At 91, Ennio Morricone was too young to die.
The veteran composer of, amongst other things, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Mission and far, far better than those two, Once Upon a Time in the West, had one more job in him.
If they had ever made a film of my cricketing career, I would have wanted Ennio Morricone to score it. For some reason, the simplicity of his haunting improvisations would dovetail with the haunting improvisations of my cricket, which has managed to be bad and ugly ever since I first picked up an ‘adult’ bat 34 years ago this weekend. Henry Fonda would play me, of course, and Caroline would be proud to be represented by Claudia Cardinale. I suppose the role of Perkins would have to be given to Charles Bronson. Pipe dreams, I know, but it has been a close season that, deep down, I think we all thought would never end.
And now cricket is back, and those endless games of WhatsApp Howzat? are over! This weekend, you will find what has mutated of the White Hunter Cricket Club after an unthinkably long delay, convening at Great Tew in Oxfordshire to play the team from Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Sometime that afternoon, I will don my own PPE and will walk the fifty yards or so into the middle, unthinkably happy that there will be a season after all, and that I will be part of it. For those- the vast majority, perhaps- who do not play cricket, it is hard to explain just how achingly wonderful that moment of the first ball of the match will be. Just think of the best thing that has ever happened to you outside of being with the people you love, and then place it in a Mediterranean sunset with a magnum of Chassagne Monrachet alongside, and all to the strains of your all-time favourite band playing live for you in the background.
The new biosecurity rules, such as they are, shouldn’t be a problem for us, not least because we generally go for entire seasons without catching anything, and because the whole concept of social distancing could have been modelled on how we look when we are out on the field. Indeed, the reality of playing behind closed doors is a bewilderingly common one to us: I think someone called Jenny, or it might have been Jeremy, came to watch us by mistake in a match about twenty-six years ago, but that is just about all the spectators we have ever had.
Maybe it has taken 100 days or more of lockdown and awfulness to make me fully understand just how bloody grateful I am for everything that cricket gives to me.
But I truly am.
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