Why I love cricket: Nigel Short

My epiphany came in 1991. My daughter Kyveli had been born and I was trying to prepare for the World Championship candidates match against Boris Gelfand. You know how it is with babies, an absolute disaster with sleep, which is the most important thing for concentration. Very cruelly, I suggested to my wife Rhea that she take Kyveli to see her parents in Greece. I started watching cricket on the television and sank into the mood. It was England v West Indies with Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash, Robin Smith and Graham Gooch. That’s when I realised there was an awful lot going on in cricket which I’d never appreciated. [Short beat Gelfand, then Anatoly Karpov and Jan Timman to set up his title decider with Garry Kasparov.]

I was a pupil at Bolton School. Haseeb Hameed and the Parkinson twins went there, it has pretty good grounds and facilities. I used to enjoy playing in the back garden but didn’t have a serious love at that point. My dad was always interested and still follows it. Martin, my older brother plays and my younger brother Jonathan is actually an ECB-qualified coach at the lowest level. He has a net and a bowling machine in his back garden. My nephew James is mad keen. 

I’ve lived in Greece since the mid-1990s and have played in Corfu, with groups made up mainly of expats and sort-of Greek Australians. I’m a spectator more than a player, but those are very memorable and positive experiences. A couple of years ago I was in India and found a beautiful ground in Maharashtra where I had a quick hit. Nothing serious, just with a tennis ball but it was a real thrill. Generally, there isn’t a strong connection between English-speaking countries and chess but India is a place where chess is highly respected.

^{Short takes on Garry Kasparov in the 1993 World Chess Championship at the Savoy Hotel, London}

In 2018 I bumped into some guys connected with the Kolkata Knight Riders at my hotel. I spoke to Chris Lynn and the sadly now-tarnished Heath Streak, and Mitchell Johnson. I don’t think they played chess but they were curious about it. When you say you’ve played a World Championship, you’re three times Commonwealth champion and have won more than 70 tournaments in six continents, you have some credentials yourself – not, obviously, in cricket, but there is a respect from one sportsman to another.

Technique will only get you so far in any sport; you need a bit of spunk as well. There are better chess players than myself who didn’t go so far, people with more ‘talent’, but being a good chess player is more than the ability to make strategic judgements, calculate well and so on. You must have resilience and a sense of timing that not everybody has. There aren’t many chess players you can say are mentally weak. 

I am now vice-president of FIDE, the International Chess Federation. It is much bigger than the ICC, but one place where we were missing some federations was in the Caribbean. I fixed a tour, went to Grenada and by miraculous coincidence England were playing West Indies. It was an amazing game: Eoin Morgan got a hundred, Jos Buttler 150, Chris Gayle 160-odd. During lunch, I met over half the Grenada cabinet in the presidential box. Then I went to St Vincent and St Lucia – by another miraculous coincidence England were playing again in St Lucia. And you’ll never believe it, the same thing happened in St Kitts. I managed to set up federations in all of those places except St Vincent so it was a very successful tour combining business with pleasure. And I met Bumble: two staunch Lancastrians together (though you’d never believe it from my accent). 

I’ve watched games all over the world: the Waca, MCG, Kolkata. My favourite grounds are Newlands and Galle. I saw England pathetically eliminated at the World Cup quarter-final at Colombo in 2011, the most painful game I’ve seen. In Sharjah [in 2002] I took the French grandmaster Joel Lautier to see Sri Lanka v New Zealand. After half an hour of questions, he picked it up and rather enjoyed it. Muttiah Muralitharan took five wickets for nine runs in 10 overs so I told him he’d seen a special player. I thought Murali was a genius.

^{Meeting Mitchell Johnson in Kolkata}

I like all forms: Tests, ODIs, T20s, mainly internationals. I think chess players are drawn to the statistics, the percentages and combinations. I also like those profound personal moments you get within the team framework like Ben Stokes at Headingley in 2019. I was going to Shenzhen in China that day, I could follow the game in Hong Kong but didn’t have data once I crossed to the mainland. The result was the first thing I checked at the hotel.

Our leading player Michael Adams watches quite a lot. He’s a Cornishman but he goes to Taunton to see Somerset. The one ‘nut’ people wouldn’t believe is Peter Svidler, who is absolutely hooked. He’s an eight-time Russian champion so a serious chess player. I introduced him to cricket during the 1996 World Cup. We were working together in Greece on openings and so on. I didn’t have satellite TV, but there was a Pakistani restaurant down in Piraeus which did, so we used to go down there to watch the games. By the end, he was the one dragging me along.

It’s interesting that cricket is looking for a new audience. Chess has had a colossal boom with people playing online during Covid. Our problem here has been a lack of support and sponsorship. FIDE has 195 federations, with chess recognised as a sport in about 130 of those countries. But not the UK, so we are immediately cut out of funding. That recognition would make a big difference. The glory days of English chess were in the 1980s. At the 1986 Olympiad we came second, half a point behind the absolutely dominant Soviet Union when they had Kasparov, Karpov, Yusupov.

I was seven at the time of the 1972 Fischer v Spassky match which was all over the television and newspapers. The 1980s generation including myself were largely products of that boom. The World Championship is coming up again this November. Magnus Carlsen [the defending champion from Norway] is stylistically universal. He can play all formats. Perhaps you can compare him to Brian Lara, who could play just about any shot. Ian Nepomniachtchi [the challenger from Russia] is more of a gritty fighter, so maybe Steve Waugh. Magnus is definitely a better player but I don’t give him more than 60/40.

This article was published in the September edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game