Managing editor Matt Thacker introduces issue 48 of the Nightwatchman…
It’s mid-November and it’s minus 7 up in the north of the country. England are just back from a white-ball tour of the Caribbean, where it’s rainy season and the games were mostly scheduled for mid-afternoon (for the benefit of UK TV audiences rather than local fans), meaning that the team winning the toss pretty much won the game.
That little jaunt was sandwiched between a thrilling Test tour of Pakistan during which Joe Root became the 13th man to top his country’s all-time leading run-scorer charts, and a three-match five-day series against New Zealand. Then it’s a quick break for Christmas, and off to India for some more white-ball hit-and-giggle in a warm-up for the Champions Trophy, a tournament due
to take place in Pakistan in February.
All this to say, it’s pretty mad and lawless right now out there in cricket-land. With climate change an ever-more obvious factor and money-spinning short-form tournaments marginalising the red-ball game, the end-of-days feeling about the entire sport is getting harder and harder to avoid.
We like to think that in our little corner of the cricket world at least, there is a sense of calm, of respect for the sport’s past and of wonder at its myriad glories. And so, as ever, we aim to bring you 140 pages of the good stuff.
We go back to a successful Ashes tour 70 years ago and one that was significantly less so 20 years later. And if Australia proved to be no country for old men back then, why did the selectors persist with their Dad’s Army policy for much of the 70s?, asks Cris Andrews. One of those picks, Brian Close – a man who played for his country both as a teenager and a 40-something – is under Stephen Chalke’s spotlight while Tony Greig, the young upstart around all these grizzled pros, gets the Luke Alfred fiction treatment as he just about avoids getting a beating in the Caribbean.
Winter is a time for reflection for the cricket-lover and this issue has it in abundance. Two poems address the end of the season and the end of a career, while John Stone looks back on a time when you could whistle down the pit to find a quick bowler. Meanwhile, Huw Richards grieves for the passing of St Helens as a venue for cricket and Kris Pathirana finds echoes of his own struggles in Graham Thorpe’s tragic death.
And we stop off at plenty of cricketing outposts as ever, with a shipwreck in New Zealand, the discovery of oil in Guyana, the story of how Martin Crowe’s Cricket Max nearly made it, trouble in Bangladesh, and the Ashes-ambivalent David Frith talking us through his two heroes.
As ever, if you would like to write for us – poetry and prose accepted! – or just let us know what you think about the Nightwatchman, good or bad, please get in touch at editor@thenightwatchman.net. We read every submission (but promise nothing) that fulfils our criteria: that articles should touch on cricket (however tangentially) and are original, well-written and thought-provoking.
Matt Thacker, December 2024