“I don’t want to be a product of my environment,” drawls Frank Costello – Jack Nicholson’s Boston mafia boss – at the start of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. Luckily for Frank, his ambition was to become a crime kingpin rather than a cricketer.
Every cricketer has their own origin story, from the weekend warrior to the globetrotting superstar. If you ask them about these first flushes their eyes often light up, a glint that takes them back to childhood and a time when the game first grabbed them.
Take Eoin Morgan: he grew up in an end-of-terrace house on the St Catherine’s Estate in Rush, a 40-minute drive from Dublin. Morgan’s first experience of cricket was playing with his five siblings on a narrow concrete path at the side of the family home. For a young left-handed Eoin any stroke into the “off side” was blocked by a 40ft fielder in the shape of their neighbour’s garage wall. The pebble-dashed blockade meant that if Morgan wanted to the ball to fly off his bat with any satisfaction he had to aim every shot into the leg side.
This architectural hindrance meant he developed an ability to whip, flick and bunt straight balls into the on side with unerring accuracy and power. As he grew older this bottom-hand, heavy leg-side dominance marked him out from his peers and helped him rise to the pinnacle of the game. Take a look at Morgan’s record-breaking assault against Afghanistan at Old Trafford during the 2019 World Cup when he clobbered an astonishing 17 sixes. Squint past the rapturous crowd, tournament razzmatazz and powder-blue kit and you can see a trace of the small boy in his shorts, smashing his exasperated siblings away into the (leg-side) depths of their neighbourhood.
Morgan is not alone. Some of the finest players the game has seen were forged by their immediate childhood environment; cricket is embellished by these home-spun techniques and idiosyncrasies.
Jasprit Bumrah honed his lethal bull-whip yorker as a child by repeatedly bowling at the skirting board in the corridor of his apartment block in Ahmedabad. If the ball hit the skirting on the full it would make only one muffled thud, all the better for not waking his mother from her afternoon nap.
Lasith Malinga’s side-armed, slingshot action is a direct response to learning cricket on the beaches of Sri Lanka’s south-west coast. Bowling with a shaved and burnt tennis ball, Malinga soon worked out that the most effective delivery in beach cricket was a yorker that took the sand out of the equation and zeroed in on the driftwood stumps and his opponents’ bare feet.
In 2009, Steve Cannane wrote First Tests – Great Australian Cricketers and The Backyards That Made Them. The book explores how often humble early beginnings indelibly shaped future greats.
The front cover shows the cobblestones on a back lane near Argyle Street in Fitzroy, Melbourne, where, in the depression-hit 1930s, Neil Harvey and his five siblings would wet a tennis ball and fling it at each other. The sopping ball would dart and skid off the surface. In order to protect the dented paraffin tin that served as the stumps the young Harvey boys had to have rapid reflexes, to prosper and score runs their footwork had to be prima-donna precise.
All six Harvey brothers became fine cricketers, but it was Neil who graduated from the back alleys to play 79 Test matches for Australia. Harvey would come down the wicket to attack balls that others would only think to defend. His prancing footwork became the standout feature of his batting and left Richie Benaud to declare Harvey “the most difficult batsman to bowl to”. Despite the consistent marauding out from the safety of his crease, Harvey was never stumped in 137 Test innings. He scored 6,149 runs including 21 centuries at an average of 48.48 – those bluestone cobbles served him well.
A cricketer’s past is never far from their present. Last week, Neil Wagner’s bone-jarring bouncer display against England in Wellington helped serve up one of the greatest Test matches of all time. When Wagner was chugging in once again to bomb England’s batters perhaps he was thinking of the time his older brother bounced him in the backyard with a tennis ball wrapped in electrical tape, smashing him on the side of the head and inducing tears. Young Neil was simply told to toughen up and get on with it.
One thing to ponder, in a modern world where time and space are ever shrinking commodities, is the prospect of whether we might see this environmental ingenuity gradually disappear from the game. “I do think cricket has become more homogenised,” Cannane says, “but generally there’s also a lack of unstructured play. You don’t really see kids forming scratch games of any sport these days, that’s sort of a bygone era now.”
When he wrote the book 14 years ago, Cannane even suggested that Australia’s modern dominance of cricket could be on the wane as a result of the diminishment of unstructured games in the backyard, street or park. Warne, McGrath and Gilchrist were in the last generation of Australians who grew up without an abundance of distractions such as computer games or, latterly, social media, to turn their heads. It doesn’t seem too far fetched and I’m particularly fond of the idea that Australia haven’t beaten England in an away Ashes series for more than 20 years because the teenage Ben Hilfenhaus was a slave to Super Mario.
Last month I asked Jack Leach what he thinks could be the secret to Brendon McCullum’s success with England’s Test side over the past year. “He gets you to almost feel as you did when you started playing the game as a kid,” he said.
Leach and his teammates will be in fine company if they continue to heed their coach and tap into their earliest experiences of the game, to embrace the chaos and creation of the backyard.
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