This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Cricket is a sport always on the verge of disaster. As Tim Wigmore highlights in his excellent new history of Test cricket, commentators have been predicting the sport’s demise since shortly after the first ball was bowled. Simon Heffer writes the same article on it at least twice a week; Wisden Magazine has a whole column devoted to how climate change will render the entire sport unplayable. Cricket is a sport that revels in gloom.
This works for me. I’m quite a gloomy man. England are always going to lose. If they don’t, it is a fluke, quickly to be written off. Brilliance is temporary. Collapse is imminent: 194-3 can become 220 all out in the blink of an eye. The young are never interested; the Hundred must be hated precisely because it is an attempt to appeal to them.
Yet cricket is also a game of hope. A team that has failed with the bat or ball has the chance to prove themselves again. The first innings duck becomes the second innings century. We wouldn’t watch it if there wasn’t always that faint hope of a miracle, that a record could be broken, a career transformed. It was such a miracle that first got me interested into the sport.
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I was always supposed to love cricket. Atkinsons are. As a child, the sport was inescapable. In the front room sits my father’s collection of Wisdens. His earliest dates to 1901, with the latest arriving each year to be coveted, then perused, then added to the collection. Some of my earliest memories are of playing in the front room whilst Dad desperately tried to explain who Brian Lara was.
There is, apparently, a picture of me in my baby bouncer in front of England against Zimbabwe in 2000. Dad hoped it would catch on. He made sure I had two middle names, out of a belief being W. T. M. Atkinson would make me more likely to captain Northamptonshire. But I have always been a bit too stubborn.
Just as my mother’s repeated suggestions that I’d be a good barrister damned a legal career, so my father’s enthusiasm for cricket left me cold. I played a bit at school, but I was hopeless. When the touring Australians practiced in our nets, I was unmoved. It was only Dad’s incredulous reaction when I told him someone called Shane Warne had watched my PE lesson that I realised he was notable. Rather than covet my father’s Wisdens, I dreamt of what they would garner on eBay.
So, I’m not sure why I sat down, in 2019, to watch England against New Zealand in the final of the Cricket World Cup. I hadn’t followed the competition. I’d enjoyed the previous year’s football equivalent, on the basis that it meant you could belt out “Three Lions” in Amsterdam nightclubs. I barely knew the rules — or laws — let alone the players, or even what an ODI was. But I sat and watched.
It did help that I was watching the Greatest Game Ever Played. Jofra Archer bowling rockets. Ben Stokes’s stolid rearguard action as English wickets tumbled. Scores tied. A super-over. And then, ecstasy, as Jos Buttler tumbled into the stumps. I may have only just clocked that an over was six balls and discovered what LBW meant. But I’d enjoyed it — and an Ashes was just on the horizon.
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The next time I would sit down to watch cricket would be on the fourth day of the Third Test. I’d heard England had been set a record total to chase, and I was sufficiently naïve to think that when England were reduced to 286-9 they might still have a chance. Dad tutted in the corner.
Well, what did he know? I’ve rewatched that last hour so many times since, especially when left with the TV remote at particularly listless house parties. I know every moment: the switch-hit for six, the burnt review, Nathan Lyon’s fumble and that final, magnificent four, with 20,000 drunken Yorkshireman hollering in unison. Stokes was Superman, the nightclub thug transformed into the all-conquering hero. I vowed that I would comply with 10CC’s dictum to not just like cricket but love it.
As much as we lament the decline of test cricket, we have been living through a golden age
I have lived up to it with the zeal of a convert. As difficult as retaining the Wisdens might make my future financial planning, they have proved an invaluable aid in my desperate attempt to make up for two decades of no interest. Holidays have gone unbooked to provide funds for the annual pilgrimages to Trent Bridge, Lord’s and the Oval. I’ve still not overcome my incapability as a player, but I have at least graduated to the parliamentary lobby cricket WhatsApp group. After 20 years of indifference, my Dad is delighted to finally have a fellow fan in the house.
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It has helped that we have been living through something of a golden age. As much as we are apt to lament the decline of Test cricket amidst a proliferation of pyjama leagues and wilting once-great sides, the last year has offered much. Everyone seemed to beat everyone else. West Indies trumped Australia at the Gabba. Sri Lanka proved, for the umpteenth time, why Kennington needs twinning with Colombo.
New Zealand beat an India side — featuring Virat Kohli and Jasprit Bumrah — 3-0 at home. And then, a month ago, South Africa triumphed against the Aussies at Lord’s to win the well-meaning but utterly unfathomable World Test Championship.
We live in a time of giants. Bumrah can lay claim to being the finest fast bowler ever to play, all hooping arms and flashing smiles. Steve Smith cheated back in 2018, but even I had to cheer when I saw him at Lord’s a few weeks ago. Ben Stokes, the Beardy Brearley, has a superb win-loss ratio as England’s captain; as much as purists moan about Bazball’s excesses, it has undoubtedly been superb to watch, and it has transformed a flagging side. An England with Joe Root, Harry Brook and Gus Atkinson has every chance of even winning a Test in Australia this winter.
Yes, all the usual structural problems remain. Most of the country, unwilling to mortgage themselves to Sky Sports, can’t see most games. The ECB seem more interested in flagellating about racism, classism and sexism than trying to promote the game. But there are signs of hope. I’ve taken advantage of Surrey’s £144 a year 22–25 membership — thanks, Dad! — one of the routes by which the county has doubled its membership and average attendance for the county championship over the last decade. Even with the Oval’s preternatural geographic and financial advantages, it does prove that, if you make it available, there will always be an audience for proper, four-day cricket.
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But what is it that I love about cricket? It’s difficult to explain without lapsing into cliché. Instead, look at my favourite Test. It was the Ashes at Headingly, of course but two years ago, not six. England were 2-0 down, chasing 251 to keep the series alive.
I’d been nervously following the match all morning, headphones in, en route from south London to Aylesbury to visit my grandparents. When I got to their house, my father had yet to arrive, but my grandad was watching the Test. So we sat together, for an hour or two, waiting for Dad. We cheered on Brook, on his home ground, as he got England closer whilst wickets steadily fell around him. The game was still in the balance when Dad appeared, and we left to see Nana in her home.
It would be the last time, I think, that Nana would recognise me and the last afternoon that I spent with Grandad on our own. When we left the home, I checked my phone for the score. “We won.”
It’s for those moments that I love cricket. Nothing brings me more joy than that shared affection between the generations. I put off cricket for far too long. I’m so glad I have made up for that lost time.
