"Australia were on the way up; no one was ever sure where England were going"
The Cricketer asked our writers and former players to reflect on their introduction to the world's most famous Test series.
Today it's the turn of our assistant editor James Coyne.
What is your first Ashes memory? Let us know @TheCricketerMag or email: website@thecricketer.com
First – a confession. It was not the Ashes that kindled my love of cricket. It was not even the Ashes that kindled my love of Test cricket.
I was born in June 1985, so I suppose I classify as a millennial. But I have always felt old before my time – and, we have to be honest here, a love of cricket does not help in that regard. And sometimes I wonder if the real dividing line between Generation X and Generation Y is those who remember when West Indies were any good at cricket.
I would have been in my last year of lower school – for some reason, Bedfordshire persisted with the tertiary system – and, as the oldest of three children, I had first dibs on the front seat in the car on the way home. If Mum and Dad popped in to the shops or to see a relative, I would hijack the car radio – off with Dad’s Al di Meola or Pat Metheny cassette, and on with Radio 4 Long Wave. Through the speakers came a far headier concoction, as far as I was concerned: the sound of conch shells, steel drums and reggae, all helpfully put into context by men with patrician tones. It was another four years before Donna Symmonds broke the TMS gender barrier, and I remember being excited about that too.
All sorts of unusual things would crop up: Chickie’s Disco, a cross-dresser called Gravy, the brilliantly-named umpire Clyde Cumberbatch… this was a little different to Jack Bannister commentating on John Emburey bowling in a sweater. I recall frequent pitch invasions, which would be true, as 1993/94 was the series when Brian Lara elevated to demi-god status. Lara, the one cricketing superstar of my childhood, passed Garry Sobers’ record the Antigua Rec. I also remember being taken aback by the appearance at Bourda of a gawky teenager called Chanderpaul, being mobbed by vaguely intoxicated men when he reached a fifty on Test debut. When you are eight years old, everyone seems old, but this lad didn’t. The most evocative thing of all, though, was Tony Cozier. Like almost everyone else, it was years later before I discovered he was white. Already cricket was informing me about the world and its complex diversity.
The Ashes, in all honesty, took longer to mean something. It may well have been because West Indies, up until that point, just seemed so much more exciting. But they were on the way down, and Australia were on the way up; no one was ever sure where England were going. Dad resolutely refused to buy Sky, and with no internet in those days, and only Ceefax and The Sunday Times for information, I was blissfully unaware of the titanic early ’90s battles between Australia and West Indies for the Frank Worrell Trophy. On the other hand, this was a time when any British child with a TV could come home from school in summer, turn on BBC1 in the lounge, and watch cricket. So I do have vague memories of watching Robin Smith and Allan Border bat in the 1993 Ashes, though I would have been blissfully unaware of the set-to between them four summers earlier. Graham Gooch’s white helmet flickers in and out; precisely when I first saw him bat, I cannot remember.
A year after England’s 1993/94 Caribbean defeat, England went to Australia. The timing of a day’s play in Australia was not so kind for someone still expected to be in bed by 8 o’clock, but I do seem to remember this 1994/95 series, mainly through reports on the Six O’Clock News and Grandstand. Perhaps this was because I was now at middle school, where a small group of us in the Year 5 cricket team – viewed with great suspicion by the mainstream for branching out from the usual obsessions of Premier League football and Sonic the Hedgehog – would take a bat and tennis ball out every break time in spring and summer term to play against a big metal fence that divided the school field from the playground.
England, now under the rule of supremo Ray Illingworth, broke the one rule touring Australia, and picked a bunch of old blokes. OK, well Gooch and Mike Gatting; Darren Gough was young and exciting. It was the swansong for those two great biffers. But what I remember was how everything just seemed so big. The Australian grounds were vast, the light brighter, their batsmen were more attacking, their TV coverage was snazzier and their commentators less restrained (presumably I can thank Tony Greig or Bill Lawry for that). I waited patiently for a glimpse of my favourite England player of the time, Chris Lewis. “I don’t think he’s playing in this game,” Dad would say. That tended to happen to England players in the 1990s.
Of course, we lost the series heavily. But I must have taken something from it, just as I had taken something from West Indies the year before. I’ve always considered it something of a miracle that I ever got in to cricket: my family were lukewarm about it, most of my friends mocked it as a sport for posh boys, and football was so dominant. But I think it must have been because it was a window into a different culture, a different climate, different sounds and lights… the sheer diversity of cricket from country to country that tells a young mind about the world in a way no other sport can.
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