Following On by Emma John

Author:Emma John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter 8

A confession: my mum and I used to be pretty mean to my dad.

Dad has never had any interest in people kicking or hurling balls around. He’d rather be doing stuff than sitting on a sofa watching other people do it in high-definition. He likes motorsport, and he has a ridiculously extensive knowledge of racing cars that reveals itself during Grand Prix weekends and boring motorway journeys. But woe betide him if he dared to comment on a cricket match that Mum and I were watching.

Sometimes his observations were sweetly naive, sometimes actively dangerous (‘England seem to be doing well for once,’ spoken fate-temptingly before a mid-innings collapse). Occasionally, like an idiot savant, his random comments would hit an accidental truth (‘They don’t look like they’re ever going to get that guy out,’ voiced before an opposition batsman scored a double-century). But mostly they were just annoyingly ill-informed and made the assumption that, whatever was happening in the game, England were going to lose it. It didn’t matter what Dad said, we would react in the same way: shush him loudly, tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about, and bristle until he left us in peace. Which, unsurprisingly, he was happy to do.

I am not proud of our behaviour. I love my dad, and I respect his brilliant brain so much that he is the only person in the world I care about beating at Trivial Pursuit. But it stirred something deep and ugly when he weighed in on the cricket. Yes, Mum and I spent a large proportion of our time loudly discussing the defects of our team; yes, we would decry this batsman as ‘useless’ and that bowler as ‘a total waste of space’ – but it was not OK for other people to say the same stuff, even if it was true. You were only allowed to agree that our team was crap if you actually supported our team. And that excluded Dad.

At the core of our behaviour was this, irrational, truth: fans are capable of feeling completely opposing emotions towards their team at the same time. We can be frustrated by them, irritated by them – we can even hate them for the way they disappoint us – and in the same moment we can feel as protective of them as that mummy T-Rex attacking Jeff Goldblum in The Lost World. We love them like brothers and sisters, and they repay our bond by annoying the hell out of us.

This complicated dynamic extends to individual players. For me, it was no better embodied than in the person of Andrew Caddick. Caddick had first joined the England team in the same 1993 Ashes summer as me, so we had that in common. He was a bowler who had grown up in New Zealand, and modelled his bowling on that of his home country’s greatest ever player, Sir Richard Hadlee. Hadlee took a world record 431 Test wickets and became an ambassador for the sport.

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