Jonathan Wilson
Where were you that Sunday in 2005?
In the stands? Glued to the telly? Or on a train, waiting for texts from your mum?
Jonathan Wilson
30-Jun-2013
My dad always said that football was never quite the same after the 1973 FA Cup final. As a Sunderland fan, he'd lived through the post-Second World War years of decline, known the pain of a first relegation, the ignominy of one of the early giants of the game adjusting to their reduced status in the second flight. And then, 28 years after his first game, he witnessed the greatest underdog story in English football history, as Sunderland, having been sixth bottom of the second division in the December, rose under Bob Stokoe to beat Manchester City and Arsenal before overcoming the might of Don Revie's Leeds in the final.
The problem was it was almost too perfect. My dad always said that even as the final whistle blew at Wembley that day, he felt a sense of sadness that that was it: that was the pinnacle and there was no way football could ever be that good again. Sunderland fans effectively took out an emotional mortgage that, 40 years later, they are still paying back. Perhaps the feeling isn't quite as intense - England winning back the Ashes after 16 years wasn't quite as implausible as Sunderland winning the Cup - but I suspect most England fans feel something similar about the summer of 2005, and particularly about the Edgbaston Test. How, after all, could anything ever be quite that good again? Since then, how could any other cricket be anything but a weak simulacrum?
That was the Test that made the greatest summer. It wasn't just that it was a brilliantly close game, full of astonishing individual feats; it was the stakes that were being played for, not in terms of money but in terms of history. Imagine if England had lost. The summer would, almost certainly, have become yet another procession for Australia, and who knows what the consequences would have been. The boom in cricket's popularity in England might not have happened, England would almost certainly never have risen to No. 1 in the world and, eight years later, it might have been possible to turn on a light entertainment show on Sky without seeing Andrew Flintoff.
Full postCMJ and a lesson in reporting on cricket
His book on England's victorious tour of Australia in 1986-87 entertained a ten-year-old and taught him the value of writing on just the sport
Jonathan Wilson
24-Jun-2013
Christopher Martin-Jenkins was honoured recently at the British Sports Book Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award that was entirely as it should be. There can't have been a British cricket fan who didn't feel a pang when they heard of his death, and there can be no greater tribute to a cricket journalist than that.
I'm not going to attempt a tribute here: there have been plenty already by people who knew him far better than I ever did. In fact, while I found him as courteous and helpful as everybody else has suggested he was, I think the only thing approaching a proper chat I had with him was at the urinals at the Riverside in Chester-le-Street after Durham had beaten Essex in a Friends Provident semi-final in 2007. That game had come immediately after the fourth Test between England and West Indies, which itself had followed straight on from a Test at Old Trafford.
"Home at last," he said, which left me discombobulated as I initially thought he was talking about me being back in the north-east - my confusion heightened by the fact I was just finishing a book about Sunderland and had been cranking out thousands of words about exiles returning and football teams providing a link with home. I started to answer in those terms before I realised he probably had no idea where I was born and was just talking about getting back to his own bed after a fortnight on the road. But after the initial embarrassment, we had a brief conversation about cricket in the north-east and Paul Collingwood, who had just scored a ton, in particular (he averages 193 in Tests in his home county). So, CMJ was a gentleman, as he has been portrayed, even after a misunderstanding in a portaloo.
Full postAnd the rest is history
A wicket off a long hop and a memorable six: oh for the golden summer of 2002 (or was it?)
Jonathan Wilson
10-Jun-2013
This is probably the most self-indulgent column I've ever written, but I'm going to try to justify it on two grounds.
First of all, I'm actually on holiday right now: if you read this when it's posted, I'll be in Cuba, having my first break from writing about sport in two years.
And secondly, the planets seem to have come together to remind me of the golden summer of 2002 (note: it wasn't really golden, and it might have been 2001 or 2003 - I can't remember). Browsing hotels in Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds a couple of weeks ago, I came upon the village of Kingston Bagpuize, somewhere I hadn't thought about since the incidents of that summer of what for the sake of ease we'll pretend definitely was 2002.
Full postWhen football replaced cricket on the back pages
You can almost pinpoint the date when the switch happened in England
Jonathan Wilson
11-May-2013
Anybody who writes about the history of sport will have spent a significant amount of time ploughing through old newspapers. Facts and statistics, of course, can easily be dredged up from websites, and so too can some match reports, but there's something far more evocative about going to the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, propping the great bound volumes on a stand and carefully turning the pages. In part it's the smell, the fustiness of age giving a sense of the passage of time that is reinforced by the way the pages crumble in your fingers. But more than that it's the chance discoveries, the odd juxtapositions.
Yes, you might be looking for a report of Brian Clough's Brighton beating Walsall in 1974 but how much more fascinating the detail or two you might glean from that is when you know that that night, two miles away from the Goldstone Ground in the Brighton Pavilion, Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo". Adverts and news stories give a flavour of the age.
I spent so much time in Colindale while researching my Clough biography that in the end the staff gave up on the usual reservation system and handed me years of microfilm at a time. It was a constant struggle not to be waylaid by cricket reports, particularly as you saw, for instance, England's tour of Australia in 1970-71 unfolding as it was experienced at the time - the increasing sense of a touring team under siege becoming more and more cussed.
Full postThe pleasure of reading Ten Great Innings
Ralph Barker's first book on cricket, written in 1964, is a curious one, of indefinite genre. But as a record of history, it does its job
Jonathan Wilson
30-Apr-2013
Until the revolution of the early nineties, when All Played Out, Fever Pitch and Football against the Enemy changed the landscape of sporting literature forever, there was a feeling among football writers that cricket writers had an easy deal. Part of the reason for the great splurge of football writing over the past two decades is simply that there was so little of it before: there are generations of players, now long-retired, suddenly discovering that there is a market for their whimsical recollections of playing at a mediocre level for an average club, while a new wave of small publishers has been taking risks on bewilderingly recondite topics.
Whether anybody actually makes any money out of it is another issue, but football literature now seems to have caught up with cricket both in terms of quality and quantity. Whether cricket ever really enjoyed the sort of glut football is now enjoying is debatable but it is true that some very strange cricket books were published. Take, for example, Ralph Barker's 1964 book Ten Great Innings.
It's a book that seems very simple but is nowhere near as straightforward as it appears. As Neville Cardus puts it in his introduction, it is "lacking the staleness of sophistication". Barker is essentially a fan, not a former player or a would-be coach, and most certainly not a journalist, jaded by the routine of game after game, deadline after deadline. "He is," Cardus went on, "enthusiastic and, without trimmings, creates the scene and the excitement and curiosity of the average man and boy who has paid at the gates." As he notes, there is a simplicity, a directness to the prose; there are very few literary pretensions.
Full postThe value of sport
What makes it memorable is often less the action than the way in which we consumed it. Sport provides a currency in which the exchanges of social interaction can be conducted. Take Headingley 1991, for instance
Jonathan Wilson
15-Apr-2013
The older I get, the more I realise sport isn't just about sport. What happens on the pitch gives us a reason to go somewhere and congregate, be that the stadium or a conveniently located television, but when it comes to recalling events the action jostles alongside other memories. What makes sport memorable is often less the action itself than the way in which we consumed it.
It's notable, for instance, that when Liverpool fans who went to the 2005 Champions League final recall the game, they quickly move away from the famous comeback from 3-0 down to beat AC Milan on penalties to talking about the craziness of Istanbul that night as a city overwhelmed by fans ground to a halt. On a related note, a former girlfriend pointed out with devastating acuity that my apparently profound verdicts on whether I liked a city or not depended almost entirely on whether I'd eaten a good meal in the first 48 hours I'd spent there. There is an overwhelming subjectiveness to these things and that shapes the experience and the memory.
It's something that occurs to me every time somebody mentions Graham Gooch's 154 not out at Headingley in 1991. I recognise it as almost certainly the greatest innings by an Englishman in my lifetime. I'm aware of having been in awe of it at the time. And yet I can't recall a single ball of it - perhaps almost because he seemed so preposterously in control, you relaxed when he was on strike; the battle was lost and won at the other end. Obviously I could go on YouTube and watch highlights and so create a sort of artificial memory, but that's not quite the same.
Full postThat '70s cricket circus
Testkill, co-written by Ted Dexter, is a murder mystery involving the death of a bowler. The plot should take a backseat for the reader, who must read it for the portrayal of seventies cricket in all its sordid naffness
Jonathan Wilson
07-Apr-2013
Fitzgerald, the Australian quick, had bowled a hostile spell with the new ball, taking one English wicket and forcing another batsman to leave the field after striking him near the heart with a vicious lifting delivery. He had seemed distracted, though, when he returned after lunch and was "listless" in his first two overs after tea, but it was the third over of the spell that proved critical. His first two deliveries were "sluggish". By the third, "his action disintegrated, the rhythm, control and co-ordination had vanished, his feet dragged and his arm drooped."
His next three balls were "drained of life and spirit" and it became apparent something was seriously wrong. He staggered in his run, "stumbled up, falling forward slightly, then with one final effort brought the ball up above his head. Then he crumpled and fell at the feet of the umpire. He lay quite still, clutching the ball in his outstretched hand." Fitzgerald was carried from the field, dead - murdered, it turned out, by poison administered at tea. It's not the most convincing set-up for a whodunit, but the least plausible aspect of Testkill is less the plot than the identity of the author. It's the work not of some jobbing hack, churning out a pulp page-turner to keep the royalties trickling in, but of the former England captain Ted Dexter.
He co-wrote the book with the former Observer sports editor Clifford Makins in 1976 (three years later they collaborated on a golfing equivalent, Deadly Putter) and it doesn't take a great leap to see the narrator, Jack Stanton, a former England captain turned journalist, as Dexter's representative in the book, doggedly investigating the crime while being threatened, on one occasion being beaten up with - what else? - a cricket bat. Similarly, when another character is run over by a car it's hard not to imagine whether Dexter was remembering the incident that effectively ended his career, when he was pinned against a door by his own Jaguar, breaking his leg.
Full postBrian Clough's cricket connection
Brian Clough might have been one of the greatest football managers the English game ever knew, but cricket held a special place in his life as well
Jonathan Wilson
19-Mar-2013
On Thursday, it will be 78 years since the birth of Brian Clough. He was one of the greatest football managers the English game ever knew, winning league titles at Derby County and Nottingham Forest, whom he also led to two European Cups. He also played twice for England and is still the fastest man to 250 goals in the English league. Yet, when he was growing up in Middlesbrough, he dreamed not of being a great football manager or even a great centre-forward, but of opening the batting for Yorkshire and England.
He would race home from school every night, change into old clothes and then dash up to Albert Park - where a statue of him now stands - to play football or cricket. He admits he spent much of his national service, when he wasn't playing sport, sneaking off to listen to cricket on the radio. When he was manager at Forest, he would regularly be seen at Trent Bridge taking in games.
Clough seems to have been a relatively accomplished amateur batsman and bustling medium-pace seamer, fired by the implacable will to win that sustained his football career. Records of him playing are rare but in the summer of 1957, Middlesbrough, the football club at which Clough began his playing career, sent a team to play cricket against Redcar Cricket Club.
Full postAll in the mind
We are used to the complaint that there is too much cricket played nowadays, but what if there was too little? You'd be forced to indulge in games played out entirely in the imagination - just as Godfrey Evans once did
Jonathan Wilson
05-Mar-2013
Too much cricket these days, they say, and I suspect anybody who listens to me attempting a 15-hour stint on Test Match Sofa on March 25, covering first New Zealand v England then India v Australia, may agree. But imagine the dangers of not enough cricket: you would end up having imaginary games, just as Godfrey Evans does in the final chapter of his splendidly eccentric 1984 book Wicketkeepers of the World.
You wonder exactly what Gordon's Gin were expecting when they decided to pay Evans, who won 91 caps for England, to knock out a book but it surely wasn't a detailed account of a game that didn't happen anywhere other than behind the glasses and between the legendary sideburns. "The ground was bathed in sunshine, with a slight breeze blowing from the Pavilion End, and the Lord's pitch looked a good one - it needed to be to last six days," he begins. There's no stinting here; this is a game fully realised in every detail. And you wonder exactly how much Gordon's Gin had been consumed before he reached a state of such pure hallucination (although given some of the things I've written in the past, it would be hypocritical to be too dismissive of somebody reporting on made-up sport).
Teams
Remembering the Callers Pegasus Festival
When the world's best cricket stars played exhibition games in a county ground in Northumberland, one young fan was hooked
Jonathan Wilson
27-Feb-2013
Growing up in the north-east in the days before Durham became a
first-class county, cricket was something consumed almost entirely on
television. From the age of six, I went fairly regularly with my dad to
watch football at Roker Park but cricket was just too far away. All we
had was the Callers Pegasus Festival, a pair of one-day games each
year, sponsored by a local travel agent and staged at Jesmond, the county
ground of Northumberland.
They started out as Durham & Northumberland against the Rest of the
World, which in those days of early Thatcherism was pretty much how we
saw life. Soon, presumably after a series of crushing defeats, there
was an acceptance that maybe we could open it up to the rest of the
country, so the games became England against the Rest of the World.
The games themselves have blurred into a series of dislocated images;
the memory hasn't preserved any results, which I guess with exhibition
games of that sort is kind of the point. I remember a glowering young
Nasser Hussain refusing to sign autographs on the boundary (many years
later, standing next to him at a urinal in the media centre at Lord's
I decided against reminding him of the incident). There was Martin
Crowe stretching alarmingly, Faroukh Engineer trying to do a
north-eastern accent, Derek Randall stealing sandwiches and eventually
taking somebody's cool-box with him to field at backward point. Clive
Rice always seemed to be making doughty half-centuries and Carl
Rackemann always seemed to be opening the bowling.
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