Friday morning at the Oval, and the ground reverberates to a unique but not unfamiliar sound, the baritone rumble of thousands of pained groans. It was prompted by replays on the ground’s big screens of a particular kind of delivery with a very specific outcome, on this occasion bowled by Akash Deep. The ball flicked off the inside of Ben Duckett’s thigh before crashing remorselessly into, well, the next part of his anatomy that it reached, and with agonising results.
The game was paused for several minutes while the pain subsided and the opener regained his composure (the blow certainly didn’t make him at all cautious, and by the end of that one over Duckett had survived a review for lbw, skipped down the track and missed completely with a wild swing, seen a leading edge drop short of gully and reverse-scooped for six).
On Thursday evening a very different sound had been heard, Chris Woakes’ cries of pain after he landed awkwardly on his left shoulder having flicked a ball back from the boundary edge, close to the press box at the Vauxhall End. News following a scan overnight was not good, confirming a complicated dislocation. The bowler’s route to recovery is expected to take several months to navigate, thereby ruling him out of a different journey, to Australia for the Ashes. At 36 Woakes is the oldest member of England’s squad, and has reached an age when few injuries are not complicated.
Among another full house at the Oval on Friday many hundreds were sporting a white headband, being sold to raise money for the mental health charity Mind and in memory of the former Surrey and England batter Graham Thorpe on what would have been his 56th birthday. A player who brought such joy to so many followers of cricket, on this ground more than any other, he took his own life almost exactly a year ago.
In 2003 Thorpe scored 124 against South Africa in his final Test here, a knock he described as “the finest innings I’ve ever played, by a long way”. Many of the more mature members of this crowd will also have stood to applaud him to the crease, ending an absence from the England team of more than a year, and again the next day to applaud him off it. A few weeks later Thorpe was interviewed by the Guardian’s Donald McRae. “When I look at the context and circumstances surrounding that knock, I’m really proud,” he said. “It was a sweet, sweet day.” But he also spoke about “plenty of times when I’ve just said: ‘Shit, this game’s tearing me apart.’”
Cricket is not normally the kind of thing that is described as a guilty pleasure. It shares little with the likes of Emily in Paris, the latest novel off the Lee Child production line, Saturday Night by Whigfield or Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food. But while this was a glorious, compelling day of Test cricket, very much the sporting equivalent of an already delicious ice cream into which people seemed unnecessarily determined to add a variety of swirls, cookies, chews and chunks, it was impossible to watch it without being conscious of all the context it carried. Of the players past and present who were not here. Of why we were wearing those headbands.
Not long before lunch Deep dismissed Duckett and sent him on his way with a few choice words, delivered with a superficially friendly arm around his shoulder. After it Joe Root had an exchange with Prasidh Krishna – who was playing with the added pressure of being a peripheral part of this team, returning to it after missing the last two games – as a result of which the bowler was spoken to by Kumar Dharmasena, which in turn led to a series of animated conversations between the Sri Lankan umpire and a variety of Indian players, KL Rahul foremost among them.
It was hard not to think back to Shubman Gill’s justification for his own terse encounter with Duckett and Zak Crawley at Lord’s a few weeks ago: “It didn’t just come out of nowhere and we had no intention of doing it whatsoever, but you are playing a game, you are playing to win and there are a lot of emotions involved. Sometimes the emotions come out of nowhere.”
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And here we sit, in our charity headbands, watching these humans peel away their layers, expose themselves, entertain us.
Despite the irritating intervention of rain after tea this was in many ways, measured by bang and by buck, as good a day as we have had this summer. But it was one that combined the sweet and the bitter. A day of great entertainment delivered with an undercurrent of great emotion, of memories that warm us and also those that chill, of pleasure and of guilt.
