England’s Existential Cricket is not fun and carefree but therapy for years of cruelty

T his week I watched, in covert late night instalments, the entire day-by-day extended highlights of England’s 1994 five-Test tour of the West Indies. This wasn’t meant to happen. But as Rick James famously said, Sky Cricket Greats is a hell of a drug. In the event it just turned out to be one of those strangely moreish spectacles.

A lot of things happened very slowly and then happened suddenly with dramatic jumps forward. Mike Atherton top-scored across the series but still seemed to be continually walking off looking soulful and wronged, sawn off by another grubber. Alex Stewart swished and carved his way to those two brilliant, breezy hundreds in Barbados, hunched in his agreeably old-fashioned stance, sleeves rolled like a cricketer from a 1950s cigarette card. Andy Caddick seemed to be always bowling, from both ends and for both teams.

But what really stood out was the unrelenting harshness of the whole thing, the sense, entirely unquestioned at the time, of cricket as a form of sporting punishment, a spectacle shot through with pain and transgression, a theatre of human failure. Here is Angus Fraser striding to the wicket with an air of doom-laden momentum, the run-up of a man building up speed to throw himself off a cliff. Here is the flu-ridden Mark Ramprakash looking stricken in the stands, the camera lingering gleefully on this tableau of barely hidden pain.

Cut in half by by a vicious skidding thing from Curtly Ambrose, John Crawley just looks utterly drained, consumed by sadness, a man who really just needs to spend six months alone with his ladbrador learning to love again. “Another failure for Crawley,” says a crowing voice.

At one point Caddick bowls an over that goes for 19 and the commentators are