You know you’re getting on a bit when you gesture towards how things used to be. It doesn’t have to become that special mix of nostalgia and resentment that can distil in later life, just a measure of distance. You’re farther along the line, looking back at youth as something that happened rather than living within it as the only state you’ve known.
My first Ashes tour was in 2013, and it was shoestring deluxe, from random couch-surfing hosts to the floors of backpacker friends, stashing free sandwiches at tea breaks and scanning the pub for cold chips. Even so, the trip was pure discovery, bursts of activity in the longueurs of a glorious English summer, where the leaves glow with that golden green to the point of bursting, the sun that illuminates your pint but stays gentle on your neck.
This year makes it four Ashes trips and some things don’t change. The shoestring lengthens but the freelance beat remains: sharing sketchy rentals, cadging rides or forensically locating the one non-lethal train ticket in a broken system. Then you walk into a cricket ground and all that disappears. Once more the rush, the grandeur. You end days under those English summer skies that stay light until 11pm, high trails of cloud scoring lines through blue as it fades to something deeper with each quarter-hour into eventual night.
What has changed is space. The Tests have a similar span but they’ve lopped off the lead-up, no easing in. The World Test Championship final started at top intensity, the Women’s Ashes filled the interim. That old feeling of wandering, learning a country between watching some cricket, has become one of relentlessly hitting the next mark.
The WTC also had the buzz of the Oval turning Indian, just as it has turned Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Pakistani before. With half the press box seats outside among the crowd, you simmer in the decibels. The Oval still feels like the people’s ground compared with the moneyed coterie of Lord’s.
Straight into Birmingham, a city that transcends the way it gets talked down to. The food, the parks, the capacious beer gardens, the action in the centre, the hills that roll up to Moseley. The wave of people washing down to Edgbaston to start a day is a great cricket sight. The end of the fifth day was even greater. It was the best thing to happen to Pat Cummins since Bruce Springsteen came to town. Unlike the rest of us, Pat got off work early enough to attend.
To compensate, I detoured to Nottingham via Yorkshire to be smashed by sound from The War on Drugs. They matched the Trent Bridge show to follow: Lauren Filer bowling like the wind, Ash Gardner bewitching, the surface and standard making it the best women’s Test. The spectators I met attended five days, committed to celebrating the expansion from four.
My colleague Adam Collins, in typical style, held his wedding on the day between Trent Bridge and Lord’s – ideal, he said, because everyone would be in town. It made for a dusty press box on day one, but day five was when the heart sank. Not because of a legitimate dismissal, but because we all knew the mood of a grand contest would turn sour.
There was a full Oval for the women’s T20, then a drive to Leeds for a 3am arrival before the next Test. The walk across Armley Park was pretty in the morning’s green, dystopian at night, as dirt bikes thrashed through the lampless dark. Headingley, still bearing the tang of one Ben Stokes day in 2019, got a new infusion from Mark Wood. On the drive back to London with Jeremy Coney riding shotgun, I played the first album from the Strokes: you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a former New Zealand captain drumming Fabrizio Moretti’s fills on the dashboard and harmonising with Julian Casablancas without even knowing the lyrics.
The women’s ODIs rounded off a classic, then to Manchester: see what’s playing at Night & Day, down the stairs to the Temple of Convenience, up on to the tables at Mojo.
At Old Trafford there was a general sense of despair about the forecast, the dampening of the squib. My friend Dave spent a few minutes fussing with the pram to cover his baby from drizzle before giving up. “He’s going to be from Manchester, he’d better get used to it.”
Things did feel flat on the way to London. But people packed out the Phoenix for our live Final Word podcast, a room of lovely cricket geeks sharing statistician jokes and sepia tales like an online chat board come to life.
Stuart Broad called time, a rare remaining player who had played Ashes Tests that I didn’t attend and his ending was as perfect for the home crowd as it was galling for Australia.
Two months of hustle, 76 podcasts, 49 Guardian and Observer articles, 21 days of OBO, two Tests of radio commentary. At the same point in 2013, I had wandered across the field late that night, looking at the lanterns in the Pavilion, feeling the poignancy of something ending, puzzled that most of the press types had vanished without marking the occasion.
This time, work until midnight, clap a few shoulders on the way out, head for 90 minutes of sleep before the airport. Farewell to England, far earlier in the season than has ever been the case.
The series was grand, while perhaps the days of tour as exploration are over. Or perhaps it just takes a fresher set of eyes.
