Chaos and creation: are we seeing the last of the backyard cricketers?

“I don’t want to be a product of my environment,”drawls Frank Costello – Jack Nicholson’s Boston mafia boss – at the start of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.Luckily for Frank, his ambition was to become a crime kingpinrather than a cricketer.

Every cricketer has their own origin story, from the weekend warrior to the globetrotting superstar. If you ask them about these first flushes their eyes often light up, a glint that takes them back to childhood and a time when the game first grabbed them.

Take Eoin Morgan: he grew up in an end-of-terrace house on the St Catherine’s Estate in Rush, a 40-minute drive from Dublin. Morgan’s first experience of cricket was playing with his five siblings on a narrow concrete path at the side of the family home. For a young left-handed Eoin any stroke into the “offside” was blocked by a 40 foot fielder in the shape of their neighbour’s garage wall. The pebble-dashed blockade meant that if Morgan wanted to see the ball fly off his bat with any satisfaction he had to aim every shot into the leg-side.

This architectural hindrance saw him develop an ability to whip, flick and bunt straight balls into the onside with unerring accuracy and power. As he grew older this bottom-hand-heavy legside dominance marked him out from his peers and helped him rise to the pinnacle of the game. Take a look at Morgan’s record-breaking assault against Afghanistan at Old Trafford during the 2019 World Cup in which he clobbered an astonishing 17 sixes in one innings. Squint past the rapturous crowd, tournament razzmatazz and powder-blue kit and you can see a trace of the small boy in his shorts, smashing his exasperated siblings away into the (legside) depths of their neighbourhood.

Morgan is not alone. Some