Players battle through, sometimes they fade away, sometimes they come back stronger. It’s all part of the game
I
’ll be honest, I’m done in. Not feeling it. Quills deep in the red zone. This white blank page looks impossibly foreboding. I feel like I’m blinking up at a vast Eiger-shaped word document. Nine hundred words of Garamond from the summit and my crampons are made of blancmange.
You think these Spin columns are easy? I had four days in bed after the last one. I need to get out of this. I’ve been called up, but now it’s plain to see it’s not working. Should I claim Scrivener’s palsy? The yips? Desperately and repeatedly slam the laptop lid on my knuckles? Channel Allan Border to Dean Jones at Chennai in 1986? “Let’s get a proper cricket writer out here. A southerner.” Andy Bull. Tanya Aldred. Let’s be ’avin you!
But sometimes you have just got to get on with it. Deal with the situation you’re given. Ben Stokes has not made it easy to get on board with all of his words and deeds at the end of the drawn Old Trafford Test, but on the issue of cricketing substitutions, well, I’ll snatch his hand off. He described the prospect as “absolutely ridiculous” and that “there would be just too many loopholes”.
