Editor’s choice – issue 50

Managing editor Matt Thacker makes his selection from the Summer 2025 issue. We publish one article from each edition on the website, but you can see the rest if you subscribe or buy a single issue or four-issue bundle. Matt has chosen Jonathan Liew’s piece, fittingly about reaching 50.

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Jonathan Liew has been a regular presence in the pages of the Nightwatchman since our first issue back in March 2013, when Jimmy Anderson had been playing for England for a mere decade. This is his sixth piece in all, and each and every one of them has been a gem.

Matt Thacker, Summer 2025

Celebrate good times. Come on!

Jonathan Liew argues for a few more shows of emotion

You’ve reached your fifty. Well done. Great knock under tough circumstances. Obviously, under absolutely no circumstances are you to celebrate it. We have ways of doing things here. There are customs, tradition, unwritten protocols to be followed. The arms do not spread wide. The helmet, if you’re wearing one, does not come off. There will be no proud swaddle from your batting partner. 

So powerful is this force of cultural restraint that you probably don’t even realise you’re not celebrating your fifty. Indeed to the untrained eye, it will appear as if even the smallest act of commemoration – the modest bat salute, the fist bump from the partner – is being dragged out of you through a forcefield of extreme reluctance. Notice how many batters instinctively lower their heads and lower their gaze as they raise their bats, as if to say: must I, really? As if this is all just a terrific fuss about nothing, and they would much rather be getting on with something more important. 

All of which seems to encapsulate the curious status of the fifty in cricketing lore: the milestone that isn’t really a milestone, an achievement that brings crowds and dressing rooms to their feet, and yet must pass with as little acknowledgement at possible by the person achieving it. We all know the cliches. The job’s only half-done. Pretty fifties are all well and good, but nobody remembers fifties. 

And of course there is a certain truth to this; with the caveat that in a sport where every run is theoretically of equal value, these things are so often contextual. There are fifties that have won games of cricket, and hundreds that have had absolutely no bearing on the result. There are hundreds that have long since passed into oblivion, and fifties that mean the world. 

Crowds, observers, the cricketing public, instinctively get this. One of the most electrifying Test innings of the last 12 months was a half-century: the teenage Sam Konstas on debut for Australia against India on Boxing Day. He’s been swatting the great Jasprit Bumrah all over the MCG. He brings up fifty with a scampered two through square leg. The G goes nuts. The commentators go wild. You can imagine the adrenaline pumping through Konstas in that moment. And yet convention dictates that he must do nothing more ostentatious than adjusting his pads, tapping his bat to his crest and then raising it squeamishly towards the crowd, like a man showing everyone the fly he has just squashed on his newspaper. 

Or Steven Finn, gingerly proffering his bat after reaching his maiden Test half-century for England against New Zealand in 2013, indeed his first in any first-class cricket, an innings busily saving the match into the bargain. This is so clearly one of the defining moments of his international career, and it will almost certainly never happen again. Or James Anderson, who admittedly does appear to be grinning a little bit as he reaches his fifty against India at Trent Bridge in 2014. I was at that match and even now remember urging Anderson to whip the lid off, kiss the sky, milk the moment for everything it has. 

But no. Whatever the level, whatever the context, the fifty remains a kind of non-event. It doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page (cricketing ephemera deemed worthy of their own Wikipedia page: the bail, the helicopter shot, “lost ball”, the quarter-seam, the block hole). It has no cultural footprint of its own, has generated zero books, zero viral listicles, zero Wisden longreads. It casts no shadow in the game’s rich statistical forest. Nobody knows who scored most fifties in first-class cricket (you would assume it’s Jack Hobbs, and you’d be wrong; it’s Frank Woolley by a distance). Nobody knows that Joe Root is only three short of Sachin Tendulkar’s Test record of 69 unconverted fifties, a mark he should comfortably break – with an airy waft to gully and a furious punch of the bat – some time on the next Ashes tour. 

Can we do this better? Ask pretty much any batter of any repute and they will tell you that the first fifty runs of any innings are the hardest they will ever score. The early numbers are full of natural predators: slow feet, quick adaptation, the languor of the dressing room and the ravenous energy of a fielding side that more often than not has just taken a wicket. Your twenties and thirties, that’s often when new bowlers and new angles intrude. By the forties, chances are you’ve played through one interval, one break in concentration. 

There’s a reason averaging fifty is regarded as the hallmark of a legend. Getting to fifty means you’ve made it. You’ve done the hard yards. You haven’t failed. You’ll sleep soundly tonight. There have been 92,106 Test innings at the time of writing and only 17% of them get to fifty. By contrast, almost a third of fifties are converted into hundreds. If we take Test cricket as the benchmark, by strict statistical logic, a half-century should be celebrated about 58% as vigorously as a century. Alas, despite a concerted campaign to get this ratio established in both the Laws and Spirit of Cricket, MCC have long since stopped replying to my emails. 

Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is in the subcontinent where the fifty is more lavishly marked these days. Here the helmet is far more likely to come off, a broad smile unsheathed. These are players unbound by our staid traditions, our false modesties. And really there is some intrinsic essence to the fifty that only really cricket can express. The fifty break in snooker goes largely unnoticed. Milestones of fifty points in rugby or basketball pass without comment. 

But cricket does recognise the fifty, and perhaps this is because it expresses something of the maddening nuance of life itself. Its appeal likes paradoxically in its very lack of completeness, its implication of something unfinished, something good but not yet perfect, the down payment on a masterpiece yet to come. 

It can be a stepping stone or a pinnacle. Savour the achievement, savour the toil and the struggle. Or simply put it out of your mind immediately and strive for still greater things. It’s entirely up to you. This is your adventure, and you alone get to choose what it means. In all my years of playing cricket as a child and adult, my highest score remains 34 not out. I’m playing a few games this summer. If I reach fifty, you’d better believe the helmet is coming off.