Pride, disappointment and anger

As much as I love the North East and playing for Durham, being situated miles from most other counties means endless hours on a coach. Though this year we have a new driver – the jovial Dave – compared with last year’s grumpy Ivor. Whether Ivor was his actual name, or just a convenient rhyme with ‘driver,’ I’m not quite sure. What I am sure of is that Dave has made journeys much more comfortable. Ivor’s penchant for testing the brakes every ten minutes was not conducive to peaceful journeys.

Mitch Claydon’s extensive selection of DVD’s have accompanied us on most trips, and while I’m disappointed that his Baywatch boxset hasn’t been opened yet, whatever has been put on is generally met with approval. The most popular choice seems to Mike Bassett – Football Manager; a true gem of a film. Quotes and snippets from the film are regularly recited in the dressing room, but there is one that is not so regularly used, but perhaps should be. It encompasses all that is important and evident in the last few weeks of our season.

Mike Bassett recites from Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If,’ in one of the more poignant moments of the downright silly comedy.

Since I last updated the blog, it seems there has barely been a spare moment to think. Such is the helter-skelter nature of Twenty20 and county cricket in general. For the team, the last six weeks or so has seen two semi-final losses; a Twenty20 quarter-final that never was; and a great win in the rearranged Twenty20 quarter-final, against a team who couldn’t actually qualify going into the last round of group games. On a personal note it has seen an unbeaten career-best double hundred; a messy dislocated finger (which looked and was feared to be far worse than it actually turned out); an all too insignificant half-century in the Friends Provident semi-final, that I dearly would have loved to turn into a match-winning hundred; a Twenty20 semi-final innings that never got going, and which made me feel heavily culpable for our loss; and a near hundred against my old county.

Phew! And every spare hour in between has been spent sleeping or on the coach, or both.

Kipling’s (or Bassett’s) words strike such a relevant chord. The ups and downs have created many opportunities for praise, for pride, for disappointment, for anger, and many more emotions beside these. The challenge for every cricketer is to treat each success and failure (or ‘triumph and disaster’) in exactly the same manner. If you get too far above your station when you do well, then expect to experience a rather hefty bump back to earth before long, and if you get too down on yourself if you’re doing badly, then you will never get out of that particular trough. Take the example of two cricketers currently very much in the public eye: Graham Napier and Paul Collingwood.

Graham Napier had a blistering month or so in Twenty20 cricket, and all talk is of Stanford millions, IPL and the like. The challenge for Graham is to now appreciate that it was just one month of his life (albeit a dream one), and knuckle down to produce many more moments of brilliance. I have no doubt that he will be thinking this, and it will be to his great credit if he can continue his rise, not least for the sheer talent that is evident, but also for his control of the mind and not allowing himself to become embroiled in the hubris.

As for Colly, he was hounded in the press for his poor run of form – something that can happen to many a sportsman. Many lesser men would have accepted defeat long before the Edgbaston Test, and slipped into the ether. Colly is clearly no lesser man however, and when many were questioning his stomach for the fight, he produced an innings of such resilience, such belligerence, but all the while playing with a freedom that betrayed his vulnerability. It defines his strength of character perfectly, and shows just how to engineer such a rise from a loss of form.

Such moments of elation or despair are hard to accept in the same frame of mind, but it is something that we have all had to come to terms with over the last six weeks. It is great to have something still to play for after the two semi-final losses, and in the shape of the Pro40, and more pertinently the Championship, we have exactly that.

As the season enters the last two months, I am sure that these contrasting moments will stand us in great stead for the challenges that lie ahead. Missing out on two showpiece finals is excruciatingly disappointing, but it would more than make up for it were we to bring the Championship to Durham for the very first time.