GIDEON HAIGH: Cricket since the onset of the pandemic has been a lonely old job where one has had to look very hard for any compensating joys
Colombo, March 13 2020
A cricketer boards a bus. But not just any cricketer nor any bus. The cricketer, Ben Stokes, is among the best, if not the best, of his era; such is his chiselled fitness, coiled strength and short crop that he makes even the act of ascending a step look athletic. The bus, though, is conveying him away from what he does best. It is March 13 2020, early in the protracted global nightmare of Covid-19.
The background ratio of two uniformed figures to one diminutive fan conveys the circumstances of the practice match at P Sara Oval Cricket Stadium in Colombo that has just been curtailed, six days ahead of the scheduled first Test, due to infection concerns. The bus’s windscreen bears the identifications and licences that have failed, despite best efforts, to keep the show on the road. The Tests, adjourned to a sine die, will never occur.
Even more so than those now familiar shots of cricketers in Hazmat suits, this is cricket in the age of Covid, with games just an infection spike or bio-bubble prick away from grim-faced abandonment and hotels serving as combinations of cave, prison and ward.
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On the front of the coach also what might be a child’s drawing, a cameo of the home life from which players are divorced by their tense, anxious, limited regime. You can’t see, on Stokes’ back, the tattoo of a pride of lions symbolising his family, whose solace he sought on July 31 for an indefinite period to “prioritise his mental well-being”.
This decision is being interpreted in the same light as the decisions of Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka to say no to sport in the modern panopticon of social media, anti‑social media, culture war and corporatism. But it’s worth contemplating the particulars of Stokes’ last 18 months in a team sport, including two locked-down Indian Premier Leagues – the combination of sterile monotony and gnawing uncertainty, the sense of simply feeding a machine that might otherwise grind to a halt.
Stokes is an expressive cricketer, who pours out kinetic and psychic energy, who seizes moments and ignites crowds. What would Headingley 2019 have been in the absence of those glorious, seething terraces? Would it even have been possible? The system’s remorselessness was relieved by such glimmers of salvation; cricket since the onset of the pandemic has been a lonely old job where one has had to look very hard for any compensating joys.
This article was published in the Summer edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game