Ashes defines more than just cricketers’ lives

Like smell (I’m told), sport offers an immediate cue to lifelong memories of time, place and people. Great sport is meaningful in itself but more so because it offers context: it allows us to remember what we were doing, who we were with and where we were when Ben Stokes, for example, cut Pat Cummins to the boundary to win the Headingley Test four years ago, or when Bob Willis took the final wicket, arms raised and wheeling away in triumph, at the same ground in 1981.

In a rapidly changing cricketing landscape, the Ashes is a constant. Five Tests, every four years, home and away alternately, a gold standard of top-class sport. For many readers, I imagine, the contest represents a simple way of measuring and accounting for the trajectory of their lives, from childhood, to maturity, to old age. The clockwork regularity of the Ashes offers us opportunity by which we can remember significant moments – births, deaths, anniversaries, friends, family get-togethers and so on.

Recently Martin Tyler, the football commentator, contacted me on just this theme. He said he could remember as a boy going with his grandad to the first day of the Lord’s Test in 1953, 70 years ago: the gates were locked before the start, and he had to sit on grass just behind the boundary in front of the old Mound Stand. He was seven or eight years old, the same age as my childhood trip to Old Trafford, and the age at which memories start to lock in.

Then he remembered watching on TV later in the summer as Denis Compton hit the winning runs at the Oval to seal the Ashes, the first time for a generation. He had memories of Jim Laker’s 19 wickets at Old Trafford in 1956; of Derek Underwood causing havoc on a wet ‘un at the Oval in 1968, and, being a great mate of Willis, the 1981 Ashes was a memory like no other. He will not be alone.

Two of our writers, Elgan Alderman and Owen Slot, have been working on long pieces about the winning moments at Edgbaston and Headingley in the 2005 and 2019 Ashes, the one about the 2019 match we published this week. No doubt the memories of many of our readers can stretch much further back but we asked them to send in their memories of what they were doing at those moments in time, and I took a sneak of some of the replies.

Daniel Ogunshakin, 41, from Manchester, recalled being a divemaster on the Thai island of Koh Tao in the summer of 2005, watching the series in a bar owned by an Australian friend of his. When Michael Kasprowicz gloved Steve Harmison down the leg side to Geraint Jones, he said the owner of the bar immediately shut the place down out of disappointment, forcing them to seek celebratory drinks elsewhere.

James Davies, 31, from Hertfordshire, remembered being in such a state of frenzied nervousness with his brother-in-law at Edgbaston that day that they made a pact to drink a bottle of HP sauce if England won. They followed through on the pledge. Alex Morgan, 47, from Kingston upon Thames, remembered driving through the New Forest, on a quiet and picturesque road, woods either side, and ruining the tranquil English scene by blaring his horn when the moment came.

Of 2019, Tom, 37, from Twickenham, recalled watching the Stokes denouement on a phone screen with three friends outside a bar by Avignon Cathedral, having given away tickets for the day as a friend was getting married in France. “It’s one of my greatest regrets that I missed being there,” he writes, “but still a memory to cherish.” Aiden, 45, from Harrogate went to every day of the Headingley Test, sitting in the front row of the old East Stand. When the winning moment came, he hugged strangers and danced a jig. “We knew we had seen something extraordinary,” he writes.

There were many more shared after we published Slot’s piece on Headingley. Thinking of my own Ashes memories, there is the winter of 1974-75 first of all, watching the highlights (would it have been the news or a special highlights programme?) in the lounge with my dad and asking him why England’s batsmen were not getting forward to Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. Then, in 1977, leaping off the sofa at my grandad’s, spilling some food, when Derek Randall caught a skier at Headingley to win the Ashes. He did a cartwheel, too, but I don’t remember that.

There was ‘81, of course, and Lillee’s bright yellow headband, as he came running up the hill at Headingley, which I watched one day live from the old Western Terrace. The end of the Manchester Test of ‘81 was spent listening to the car radio waiting to get a ferry back from a family camping holiday in France. When Chris Tavare and Geoff Miller combined with a parried catch at Melbourne in 1982, as the match went to the wire, I was listening to the radio under my duvet.

Like Stuart Broad, I’ve voided every Ashes series defeat in which I played, which means the entirety of my career between 1989 and 2001.

On the other side of the fence again, post retirement, I remember glibly saying a cheery good morning to Nasser Hussain on the first morning at Brisbane in 2002 and wondering why he had ignored me (he hadn’t, of course, but was consumed in the moment, blinkered to all else – a quick reminder not to forget what it’s like in the middle of it). When I presented the urn to Michael Vaughan on the presentation podium at the Oval in 2005, I was slightly on tenterhooks, it being the day my daughter was due (she held off for a week, helpfully).

I could go on, but then so can we all. Whether you have played in it or watched it, the Ashes will spark a host of memories that have nothing to do with cricket: good memories, bad memories, happy and sad. It would be good to read some more of yours.