DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 16

The Bosses Cricket Team

Passmore Reserve was never officially home in the way a mortgage or a council lease might make a place home, but for St Thomas Cricket Club it was close enough. It had the sort of tired suburban sporting-ground feel that made cricket seem both important and faintly ridiculous at the same time, with boundary lines that were more suggestion than law, patches of grass doing their best, and enough familiar faces around the place to make a bloke feel he had accidentally joined a village. On that day it was our grand final against Terrey Hills, our arch rival, and Mother Nature had already had her say by turning what should have been a proper match into a thirty-five-over-a-side slog-a-thon to decide the premiers. All the relevance of being a country kid with ability above most of the men around me was suddenly gathered in one afternoon, even if at the time I would have hidden that thought under a joke, an appeal, or a swing of the bat that looked far more carefree than it felt.

There is something both magnificent and unfair about a shortened cricket final. All the patient work of a season gets squeezed into a form of controlled panic, and suddenly the ordinary rhythms of cricket are replaced by a sort of democratic madness where every over looks more important than it probably is. Bowlers think they are assassins, batsmen think they are heroes, captains think they are generals, and everyone else pretends to know exactly what the par score might be while privately guessing like the rest of us. It is not the most scientific way to decide a premiership, but cricket has always had a gift for dressing up accident as tradition and then expecting grown men to take it seriously.

I was still young enough to be the kid in the side, even though by then I had stopped feeling like a passenger. I had come from the country with a game that had been built in paddocks, yards, school grounds and places where a boy learned to bowl at a stump because no one else was around to hold a bat. I was not polished in the way grade cricketers could be polished, but I knew how to compete, and there are some things you learn in isolation that coaching nets cannot quite provide. That sounds like a simple sporting virtue when men say it around dressing rooms, but compete was never a simple word for me, because the contest outside me was usually only the visible part of a much harder one going on within.

Men use that word as if everyone means the same thing by it. It can mean running in harder, swinging bigger, glaring more fiercely, or convincing yourself that courage is best measured by how loudly you invite pain. I had seen enough of that version of sport, and I had probably performed a bit of it myself when the young male brain was at its most underdeveloped and therefore most confident. But my understanding of competition had less to do with flailing bats, bouncer-riddled overs or grand gestures made for spectators, and more to do with getting close enough to defeat to feel its breath and refusing to let it have the final word.

The real competition was often inside me, and it had been there long before Bruce and St Thomas gave me a cricket ball and a place in the side. It was the fight between fear and pride, anger and control, loneliness and performance, the need to belong and the refusal to beg for belonging. I had learned early that nobody was coming to rescue the boy bowling at a stump in the yard, so the boy had better work out how to make the stump mean something. That was not heroic in the way old sporting stories like to become heroic after the third retelling, but it was a kind of education, and like many educations it was more useful than pleasant.

That was where the death-or-glory boy came from, though not in the theatrical sense people sometimes imagine. The glory was not produced by standing there foolishly while someone tried to knock your head off, or by swinging across the line as if the scoreboard had insulted your mother. It came from the near-death experiences of sport, the moments when the game was almost gone, the innings was almost lost, the batsman was almost through you, or the room had almost decided what you were worth. A fight to the death was normal to me, not because I wanted drama, but because so many small things in life had already felt like survival tests wearing ordinary clothes.

Country isolation teaches a boy strange lessons. It teaches him that effort is private before it is public, that disappointment does not need an audience, and that being overlooked is often answered not by complaint but by becoming too useful to ignore. It can also leave a boy with habits that later need some civilising, because a mind raised on private contests can begin to treat every room as if it is quietly keeping score. I do not present that as an entirely healthy thing, but it explains why cricket suited me so well, because on a cricket field at least the keeping of score was not imagined.

So when I say I knew how to compete, I do not mean I had mastered some noble sporting code. I mean I knew how to stay in a contest after comfort had left, how to use stubbornness when elegance was unavailable, and how to turn being underestimated into a kind of fuel. That was not always pretty, and I doubt it made me the most relaxing young man in the world to captain, employ, coach or sit beside for too long. It was effective, though, and effectiveness has a habit of being mistaken for confidence by people watching from a safe distance.

On the cricket field, that inner conflict finally had a lawful place to go. I could run in hard, bowl at the top of off, test a batsman’s patience, hold an innings together, or throw the bat when the moment allowed it, and nobody needed to know how much of it had been rehearsed in emptier places. The game gave shape to something that otherwise might have looked like restlessness, impatience, or too much mind trapped in too small a room. For a young bloke already learning the art of making himself acceptable in offices and other adult spaces, that was no small mercy.

That day at Passmore Reserve, everything that had been forming for several years seemed to arrive in one place. I took five wickets, top-scored with the bat, and sent several balls over the fence with the sort of abandon that is easier to enjoy when it is working. I was not thinking in grand life patterns at the time, because nobody in the middle of a cricket final pauses between balls to consider the philosophical significance of being accepted through performance. Looking back, though, I can see how much of my life was already sitting there in whites, disguised as a Saturday afternoon sporting contest.

When I played well, we usually won, and when I did not, which thankfully was not often, the result became a much more nervous matter. That sounds arrogant if stated too cleanly, so perhaps it is better to say that I carried a fair bit of the load in a team that had started to expect me to carry it. I was young enough to be laughed at, old enough to be relied upon, and good enough that the laughter usually came with a kind of permission attached. It is a strange form of belonging when the room lets you be ridiculous because it also expects you to save it.

That was one of cricket’s little gifts to me. In most rooms, being young meant being managed, corrected, tested, or quietly placed somewhere below the salt, especially if your thoughts arrived too quickly or your mouth ran a little ahead of diplomacy. On the cricket field, if you could take wickets, make runs, hold catches and change a match, the room had to make space for you, even if the room was wearing whites and calling you a smartarse. The insult, in that setting, often came with affection attached, which is one of the stranger privileges granted by sport.

St Thomas was not a grand club in the sense that people write histories about clubs. It was not full of famous names, selectors in blazers, or promising young men being carefully groomed by wise old coaches who had seen it all before. It was a club of Bruce, his brother, and a marvellous collection of often eclectic characters who seemed to have arrived by accident and stayed because cricket gave them somewhere to be on a Saturday. There was something beautifully democratic about that, although democracy in a cricket club still depends rather heavily on who has remembered the scorebook, the stumps and the sandwiches.

Bruce being involved mattered, because he belonged to both sides of my life at that point. He was part of the professional world I had stepped into, the world of accounting offices, clients, deadlines, files, ledgers and the slow discovery that I had somehow fallen into a trade I did not yet fully understand. Then, on the weekend, he became part of another world altogether, a world where hierarchy loosened, ability announced itself more honestly, and the bloke who might be the boss from Monday to Friday could still misfield at square leg like the rest of us. That did not remove the hierarchy completely, but it gave it a limp and made it easier to live with.

Playing in that side was an escape of sorts, though not an escape from responsibility. It was an escape from the forms of adulthood that had begun to close around me before I had quite decided whether I was ready for them. During the week I was learning to become useful in an office full of men with degrees, certificates and more years behind them, but on Saturday I could run in with the ball in my hand and know exactly what my job was. There is great comfort in that kind of clarity, particularly when Monday to Friday is already teaching you that the adult world can make even simple matters unnecessarily foggy.

A batsman was either beaten or he was not, a catch was either held or dropped, and a scorebook had a brutal honesty that no office discussion could soften. Cricket contains plenty of excuses, of course, because cricketers are human and therefore cowardly when necessary, but the ball still has a way of recording the truth before the mouth can improve it. That appealed to me more than I would have known how to say at the time. In the office, the truth could be delayed, softened, explained away or filed under a heading no one wanted to open, but on the field the truth often lay in the grass beside a bail.

I had a season where I took fifty-five wickets at an average of five and a half. Even now, I look at those numbers and feel the young bloke in me trying not to grin too widely, because false modesty is just vanity wearing a cardigan. Figures like that do not happen by accident, and they certainly do not happen because everyone else has agreed to make you feel better about yourself. They happen because something in you knows how to keep asking the same uncomfortable question of batsmen until enough of them answer badly.

It was not just the wickets, though the wickets helped. There were times I blazed with the bat, and I liked those moments because every cricketer likes the clean sound of a ball leaving the middle and heading towards trouble. More often, though, I had to hold the innings together, because someone had to resist the collective urge to turn a modest target into a police incident. That was less glamorous, but it probably told more truth about the player I was and the man I was becoming.

Cricket kept teaching me lessons without asking whether I wanted tuition. The spectacular moments were remembered more easily, but the real work was often restraint, judgement and the unglamorous business of not getting out. It is strange how early that pattern appeared in my life, because professionally I would spend decades doing much the same thing for other people’s messes: absorbing pressure, reading danger, slowing the panic, and trying to stop everyone swinging across the line. On Saturday it was called batting responsibly, while during the week it would eventually be called accounting, although that description was nowhere near as honest or as entertaining.

On the field, the traits that made me difficult in other rooms were easier to forgive. Impatience could be called competitiveness, bluntness could be called honesty, and overthinking could be disguised as setting a field. The joker in me could play with boyish abandon because there was no reason to stop him, or at least no reason anyone could easily enforce while I was taking wickets and making runs. Winning allowed a certain amount of leeway, and I was never slow to occupy whatever leeway had been provided.

That may be the closest I came, in those years, to being free inside a room. I could say things there that might have landed badly in an office, because on a cricket field they were wrapped in banter, sweat, effort and shared purpose. I could be cheeky, loud, cutting, ridiculous or triumphant, and the older men could roll their eyes while still throwing me the ball when the match tightened. It was not complete freedom, because no room gives that to anyone for long, but it was close enough for a young man who had already learned to edit himself elsewhere.

There is a particular kind of belonging that comes from being useful. It is warm enough to keep you going, but it is not always the same as being known. You are welcomed for what you can do, and sometimes that is enough for the afternoon, especially when the afternoon includes wickets, runs, laughter and the shared stupidity of taking suburban cricket more seriously than the rest of the world thinks it deserves. It does not mean anyone has seen the whole machine running underneath, and perhaps it is unfair to expect a cricket team to do that when most of us were flat out remembering who was umpiring from which end.

I did not think of it that way then, because at that age I was still collecting forms of acceptance without examining the fine print. I thought I had found a place among men who were older than me, and in many ways I had. They laughed with me, relied on me, cursed me when I deserved it, and gave me the sort of room that young men usually have to wait years to occupy. The trouble, if there is trouble in a good thing, is that performance becomes its own argument, and once performance is making the argument for you, no one is terribly interested in hearing the more complicated evidence.

Play well and the questions stop. Take wickets and nobody asks too much about the rest of you, because the rest of you is not required while the scorebook is still open. I do not say that as an accusation against the team, because cricket clubs are not designed to conduct psychological audits between innings, and no one wants the opening bowler explaining his lifelong relationship with belonging while a batsman is taking guard. Still, the pattern was there, and it would follow me into professional life in different clothes.

There were times when we came up against better cricketers, or at least men who arrived with better credentials. Rob Honeyman was one of them, a former first-grade stalwart of Manly and a bowler of genuine note. His control with the ball was legendary, and not legendary in the way clubs exaggerate the past after three beers, but legendary in the more annoying sense that he could actually put the ball where he wanted. A bloke like that does not merely bowl at you; he asks questions, and he keeps asking them in the same calm tone until you either answer properly or give him your wicket out of embarrassment.

Against our side, Honeyman had every reason to believe he could roll us cheaply. That is what good bowlers do when they sense a team is one mistake away from becoming a procession, and suburban teams are very good at turning one mistake into six if provided with the right encouragement. I remember thwarting him, though not with the fireworks a younger vanity might prefer. I farmed the strike, took what was there, protected those who needed protecting, and made him bowl himself towards a standstill.

It was not heroic in the schoolboy sense of heroism, because there was no grand assault, no reckless charge, and no glorious collapse in the name of entertainment. It was a different kind of satisfaction, the satisfaction of seeing the shape of the problem before it swallowed everyone else. A dangerous opponent had to be managed, not admired, and sometimes the most aggressive thing you can do in cricket is refuse to be hurried. That sort of innings does not always make the best story in the rooms afterwards, but it can be the reason there is still a story worth telling.

The bloke who hits three sixes gets remembered, even if he also donates his wicket in an act of civic vandalism. The bloke who keeps the dangerous bowler at bay can be appreciated, but appreciation has a quieter voice than applause. Still, I think that was part of why the team came to trust me, because they knew I could enjoy myself, and heaven knows I did not always suffer in silence, but they also knew I understood the match. Beneath the jokes, the country-boy bravado and the occasional impatience, I could read a game unfolding and feel the wall before the rest of the side had even noticed the bricks.

Cricket was kind to that part of my mind. It gave pattern recognition something physical to do, and it let me make decisions without having to write a memo explaining the obvious. If a batsman was late on the ball, if a fieldsman needed shifting, if a bowler was tiring, if a chase had to be slowed or accelerated, the answer existed in the game before anyone needed to hold a meeting about it. That is probably why I loved it so much, because it spared me the indignity of having to soften every conclusion before it could be accepted.

The ball either swung, seamed, bounced, stopped or disappeared, and no committee could vote it into being something else. Bowling well was not soft or diplomatic, and a batsman who had just lost his stumps was rarely in a position to argue that I should have expressed myself more gently. There was a purity in that, even if purity is a dangerous word to use about a game that can still produce arguments about whether a catch carried when half the field was forty metres away. Cricket could be absurd, but its absurdity had rules, which is more than can be said for some offices.

One of the great St Thomas moments came when the scores were tied and a loss was looming. Those are the moments in cricket when every man suddenly becomes very interested in his shoelaces, the far boundary, or the behaviour of passing birds. The rival side needed only one run, their last wicket was at the crease, and the match had reached the sort of point where theory is useless and someone has to hold the ball. Bruce threw it to me, which was either an act of faith or evidence that everyone else had successfully avoided eye contact.

There was no elaborate plan, no cinematic silence, and no great speech from the captain about honour, courage or the proud traditions of St Thomas. Bruce simply resigned himself to one final throw of the dice, I ran in, and first ball I dismissed him. That became one of those iconic moments in St Thomas lore, and every club needs a few of those to justify the hours spent pretending suburban cricket is a matter of public consequence. I do not remember every technical detail of the dismissal, and perhaps that is just as well, because memory is tempted to improve its own highlights when no umpire remains alive in the imagination to contradict it.

What I remember is the sudden release and the absurd joy of it. I remember the feeling that, for once, the wall had been seen, named and avoided in the space of six deliveries less five. Those moments feed a young man because they give him evidence that he is not imagining his usefulness, and that his confidence is not merely a personality defect waiting to be corrected by someone older. In ordinary life, especially in the office, I could still be the youngest man in the room, but out there I was not young in the same limiting way.

Then there was the day I took nine wickets in an innings, which sounds like one of those claims old cricketers make when the scorebook has conveniently gone missing. The scorebook existed, though, and the wickets were real enough. What made it even more absurd was that my opening bowling partner had done the same thing the week before, on a weekend I had missed for some reason that has disappeared into the fog. One week one opening bowler takes nine, the next week the other does the same, and suddenly the club has enough material to bore innocent people for years.

I was annoyed only in the way competitive people are annoyed by excellence that occurs in their absence. Even when you admire a teammate, you may still quietly resent the timing of his glory, particularly when it leaves you with the feeling that fate has been handing out miracles while you were somewhere else. Taking nine wickets is a peculiar experience, because at first you are just bowling well, then you are having a good day, then people start counting in that dangerous way people count when they should keep their mouths shut. By the time you get close, every ball has more weight than it deserves, and the game becomes less about cricket than about not letting the story escape.

I suppose that is why the grand final at Passmore Reserve stays so strongly in my mind. It was not just that I performed well in a final, though there is no point pretending that part did not matter. It was that the day gathered so many threads together: the country kid, the young accountant, the joker, the performer, and the outsider who had found a side door into belonging. Against Terrey Hills, with a premiership squeezed into thirty-five overs a side, all those versions of me seemed to be running between the wickets together, which is a crowded way to bat but not a bad description of how I often lived.

Against Terrey Hills, I knew what the rivalry meant. They were not just another opponent, because clubs like ours need enemies to make the season feel properly shaped. A grand final against an arch rival gives even the most modest competition the air of a national emergency, and by the time the toss is done everyone has quietly decided that defeat will require several decades of explanation. That may sound ridiculous to anyone who has not played club cricket, but anyone who has played it knows that ridicule and sincerity are often padded up together.

The shortened format suited my younger self more than I would have admitted. It suited the boy who enjoyed impact, who liked the crackle of a contest, and who found comfort in being able to bend a match by force of performance. It also suited the less patient parts of me, the parts that preferred action to waiting and wanted the question answered now rather than after a committee had met to consider the terms of reference. Batting was different, because batting asks a man to manage his own appetite, and the appetite to dominate can become a very quick way to sit down again.

I liked hitting the ball hard, and when I sent those balls over the fence in the final there would have been no shortage of boyish pleasure in the swing. Yet even there the larger job remained, because top-scoring in a shortened final is not only about enjoying the shots that fly. It is also about surviving the ones that tempt you towards stupidity, and I had enough inner stupidity of my own not to require further encouragement from the bowler. That, too, was part of competing, because the opponent is not always the man holding the ball.

The team around me gave me room to be both serious and ridiculous. I could stir, joke, exaggerate, appeal too loudly, and behave like the young bloke who had not yet learned the full adult art of keeping himself dull. Because I delivered, a certain amount of leeway followed, and in cricket leeway is often the nearest thing to emotional understanding. It was not that they all sat around admiring the complexity of my inner life, which would have been alarming behaviour in a cricket club anyway, but they made room for the package because the package took wickets.

I knew, even then, that the old boys club did not operate in quite the same way on our cricket field. It existed in grade cricket, of course, and it existed in selection rooms, practice requirements and networks of familiarity, but inside our Saturday side the rule was plainer. If you helped win games, you belonged, and the scoreboard was a far less snobbish judge than many people in suits. That suited me beautifully, because winning allowed room for eccentricity, and I had enough eccentricity to require a zoning permit.

The team could put up with the joker, the loud mouth, the overexcited appeal and the occasional blunt assessment because the same package also came with wickets, runs and a fair chance of dragging us out of trouble. There was generosity in that, and I do not want to make it sound smaller than it was. Those men gave me a place when I was still learning how to stand in adult life without either apologising too much or announcing myself too loudly. They let me be young in their company, and that is not nothing.

But there was also a limit to the form of acceptance sport provides. It accepts the visible self first, the running, diving, hitting, bowling, laughing self. It accepts the part that can be measured by a scorebook, and it is often less interested in the internal arithmetic that produces the performance. That was not their fault, because a cricket team has enough to worry about without examining the private machinery of its opening bowler, but the bargain was still there.

I could be accepted by being useful, forgiven by being effective, and given room by proving that the room benefited from letting me in. That is a dangerous bargain if you mistake it for love, but it is a powerful one if you are young and hungry for a place. I do not think I mistook it entirely, though I probably wanted it to mean more than it could. The boy in me had always looked for doors into belonging, and cricket kept opening one wide enough for me to run through with a new ball in my hand.

There was a freedom in being the jester, too. In the office, a joke could be misread, stored away, or used later as evidence that I lacked proper seriousness. On the cricket field, the joke belonged to the weather, the grass, the appeals, the dodgy umpiring, the dropped catches and the general absurdity of grown men giving up Saturdays to chase a red ball. I could laugh there without having to explain the machinery behind the laugh, and that mattered more than I knew at the time.

Humour was already becoming one of the ways I managed the pressure of being too much for some rooms and not enough for others. If I could make them laugh, I could take the edge off the speed of my own mind and perhaps hide the fact that I had already seen three consequences past the one being discussed. That trick worked well enough to become dangerous, because every useful trick begins as survival and ends by becoming expected. In the cricket team, at least, the joke and the performance could live beside each other without one entirely cancelling the other.

The bosses cricket team, as I think of it now, was a bridge between sport and the professional world. It let the accounting office and the cricket field overlap in a way that softened both, and Bruce could be boss, captain, teammate, accomplice and witness, depending on the hour and the state of the match. It gave me a way of belonging to older men without having to wait for age to grant permission. It also gave me a way to prove myself in a language nobody needed to translate into office manners.

That is why those St Thomas years sit so warmly in memory, even with the ache attached. They belonged to a time when I was still young enough to believe that performance might solve most things. If I was good enough, funny enough, useful enough and willing enough to carry the load, perhaps the room would not only let me in but eventually understand why I had needed the door opened in the first place. It is a generous thought from a young man, and a slightly heartbreaking one from an older man who now knows how many rooms will accept your usefulness without ever asking what it cost.

Of course, cricket also showed me the cost of paths not taken. I played for St Thomas because I was good at cricket, and because the club gave me a way to keep playing inside the life I had already been forced to build. My HSC result had meant night school, TAFE, work, wages, and the need to keep myself moving towards a regular salary with some chance of increase. That practical decision did not leave much room for grade cricket or higher-level football, even though the part of me that still wanted the larger test did not simply pack its bag and leave politely.

I played cricket because I was good at it. I played with Bruce, his brother and the rest because they gave me a team, and because on those Saturdays I could let more of myself loose than most rooms allowed. But I also played there because life had already narrowed the road, and the cost of earning, studying and surviving was that some higher doors in sport closed before I had a proper chance to push against them. That is not the same as saying I would have walked through every one of those doors, but it is saying that I wanted the chance to find out.

Grade cricket sat out there like an unanswered question. It was not a fantasy in the childish sense, because I had played enough cricket against enough good players to know I was not kidding myself completely. I knew there were better cricketers around, and I knew grade cricket would have tested me in ways Saturday suburban cricket could not, but that was exactly the point. I wanted the test, not because I was certain I would conquer it, but because part of me needed to know what happened when the room was bigger and the opposition stopped being polite.

The trouble was that talent does not get you to training on time when night school is waiting. Ability does not pay rent, buy petrol, keep a job, or explain to an employer why cricket should be allowed to reorganise the working week. I had my HSC result behind me, TAFE in front of me, and a regular salary that mattered more than any romantic idea of a sporting pathway. That is a dull sentence to write, but a lot of life is decided by dull sentences, and the dull ones often have more power than the dramatic ones.

The old boys networks around higher sport did not always say no directly. They did not need to, because the requirements did the work for them. You had to be there, be seen, train regularly, fit the pattern, join the system, and make yourself available in a way that assumed life had left you enough space to do so. Mine had not, and there is a particular frustration in knowing that the door might not have been locked, but the road to it had been washed away.

Do not get me wrong, I actually tried to push at the door. When I first came to Sydney, I tried out for three separate grade clubs, although Sydney University came much later in life, by which time the question had already changed. St George and Mosman invited me into their train-on squads, and those invitations said something important, even if they did not become the path I wanted. They said I was not imagining the ability, not completely anyway, and that the country kid who had learned the game through stubbornness, loneliness and repeated effort could still make people look twice.

I had played in winning Southern Tablelands Under 21 competition teams for Yass, and I had been picked in Western Division schoolboy teams, so the idea of testing myself higher was not some fantasy stitched together from backyard glory and selective memory. I had reasons to believe there might be more there, and reasons to wonder whether the better stage might reveal the better player or expose the limits I did not yet know how to name. That is what a proper test is meant to do, and that is why missing it properly can gnaw away long after the sensible explanation has been delivered. The sensible explanation may be correct, but correctness is not always enough to restore esteem.

The invitations should have lifted me, and in one sense they did. Being asked into train-on squads at St George and Mosman was not nothing, particularly for a young bloke trying to prove he had not left all his worth behind in the country. But being invited close enough to see the next room is not the same as being able to live in it, and the train-on squad is a hopeful phrase that also contains a quiet warning. Turn up, keep turning up, be available, let us see you, fit the machine, and prove not only that you can play but that your life can be arranged around being seen.

I could not give the machine what it wanted without taking it from work, study and the basic need to keep a salary moving forward. That made the invitation feel less like a doorway than a reminder of what life had already spent on my behalf. It added to the fall of esteem in ways I probably did not understand at the time, because school had already marked me down publicly, work had made me the young bloke trying to prove usefulness among men with certificates on the wall, and now cricket offered a test that I could see but not properly reach. It is a strange thing to know you may be good enough to be considered, but not free enough to be chosen, because the rejection is no longer clean enough to argue with.

So the old boys network was not always a bloke in a blazer blocking the gate with a clipboard and a smug expression, though no doubt that version existed often enough. Sometimes it was more ordinary and more brutal than that. It was training nights, transport, wages, study, exhaustion, the need to live, and the slow erosion of a young man’s belief that ability alone could drag him through every locked door. That was a hard lesson for someone who had spent so much of his life turning usefulness into a passport.

So I played where I could play, and I played with everything I had. St Thomas gave me cricket that mattered inside the life I was actually living, even if it was not the ultimate examination I might once have wanted. I could take wickets, make runs, win matches, carry innings, and still turn up to work and study because that was the bargain life had struck without asking for my signature. It was not a bad bargain, but it was not a free one either.

By the time I had a chance to test myself more seriously, age had started doing what age does. It does not arrive with a trumpet and a formal notice, announcing that the shoulder will now be less reliable and the reflexes slightly less generous. It simply removes a fraction here and a fraction there, until the mind that still knows what should happen has to negotiate with a body that has become less enthusiastic about proving the point. That is one of sport’s quieter cruelties, because the part of you that understands the game best often arrives after the part of you that could most fully execute it has begun to leave.

I may have been a better cricketer in my head later, calmer in some ways, more tactically aware, and less captured by the raw urge to win every contest by force of will. But cricket is not played in the head alone, and by then the ultimate test came with a small asterisk attached: yes, but not quite the version of me that should have been here. I do not know how far I might have gone, and that honesty matters because regret has a habit of turning every missed road into a highway to glory. I might have thrived in grade cricket, or I might have found a ceiling quickly and been forced to admit that the paddock-made competitor still had rough edges the better players would punish.

What bothers me is not that I was denied a guaranteed triumph, because no such thing existed. What bothers me is that I never properly got to ask the question when the answer would have been fairest. That is why St Thomas carries both warmth and ache in memory, because it was a gift, a release, a place to belong, and a stage where I could be young, useful, cocky, funny and occasionally bloody difficult with enough wickets to excuse the inconvenience. It was also the place where a larger sporting possibility was converted into a smaller but survivable one, and somewhere underneath the laughter and the scorebook was the knowledge that survival had already made one selection on my behalf.

The grand final at Passmore Reserve remains bright because we won something more than a match, at least for a while. We won the right to believe that our odd collection of men had become a serious side, and I won another small argument with the boy who had once wondered where he fitted. Yet even in that brightness, there was a shadow I could not fully name then, because the same talent that gave me a place also reminded me of the places I could not go. I played the cricket available to me, and I loved much of it, but the available life is never quite the same as the possible life, even when the available life has given you five wickets, a top score, a premiership afternoon and enough stories to keep an old cricketer dangerous around innocent company.