Hedges Roses Semi Final in 1996. Lancashire always seemed to be at Lords and I watched in amazement as Essex collapsed in the 1996 Nat West Final. 1996 was an amazing year to be a Lancs Fan.

I always watched England Test Matches when I could, even from a very young age. The television was on when Graham Gooch scored 333 but I was too young to really appreciate it. However I do remember the 1994 season pretty well, and in the period from 1995 to 1998 it always felt like England were close to being a good team. Sadly it was a case of ‘close, but no cigar’.

Early Heroes

In the early days, it felt like Gooch was our only hope – and I would rate Gooch as the best England batsman I have seen (superior to even Kevin Pietersen, and I never saw David Gower ‘live’). Of course, Gooch was part of that 1992 world cup runners up team. I loved Allan Lamb and Robin Smith, and when it comes to the One Day game, the England Finalists of 1992 were hard to topple – until 2019.

But it was all about Test Cricket for me. Alec Stewart ought to have been one of our best ever openers and Graham Thorpe became one of our best. Darren Gough and Dominic Cork bought some life to the team.

But I have always loved a ‘scrapper’ and I was gripped by that confrontation between Atherton and Alan Donald in 1995 and notably in 1999.