Rob Key has dedicated his life to cricket. The current managing director of the men’s game in England played professionally for the best part of 20 years and scored almost 20,000 first-class runs. He loved batting and was very good at it, yet he spent the overwhelming majority of his time as a cricketer doing something he loathed. He hated fielding.
“The fear of letting people down is constant, as is knowing you can’t do anything about it,” he writes in his memoir Oi, Key. In a chapter entitled The Grind, Key describes how he never grew tired of the part of the game he truly loved – scoring runs – but says the “dread” of fielding was always with him. Post-retirement he said wryly: “Fielding is as close as a human gets to being a dog.”
