‘E
verything felt just right,” Paul Baker tells me. “It felt like the script had been written and it had come to fruition. I thought Henry Cullen was going to be involved. They started playing together, probably at under-11s. Their family lived around the corner from us and became great friends. I felt that it was going to happen.”
It had to be Cullen to finish the match, of course it did. They had come up through the Worcestershire pathway had Cullen and Paul’s son, Josh Baker, wicketkeeper and left-arm spinner often working in combination. Now Cullen, playing as a batsman rather than wicketkeeper in the Metro Bank One-Day Cup final against Hampshire, had a job to do: not just for his club, but for a mate gone too soon.
It was Cullen who had come to pick Josh up for a second XI match on that grim morning 16 months ago, when Josh collapsed and died in the shower from sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, aged 20. “They were playing a second XI match at Bromsgrove, which is 15 minutes or so away. They’d take it in turns to drive each other to matches. They were so close,” Paul says.
In that time since, Paul and Lisa Baker have had to find a way to go on, the grief always there, coming and going in waves. Cricket, which Paul says has given them and gave Josh so much, has continued to play a vital role through memories and connections, while also helping to create the potential, through the JB33 Foundation, for a fitting memorial to a life that was cut short far too soon but was well-lived
