Forever 63 no.

In the early 90s I would open the batting for the 2nd XI of our age group at school. At 12 I set a high score of 52, and that year averaged about 26; a very respectable score for a young team of sloggers would often make under 100 in a whole innings. That year, 1993, was by far the high water-mark of my cricketing career.

Our practice nets were a row of 10 outdoor netted corridors, half astro-turfed, with an all-weather mat at the bowlers’ end, one at the batsmens’ end, and a patch of overgrown grass in between. During a routine practice session our opening bowler Sanjay Dindyal decided to emulate our heroes in the West Indian team, and bang one in short. The ball caught the far lip of the batsmens’ astro-turf where it was sunk into the soil, and spinning forward, the ball looped high up in front of me, and suddenly dipped down. I attempted something between an ambitious pull shot and an automatic facial self-defence. The result was closer to a 19^th century circus act as I instead opted to catch the ball with my teeth. That’s something you just can’t teach, you either have it or you don’t. I didn’t, and I remember to this day, 20 years later, the slow motion image of my tooth arcing out of my mouth as I span anticlockwise on my back foot and the little white missile floated serenely forwards, landing about 15 feet up the pitch. James Stern, batting in the next net, first in surprise and then laughing said “give us a smile Rob”, and I did, a big bloody toothless grin. I don’t remember it hurting at all. We were kids, up to high-jinx, and the whole thing was quite a laugh. I knew I would have a good story for life.

The damage was this: both front teeth were severed from my jaw. Pushing the defenestrated tooth back into the shrunken, in-pressing gum hole was at that time the most painful thing I had experienced. Both front teeth had deep root canal surgery and are now drilled into my jaw. Being dead, they gradually blacken and periodically they have to be dyed from the inside out. For many years I was extremely self conscious of my smile, as my front teeth will always be a slightly further off-shade than my already very off-beige English drinkers’ ivories. The much worse damage was that the school introduced the compulsory wearing of helmets for child-batsmen. I asked them not to, and instead to simply astro-turf over the whole length of the nets. We don’t play cricket on a pitch with two inch-deep ridges running cross-wise, so why were we made to practice on ones? A schoolboy does not, until they have developed physically, have the speed or power to fire down a proper bouncer, not without the aid of a ridged pitch. The school could see that rather than upgrading to inherently safer and more accurate facilities they could pass the expense onto the parents by adding equipment to little Timmy’s kitbag.

I played on for a few more years, never with a helmet as it felt cumbersome, uncomfortable, and above all unsportsmanlinke, and perhaps because of this I stopped at about 17 when the bowlers had become men, 6ft tall with furry faces and broad palms. They chucked down the ball too fast for me. Against full-size butch sportsmen I simply didn’t have the reaction time, let alone the physical or mental toughness, for cricket.

That’s not even the only cricketing accident we had. During a school match at 15 I remember seeing David Bloom, also playing for the under 16 2^nd XI, knocked unconscious in the field at short leg, when a misthrown ball from the outfield landed on the top of his head, rather than in the keeper’s gloves. He was felled for about a minute. It happened quickly and I don’t think it ever got mentioned again. Had the accident, god forbidden, been fatal, would we have introduced helmets for fielders? Now that an umpire in an amateur match in Israel has died after being struck by the ball in a freak ricochet accident, is umpire's safety to be regulated too?

Now when I see little batsmen of 10, keen, proud, lively, playing cricket wearing preposterously vast protective gear, helmets making them look like a team of sporty Frank Sidebottoms, I feel guilty. It would have happened anyway but at that moment it was my bad batting, poor technique and naturally slow reflexes that led to, in our little corner of London, the sudden advent of pampering over hardiness.

Cricket is a tough sport. The first thing you notice when you handle a cricket ball is how hard it is, like lightweight concrete. Mentally the game is tougher: even at the schoolboy level a game goes on all day. It is inevitable that someone will lose concentration at some point over the 7 hours. We play sports for health, but also for risk. A sport is a choice that each one of us makes to play. It’s fun, exciting, alive, to take risks, grow, strengthen, discover, and there must be setbacks and injuries as part of this process.

If Philip Hughes, and perhaps eventually Sean Abott, had known that their aggressive and exciting let alone normal style of play would cause future players to be made to play in riot gear, in an attempt to snuff out all physical risk, they would I hope be disappointed. They played because they liked the drama and excitement, and they were and are extremely tough men. Broken fingers are pretty regular in cricket. Taking it on the bonce, the chin, in the ribs, they don't like it up 'em. Out in the middle for hours on end. Sledging, taunts from around the bat. Heat, sweat, fear. I was neither tough nor particularly liked the risk, so I stopped playing. As a university student in Scotland, cricket didn’t really figure on the agenda and I took up golf, an excuse to get away from women for a stroll in the countryside with a side-issue of competition.

Parents hate their children sitting indoors playing computer games all day, but a boy playing cricket in an environment without risk is an open-air computer game. We have helicopter parents who endlessly protect their children from all forms of living risk, in a guilty bid to induce unbreakable dependence. I hope that cricket’s rulemakers don’t lose their heads and render this sport of tough bastards into, as Vic Marks put it, rugby without the tackling.