My year of watching and covering the game
2021 featured lots of early starts, memorable conversations, a new cricket format - and a fair bit of golf
5am, January 15, 2021
The kettle boils and Joe Root sweeps. The tea brews and Joe Root cuts. The toaster pops and Joe Root drives. The England captain is on his way to 228 in Galle, a place that may as well have been on another planet from the dank winter morning at home in London. I tuck in and so does Root. Jonny Bairstow plays nicely for 47, Dan Lawrence - strong through the leg side and cock-of-the-walk - puts together 73. Sri Lanka aren't very good. England end up winning by seven wickets.
These early mornings are tough. Root is run out for 186. I move the dial on the underfloor heating to 22 degrees. England win by six wickets. Root says the Sri Lankans are a good side and difficult to beat at home. Really? Whatever - his batting is sublime. Work done during the days of lockdown to eradicate the faults that creep into a busy man's game has paid off handsomely.
The sound of the alarm truly shocks me. Shower, shave, dress and go. A car whisks me to the Times building, which is situated between Borough Market and the Shard. The night is bitterly cold. Bang on 3.30am London time, Root wins Kohli's toss of the coin, announces that England will bat and is soon walking to the wicket where he makes another double-hundred. So this is what Australians felt like when Bradman carried all before him. In Chennai, with the stadium empty, Root plays an innings of such complexity, such mastery, that it seems almost transformational. Indeed, England go on to win by 227 runs - a barely believable margin against a team as good as India.
British Airways flight 54 to Chennai, where the Covid cases are rising fast. I check in at the Taj Coromandel and am taken to my nice room and told that the front desk will keep the key. This, then, is one week of quarantine proper. Good fun too. Lots of music - Springsteen and Dylan, yes, the Beatles, of course, and a raft of contemporary stuff introduced to me by my 15-year-old daughter whose crush on Harry Styles does not prevent her from exploring other avenues. Olivia Rodrigo, Paolo Nutini and Lana Del Rey are very good. All by my lonely self I've discovered a band called Wolf Alice, for whom I have developed my own crush. Two mates email me the task of picking 70 favourite songs to join hands with theirs and become a playlist for anyone interested. So I go to work. In breaks between guitar solos, I read Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre and The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne - both compelling and rather brilliant - and set up a circuit-gym thing, which I stick to for an hour each day.
Less than three weeks later I have left the country. As the number Covid cases went through the roof, India was placed on the UK's "red list" for incoming travel. That, and a personal issue that needed urgent assistance, saw me home few days before the tournament was suspended indefinitely. In the rush to beat the red-list deadline, I leave my phone in a Chennai cab. That's the phone with flight details, e-tickets, essential Covid documents, etc. Don't ask. I make it home 22 hours before the UK's ten-day-airport-hotel quarantine isolation rules kick in.
Another Zoom call with Dexter, who is looking less well at an alarming rate. For the first time he sounds croaky too and is reluctant to have his usual large whisky. I don't give up my gin. He changes his mind on the scotch. We have introduced mystery guests to these fortnightly frolics, among whom have been the Michaels Atherton and Vaughan (Ted says Vaughan is his favourite England captain ever) and Sir Tim Rice. On one of these calls Ted doubts that county cricket can survive as is and that the damage done to batting techniques by the attention given to the short formats of the game will, soon enough, cost England dear. Not bad for an 86-year-old, huh.
Hampshire have given me two tickets for the second day of the World Test Championship final and I zip down to the Ageas Bowl in great excitement to be a spectator at a Test match for the first time in 35 years. The last occasion was on England's 1986-87 tour of Australia, when I watched the whole of the fifth Test from the Brewongle Stand at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Now I'm in temporary seats behind the bowler at the Hilton-Hotel end of the Ageas. It's bloody cold but me and a mate have the best time. Rohit, Shubman, Kohli, Southee, Boult et al, plus a beef sandwich and a pale ale. Wonderful.
The Hundred begins and I'm chairman of Southern Brave. We lose the first two games. In the third, the first at home, James Vince makes 60 from 38 balls - thereby outwitting Liam Livingstone's 68 from 44 - and we beat Birmingham Phoenix with three balls to spare. Then we sneak a win from nowhere at Lord's and proceed to remain unbeaten to the end, when Vince lifts the trophy to the delight of surprisingly engaged fans.
I am a guest of the MCC chairman for the second England-India Test. The chairman's hospitality box at Lord's is alongside the president's. The president is, of course, Kumar Sangakkara, whose ground-breaking appointment was met with tremendous excitement. We have a jolly day and it's interesting to watch from side-on rather than down the barrel from on high in the commentary box. The game appears faster, harder, slicker, and the players leaner, quicker, stronger. Later that week I have dinner with Kumar. He likes the eight-team, four-day cricket idea too.
Ted Dexter has died. You had to have seen this guy to understand how good he was and how charismatic. At least he didn't suffer for too long. My heart goes out to his wife, Susan, who asks me to speak at the funeral. It is a polymath of a sort that I talk about, for Ted greeted Wes Hall's bouncers with the same sense of adventure that he applied to his love of racing - cars, bikes, dogs and horses - golf, flying, music and marriage. I miss him already.
Atherton calls me to say that, in the name of Covid security, England have just cancelled their two-match T20 tour to Pakistan. This is shameful, especially because Pakistan supported England with a six-week visit in the first, horror, year of Covid. Ramiz Raja, the newly appointed CEO of the Pakistan board, fires every bullet in his gun and is greeted with wild applause. England were wrong to have pulled out of South Africa late in 2020 too. Who is behind this stuff? In the Times, Athers, the paper's cricket correspondent, goes flying in, every bit as critical as Ramiz. Soon after, the chairman of the ECB, Ian Watmore, resigns.
The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland, an annual golf extravaganza for which an invitation is the moment of the year. Phew, I've got one. Each amateur plays with a European tour professional golfer for three days and the top 20 teams of two make the cut and play on the final day. My pro is a splendid Salford lad, Marcus Armitage, and a damn good player. He makes the cut in the pro event; he and I miss it in the amateur event. (Who could possibly be to blame for that?) On the first day at St Andrews we play in a four-ball group with Ian Botham - that's Lord Botham of Ravensworth, trade envoy to Australia. Next day at Carnoustie with Vaughan, and then on the third day with Shane Warne at Kingsbarns. It is such fun.
EK 006 to Dubai for the ICC T20 World Cup, which begins with another week of quarantine, but this time I've got a balcony, yay! Same rhythm - music, books, gym circuit - that includes an outside lap, of sorts. The Radisson is not the Taj, however, and its position alongside the freeway and a next-door building site makes for a thick layer of dust every day. Mind you, it's too hot to be outside for long, and anyway, that chap is suddenly back with the key and we are out, and in… to the bubble. Grr.
Raging Omicron threatens India's tour of South Africa, where I work for Supersport. BT call about the Ashes, which begins in six days, as they are planning to broadcast the first two Tests from the studio in London - off tube, as it's known - rather than take the Fox feed from Australia because Michael Vaughan is in it. They would like me on board. I can do the first Test but they don't call back. Then I hear the idea has been binned.
There is a dreadful symmetry between now and the start of the year. In a cosy dressing gown, I'm on the early tea-and-toast run in order to watch England get hammered. It's bad enough in daylight but in pitch black, with sleet hitting the windows, it's appalling. Root is again holding the fort, this time alongside a gutsy Dawid Malan, who wasn't in India. Warne is trying to appraise England's mediocrity with a balanced eye but otherwise it's all in down under.
Well, here we go again. Have checked into the Hyde Park Southern Sun in Johannesburg and had a quiet Christmas dinner with Sunny G and Mike Haysman. Since South Africa's readmission to international cricket in late 1991, India has been faithfully at their side (England, note). Tomorrow Kohli will call from Dean Elgar's toss of the coin. In Calcutta 30 years ago, Clive Rice and Mohammad Azharuddin shook hands at the toss - neither of tomorrow's captains had reached their fifth birthday - and India went on to win a low scoring one-day international by three wickets.
England have lost the Ashes in less than 12 days of completed cricket. All hell has been let loose. The front page of Sydney's Daily Telegraph has run a full-size shot of the victorious Australian team with a strap across it that reads, "Need a rapid test? Play the Poms!" Harsh but fair.
At Supersport Park in Centurion, about 35 minutes' drive from Johannesburg, Kohli wins the toss, and the match. The pitch is tricky and the Indians that bit better. Quinton de Kock announces his retirement from the Test match arena. Such a natural player and entertainer, he will be sorely missed.
Mark Nicholas, the former Hampshire captain, is a TV and radio presenter and commentator