It had been made no secret that Stuart Broad’s next career would come in broadcasting, the man renowned for some time as the best talker still playing the game.
Nor then, was it any surprise to hear the 37-year-old, with the final answer of his final press conference as a professional cricketer, articulate so wonderfully the essence of the career the rest of us were about to try to do justice to in prose.
“When I was a kid growing up I had sporting idols like Martin Johnson and Stuart Pearce,” Broad said. “When I watched them, I loved their passion and drive. I never looked at them and thought: ‘I could give more for that shirt’.
“Ultimately, that’s how I’ve played my sport. I’ve never wanted anyone in the crowd or watching at home or listening on the radio to think: ‘He’s not giving absolutely everything.’ Every day I’ve pulled on an England shirt, I’ve given my heart and soul.”
The problem? That Broad had been asked how the bowler who not only delivered some of the most iconic spells in English cricket history, but also popularised the Celebrappeal, invented Broadface and once had a row with a robot, would like to be remembered. As a bloke who turned up and had a fair crack? Well, that simply would not do.
The grafter’s moniker is often bestowed as something of a back-handed compliment, the insinuation of a player willing to fill a void of skill with sweat and spirit. Broad, though, is something else, a cricketer indeed spurred by the most potent of competitive drives to pour the lot into his craft, but also one of immense ability, enough to make this game’s most taxing employment appear the most enjoyable job in the world.
The social media age has no doubt burnished Broad’s comedic reputation, but cricket’s first meme-able export near enough predates the form, the brand of organic source and even now, with its founder firmly in on the joke, authentic. Broad is funny when he means to be (the infamous Courier Mail press conference) but, crucially, even more so when he does not: recall the time he spent 10 minutes whinging about the sight screen at Adelaide, then was bowled by Mitchell Johnson first ball, or just this summer, when he claimed, like a seam-bowling Jay Cartwright, to have invented the outswinger.
Entire Twitter accounts and listicles have been devoted to recording the greatest hits and are all worth a rain-delay scroll, but perhaps the zenith exhibition of Broad’s performative streak came at the height of the Australian ball-tampering scandal.
Asked for his thoughts, Broad, with a straight-face and all the innocence of a primary school nativity play, wondered why such a successful team had suddenly turned to sandpaper, when they had actually been very good at finding reverse-swing during the previous Ashes. A puzzler.
In another life, shorn of his 602 Test wickets (and counting), Broad might still be a jobbing county pro of comic and cult appreciation, a fast-medium Frank Spencer, if you will. Keep the scalps but strip away the charisma and he would still be an all-time great, just not one quite so adored. The combination, as it stands in truth, is rare.
Sport has known many entertainers among its legends (and, it must be said, plenty of miserable gits, too). Some were enigmas, those complex characters prone to bouts of genius on the field and often lunacy off it, mythologised just as much for talent never quite, or not consistently, fulfilled. Few of those, though, were still going about their business with mischievous zest at 37.
Others were mavericks, so gifted as to throw shade on convention and scale the peaks via paths untrod, the joy rooted in the audacity of it all and the impression they might be just as good in a pair of slippers with a cigar on the go. Broad, though, has made himself every bit as good as he might have and never better than in England whites.
When Broad became only the fifth man to pass 600 Test wickets this month, much was made of the theory that, in a game of changing priorities, there might never be a sixth. True or not, there will be cricketers by other metrics just as good and, probably, better. It seems unlikely, though, that there will ever be one quite so much fun.
