What we talk about when we talk about cricketing dads isn’t as simple as Bazball

T he rain came to Edgbaston early on the third afternoon, with the Australians still batting and a nasty swirling wind that whipped you in the face like a wet towel. Edgbaston, it has to be said, is not the most auspicious place to be when it rains. Most of the seats are entirely open to the elements, and so when the weather hits the only places to take shelter are the poky little gangways at the bottom of each stand. And so here we cowered and shivered, pressed up against roughly 2,000 other punters all jostling for this same tiny parcel of dry land, patiently waiting for Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist to resume their innings. Dad sipped a cold pint. I drank tea out of a flask. We didn’t talk much. We never talked much.

When we talk about cricketing fathers, we’re usually thinking about lineages and dynasties. Mickey and Alec Stewart. Chris and Stuart Broad. Ian and Anya Shrubsole. But most of the time the influence is more subtle than that. It’s the strange ambient noise of the television in the next room or the radio in the garden. It’s long sun-blanched afternoons sitting on the grass watching Dad doing silly things in a white costume. It’s boring Sunday morning car journeys to colts games or All Stars sessions. In my case, it was the annual pilgrimage to watch England lose at cricket.

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Dad was not, by even the most generous definition, a cricket fan. I think he got vaguely absorbed in the game when he moved to London in the late 1970s and had a flatmate who watched it. But he probably couldn’t have named more than a few England players or picked