Just as I was starting to feel better and as I was about to write a piece about the good moments from Test cricket, another bomb drops.
If the latest allegations are believed then some West Indies cricketers are allegedly implicated in fixing too. If these rumours surface and the players I suspect might be involved are, I think I might need to take a week’s worth of sympathy leave and disappear into the mountains.
I feel sorry for my Twitter followers. My Tweets since this news broke have been emotional. A barrage and verbose assault of emotion. I cannot apologize for the way I feel. Instead, I will try to explain just why this means so much to me.
I was an odd and awkward kid since I can remember. I never really fit in anywhere and, since I was little, the once thing I could escape into was Test cricket. After South Africa, my second favourite team was the West Indies. I could get lost in Brian Lara’s batting and and Curtley Ambrose’s bowling for hours. Watching them made me feel like I understood something, like I understood where I fit into place.
Then I went through a phase where I didn’t watch cricket at all. It was a sport for jocks and I most certainly wasn’t a jock. Again, very confused about my place in society.
My father died in February of 2003. At that time, there was a cricket World Cup going on in my country. When I wanted to escape, I would watch this. I could forget about everything and just feel safe watching these guys play. They made me feel like I belong, they were my escape. If I wanted to not feel what I was feeling, I’d switch on the tele and watch. I was like a happy kid again. Everything was okay.
Everybody has that something that they love so much they would die for it. For some people it’s shopping. For other’s it’s music or running. For me, it’s cricket.
It’s always been there. It’s been a constant. cricket has never rejected me for my choices, my mistakes, my feelings. It was the one purity that’s always been there and now, everything I know and believe about it has been tarnished and tainted.
So, it’s not just a game to me. It’s more than that, it’s my drug, it’s my coping mechanism, it’s my first love and now all of that is about to be taken away from me. And I am angry, upset and distraught. I feel like I am losing a part of me.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
This is the most beautifully fragile passage I’ve read in quite some time. It’s like a snowflake falling on an infants head while they witness their pet bunny hit by a truck.
Thank you
Nesta´s last [type] ..Cricket Fix- Confessions of the Not Guilty
Not sure if the dead bunny was quite what I was going for but I’m glad you liked it and I got my emotion across.
reads like a poem.
@AltCricket´s last [type] ..Mitchell Johnson shocks world by revealing he is straight