My brother is asleep on the couch at his in-laws’ summer house in Norway. The room is full of the light of the afternoon sun. From the TV, there is the soft rumble of a stadium crowd then silence, followed by the distinctive knock of a cricket ball on wood. For a moment the crowd gets louder and the players on screen shuffle around, but nothing changes and a commentator’s sharp, low voice cuts through.
I realise he’s watching the first Test of the Ashes. It’s 2023 and I’m visiting for the first time since Covid. I estimate it has been at least 15 years since I saw, or heard, a game of cricket. When Ponting, Warne, Gilchrist and McGrath lit up Australian screens. When my dad was still alive and I was young enough to be home when he’d watch it.
The familiarity of the scene – the warm summer, the slow afternoon, the large head snoring – sends me back in space and time to the various back yards of our childhood. When Dad taught us how to pace out a bowler’s run-up, how to turn side on, lift your left arm straight up and look down the inside at the middle stump. The correct way to grip the bat, keep an eye on the ball and stay in your crease. The house rules that made the game exciting: six and out, one hand one bounce, tip and run.
This summer, it is almost nine years since he died. Long enough for the sting of the loss to have numbed and for the family to have rearranged itself in a new dynamic. Long enough for the edges of him – a look in the eye, “Oh, hi darling” when you answer his call, the way chronic pain stilted his gait – to start to fade. But here I am, in Norway, remembering staying up late with him to watch Michael Bevan hit a four to win off the last ball in the 1996 World Cup.
Sport was a big part of my childhood – I swam squad, I played goal attack – and often he was there on the sidelines. Shouting “steady” as I lined up for goal in a voice so deep and loud my coaches turned it into a joke. But as I hit my 20s, sport fell away. Studies, travel and partying took over and the captain-of-the-netball-team side of me went quiet. When he died, I was 27 and moving to London. The next year one of my brothers (the cricket watcher) followed me to Europe. Family life was strange and strained; it turned out we couldn’t grieve together, so instead we grieved alone.
But here was sport, a decade later, reminding me about things Dad had given us and things we shared: competitiveness, a love of winning and a respect for hard work, discipline and what it facilitates: skill, courage, grace under pressure.
I’m at a conference in Copenhagen when Alex Carey stumps Jonny Bairstow and my brother and I are texting in delight – Ben Stokes the self-righteous, sore loser is too funny. By the time of the fourth Test, I’m in London and we’re both praying for rain. Of course, we lose the final Test and draw the series but we’ve found something, an ongoing dialogue that reaches across countries and continents. All the way across the sea.
Last summer, when Sam Konstas was smacking Jasprit Bumrah around the MCG on Boxing Day, I text, “Are you watching the cricket?”
“Yes,” he shot back from the depths of winter. “It’s bonkers.”
This past July I’m visiting while he starts paternity leave and we sit together, reading books to his baby girl, half-watching England versus India. Nervous about what an English win could mean for the upcoming Ashes. We’re gleeful the morning after Stokes embarrasses himself by pressuring the Indian batters to shake his hand and retire. Decreeing the lack of sportsmanship over coffee and quoting The Grade Cricketer podcast to each other: “How long do you need? An hour?”
Most of us run away from our families when we’re young and spend some of our adult lives trying to find our way back. I did not expect sport, or more specifically cricket, to be a through-line I could follow. A place where Dad’s parenting and care still exists. Where he is still explaining how to protect the stumps or telling me to stop grumbling on the way home after a loss. It is a place with an abundance of reminders about his love for us and the way he taught us to be. With each series (and what is more exciting than the Ashes at home?) the place gets expanded with new memories forged from the old ones, new ways to make each other laugh and to remind ourselves (no pressure Pat Cummins et al) how fun it is to compete.
