Tomorrow, England play the West Indies in the first of three One Day Internationals in Antigua. Even accounting for the post-Ashes intrigue, it is hard to imagine there will be much of a crowd. Which takes me back to the 2007 Cricket World Cup.

Thursday March 29, 2007, to be precise. For a third consecutive day, thanks to the rain that took West Indies versus Australia into a second day, my mate Raoul and I are sitting in the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium. The previous day, in the aftermath of the 2007 Cricket World Cup touching down in Antigua for the first time, the local rag, The Daily Observer, claimed on its front page that “cricket-goers at the spanking new ground were certain . . . that the venue is the region’s most beautiful.” Never let the facts get in the way of the truth. There was precious little beauty on offer – with each day the crowds had got thinner, the cricket more one-sided. I could accept Australia drubbing the Windies, but today the hosts have been bundled out by New Zealand for 177. And now Darren Powell and Dwayne Smith – Dwayne Smith – are opening the bowling for the West Indies, following in the illustrious footsteps of Roberts and Holding, Garner and Marshall, Ambrose and Walsh. It dawns on me that I am twenty years too late.

I know, I know, I don’t expect much sympathy. I’ve left behind a freezing British winter to spend three weeks on an island with a beach for every day of the year. Only a cricket fan – and especially a cricket fan of my age, perhaps one, like me, who took his first steps on a cricket field under a replica Richie Richardson sun hat – could understand my bitter disappointment. Growing up in the 1980s, the West Indies were not only the best team. They were the coolest, too. Who knows who would win between them and the great Australian team that followed, but I know who I’d want to win. The effortless cool and swagger of Greenidge, Richards and Marshall, or the boorishness of Hayden, Steve Waugh and Warne? And a Caribbean tour always sounded so cool on Test Match Special, the lilt of Tony Cozier and Donna Simmonds, the sound of a conch shell. A World Cup in the Caribbean would be too good to miss. Wouldn’t it?

Almost a month later and the World Cup is finally all over. Appropriately it finishes farcically in the dark with Australia the inevitable winners. It has been a long procession, the final taking place on the 47^th day of a tournament that used up most of its drama quota on Day 5. While Ireland and Bangladesh progressing at the expense of India and Pakistan was a good thing for cricket, it was not good for the rest of the tournament. As an inadvertent advert for the advent of Twenty20 the 2007 Cricket World Cup has been a triumph. In every other respect it has been an over-long, under-competitive disaster. Sure, it could have been better, richer for having a vibrant host team, but what is even more unforgivable – and for this, the ICC have to shoulder the blame – is that the tournament could have been more West Indian.

The games in Antigua could certainly have been more Antiguan. Returning to that copy of The Daily Observer, one has to turn to page 18 for something more like the truth. Cricket Lacked Antiguan Atmosphere, Says Sir Viv. Take the ground, the Chinese-built Sir Vivian Richards Stadium – so unbefitting of the great man, and such a contrast to the Antigua Recreation Ground. Two days prior to the Australia game, we had wandered into the Rec, in the heart of St John’s. Sitting in the welcome shade of the stand with a saltfish and avocado baguette, Marlon Samuels smacking the ball out of the ground, Brian Lara doing some catching practise just below us, I let my imagination run. After all, this was the place of Viv’s 56-ball hundred and Lara’s twin peaks of 375 and 400 not out. This rickety old ground must have been some place to be when the Windies were dishing out some licks, Chickie’s Disco blaring and Gravy leading the celebrations.

There’s no wandering to the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium, and no running for your imagination when you get there. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s in Antigua, but it could be anywhere. It’s an ICC enclave with its own overly-officious border patrol. It wasn’t just the prohibitive ticket pricing that kept locals away (£75 to get in sounds a lot me, and I could afford to watch a lacklustre team with no representation from the Leeward Islands at a ground I didn’t want). They had read the small print. Or enough of it to get the picture: essentially, nothing could be taken into the ground that could instead be bought at inflated prices from official ICC vendors inside. No local customs would get through ICC customs.

What else but money could explain such control-freakery? The ICC might point to that mantra of our post-911 times, Health and Safety, but it hides their true motivation. What is so frustrating is that it seems so unnecessary. Surely the ICC generate enough money through TV rights. I imagine the money made at the ground is peanuts in comparison. Not peanuts to the good folk of Antigua, however, and it’s criminal that the ICC doesn’t give them a sniff of the action. The Roti King would have made a killing. Given that the TV rights would presumably be worth a lot more if the product was better, if there was better cricket in front of better crowds, surely all this self-serving greed is ultimately self-defeating. And even if you don’t agree with that theory, shouldn’t the needs of players and fans alike come first?

Some times, less is more. Why not have fewer, more meaningful, games? Why not revamp The Rec? Why not make it affordable for locals? Why not trust fans to behave and enjoy the cricket? Isn’t cricket that most civilised of games? Aren’t the fans equally so? Who needs a Party Stand? All the ICC have to do is provide the cricket. We’ll do the rest. It doesn’t have to be so contrived, so sanitised, so joyless.

It might be of little comfort, but perhaps the ICC got the tournament it deserved. There is a certain irony in India crashing out early of a tournament bloated by demand from advertising executives keen to exploit the Indian TV market.

The good folk of Antigua didn’t get the cricket ground they deserved, however. Two years after the World Cup, that particular white elephant wasn’t even fit to host a Test match. The Test against England was abandoned after ten balls, a 366th beach having replaced the bowler’s run-ups. According to Mike Selvey in Monday’s Guardian, the subsequent transfer of the Test to the Rec was a “triumph of community organisation.” Shame the same couldn’t be said of the World Cup.

Last Thursday I played my last ever game of football. Before the game I had dared to dream. It was cup finals night, after all, and in recent weeks we had been in rare good form. Here was a chance to go out in style.

But how many get to go out in style? Sport rarely has room for sentimentality. As Sachin Tendulkar has recently shown, only the very great are lucky enough to choose when they retire. Luckier still are those who can look back and say they retired at the right time. Tendulkar might not, who knows? But Paul Collingwood, I suspect, does – the ultimate team man bowed out at the end of the ultimate team effort, the historic Ashes win in 2010/11.

Back then, how many of Collingwood’s team-mates could have been forgiven for thinking that they might be doing something similar in three years time? It’s not often that the hamster wheel of international cricket offers a natural end to a cycle, even rarer when that is in sync with a team’s natural cycle. But in our Ashes-centric world, the back-to-back Ashes always looked like it would be just that – something of a final season finale of the DVD boxset that was Andrew Strauss’ England.

I was going to say nobody gets to write their own scripts, but that is not strictly true. Plenty write, few get to act them out. Now, with the post-production in tatters, it is hard to believe that the script ever got past first draft. But then? With a visionary director, settled cast and extensive crew, what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing. Or at least that is how it seemed in the summer of 2011, as England thrashed India 4-0 to claim a place at the top of the Test rankings. But no production is without its hiccups, and so it proved. First, on location in the UAE, Pakistan dished out a humbling 3-0 defeat. Then, back on set, leading man Kevin Pietersen had his head turned by Bollywood, and fell out spectacularly with Strauss. Despite the resulting change in captaincy, the cast – in personnel and personality – remained broadly the same, and the narrative arc, despite a wobble, appeared to be back on track.

Perhaps this had more to do with Australia than England. Where England had triumphed in India – Alastair Cook revelling in his new leading role, a reintegrated KP to the fore – Australia were involved in their very own horror movie. English set-designers, aided by a rare dry English summer, went about replicating those Indian conditions, and sure enough England retained the Ashes.

If this really was some kind of DVD boxset, then hindsight tells us that was when the network should have pulled the plug. No more, let’s go out on a high. But another Ashes series is a hard thing to say no to, and at the time nobody was telling anyone to retire, or complaining that the same old stars were being wheeled out.

So we were treated to the mother of all surprise endings. Jonathan Trott, Graeme Swann and Steven Finn didn’t make the wrap party. Andy Flower and Kevin Pietersen won’t be seen again. Perhaps Matt Prior, too. Instead of the happy ending of a valedictory tour for this England team, we got to watch the work of Darren Lehmann, a maverick old-school director, and the rebirth of Mitchell Johnson, hitherto typecast as Ashes clown.

In a recent conversation on the subject of worst film endings, my friend Raoul opined that in order to feel the rage and disappointment of a truly awful ending it has to come after what has hitherto been a reasonably good film. He cited LA Confidential and Apocalypse Now as prime examples, and the latter seems to me to be an apt analogy to the recent tour.

The Horror…

Yes, but also strangely reassuring. Sport, and Ashes cricket, remains gloriously unscripted, and England taking for granted beating Australia never felt right. Just as Apocalypse Now is in my eyes still a great film in spite of its ending, I hope this whitewash won’t be the abiding memory of Flower’s England, the team of Swann and Pietersen. They were better than that.

Oh, and that last game of football? We lost. 2-1. No going out in style for me either.

When was the last time you heard a half-way interesting interview with a sportsperson? And no, not including managers – so anything Jose Mourinho says doesn’t count; nor Kevin Keegan’s infamous “I’d love it if we beat them” rant. Struggling to think of any, right? This is meant as no slight on sportspeople. Actions speak louder than words. Take cricket: when a player can say so much with a ball or a bat in hand, why do we expect them to be as eloquent when a microphone is thrust in his or her face. Which brings me to Alastair Cook.

While Cook was scoring stacks of runs, and while England were winning, it was funny that his accent differed in every interview, veering from plummy private school boy to Essex lad to, more inexplicably, South African and Australian. It was funny that he sometimes got a bit tongue-tied. But when the runs and the wins dried up in such spectacular fashion in Australia, it didn’t seem quite so amusing. Cook himself looked like he was struggling to see the funny side, often looking haunted, and it was easy to suppose that the stress of having to undertake so many interviews was undermining his confidence and form. Perhaps it was, we will never know.

What we do know, however, is that cricketers, regardless of their aptitude as interviewees, are obliged to serve a media that quite frankly should know better. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the toss at a Test match. Commentary boxes are filled with ex-players who know full well that players are trained to say nothing, and that captains, particularly those like Cook who also open the batting, would be better served preparing for battle.  Essentially, the viewer needs to know three things: who has won the toss, who is batting first, and who is in the team. Further illumination is not required in the form of an interview with the captains. A captain will say that he has selected the team and chosen to bat or bowl first because he thinks that is the best way to win the match. Simple as that. A captain shouldn’t have to justify further, the proof will be in the actions of his team. Any further analysis should be done in the commentary box – it is their job after all.

Am I really in the minority here? Do viewers really want to hear yet another anodyne interview about “hitting the right areas”? Do broadcasters think we do? Do sponsors think that we are more likely to buy the products branded onto a man making a meal of saying nothing? Sadly, they probably do – there is no such thing as bad publicity, after all. Don’t forget, these are the same people who, during the excruciating final morning of the 2005 Edgbaston Test, thought the viewers might be interested in car insurance. I wasn’t. Even if I could drive. In fact I didn’t want to buy anything – all I wanted was a wicket, and I’d like to think they can’t be bought. The relief when it came certainly could not.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad. Cricket coverage – and, arguably, the game itself – has advanced greatly in this age of private commerce and global television audiences. Test matches have grown infinitely more watchable in my lifetime, and it is easy to tolerate a few adverts as necessary evils. But I draw the line at the pre-match interview. Firstly, because they appear to me to be far from necessary. Secondly, when it is supposed that these very interviews are undermining performance, they are not only pointless but downright self-defeating.

Let the players play. Let the commentators comment. The product (placement) will take care of itself.

First things first. Yes, it is a shame that there is a KP-shaped hole in English and international cricket. And yes, it is a shame that ECB obfuscation, however much a result of legal restrictions, has left a vacuum for the likes of Piers Morgan to fill. Nobody is coming out of this smelling of roses, and there remain so many unanswered questions.

Chief among them is this: What exactly has KP done? But maybe, by concentrating on what he is alleged to have done, we are missing the point. He may not have done anything other than be himself. The same self that has managed to undermine the leadership and team unity of every team he has ever played for. So when Paul Downton said “the time is right to rebuild not only the team but also the team ethic,” the implication was clear. Whether you agree with it or not, the ECB has made a judgement call – a decision which they will live or die by.

For what it’s worth, my take on it is that KP should have been sacked after the “textgate” affair of 2012. And I think he would, had Andrew Strauss not retired, and Alastair Cook not insisted on reintegrating him. With a trip to India and an Ashes double-header on the horizon it made cricketing sense. Perhaps I am being overly cynical, but it also made economic sense. KP has always been box-office.

It was always going to be a marriage of convenience, however, and perhaps the analogy of marriage is instructive throughout KP’s career. The whirlwind romance of the One Dayers in South Africa. The celebrity wedding of the 2005 Ashes. The honeymoon period of England and KP taking on the world. The power struggle over who should wear the trousers/captain’s armband. The seven year itch when KP flirted with the IPL. The trial separation. The reconciliation. And now the divorce.

And maybe it is also a divorce of convenience. For all that it is an incredibly brave call to get rid of a player of such undoubted ability and popularity, it could be argued that it is as convenient a time as any to dispense with KP. It is very much the end of an era for what has, lest we forget, been a highly successful England team, and KP isn’t getting any younger. Or, it would seem, any easier to manage. Perhaps, as well, his knee isn’t getting any better, and maybe his batting is on the wane. The argument that he was the leading run-scorer in the Ashes doesn’t wash. Statistically, he may have been the least awful of England’s batsmen, but he often threw his wicket away in exasperating fashion, and nobody is making a case for Michael Carberry to be retained on the strength of being the second highest run-scorer.

Would KP see it as a divorce of convenience? Who knows, but he won’t be overly inconvenienced by a fat IPL contract, and he retains the adoration of much of the English public – something I suspect he craves more than anything. It is his curse that he has often been far from loveable, and it seems that the love affair between KP and England is well and truly over.

As is so often the case in messy divorces, it is the kids that suffer the most. For kids read fans.

Ah, 2012, that annus mirabilis for British sport. Bradley Wiggins in his yellow jersey, John Terry in his shin pads, Andy Murray in tears, London in the spotlight and Olympians in excelsis. Whither cricket in all this? Wither, more like.

It’s Saturday 4 July at Kevin Pietersen’s now-infamous “Tough Being Me” press conference at Headingley, and KP is not feeling the love. “Why has it reached this stage?” asks Stephen Brenkley, cricket correspondent of The Independent. “You’ve just made one of your most brilliant hundreds, the whole country is looking forward to seeing you play Test cricket for another five years or so …” Our hero drops his guard, breaks into an involuntary grin, The Smith’s providing the soundtrack: “I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.”

But the whole country isn’t looking forward to seeing KP play Test cricket for another five years. They’re watching the Olympics. This is Super Saturday, remember. Jess Enniss, Mo Farrah, that other one who won the long jump. If KP crops up in the national conversation at all he’s being held up, along with every diving, imaginary-card-waving footballer, as a contrast to the refreshing humility of our Olympic heroes. But what if – and this is the rub – what if when saying “it’s tough being me”, KP is speaking for cricket? Nobody is bigger than the game, but if anybody thought they might be qualified to speak for it …

He could certainly have been speaking for me. Apologies for slipping into solipsism, but for me 2012 was not the glorious year of sport that history will record. Saturday 4 August wasn’t the worst day of my cricket season (that had come six weeks earlier, bowled leaving my first ball), but it was in no way super and may have been the most symbolic. Bad weather, bad back, bad form … just bad. So bad that it was tough. So bad that I offered to be one of the two wickets we had to forfeit as part of a revised target after a lengthy rain break. You thought Duckworth-Lewis was incomprehensible? Try the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Premier League’s rain rules.

And the Olympics didn’t help with my rain-soaked mood. Helped by being somewhat of a contrarian and, possibly as a result, opting not to have a TV in my newly-purchased flat, I vowed to ignore the Olympics as much as I could. The response I got was one of surprise. “But you love sport!” I love music too, but I’ve never got too excited by the Eurovision Song Contest. Why would a sports fan love all sports? It’s no surprise when a film buff isn’t a fan of horror. (Isn’t life scary enough?) Why should it be a shock that I don’t get dressage or the hammer? Or maybe I get it, but I want to get more from my sport. Just because it’s the Olympics and just because it’s in London doesn’t mean I should suddenly find myself an avid fan of 10m air rifle shooting. There’s a reason why I don’t follow these sports. In fact, I would hesitate before calling most Olympic events sports. Competitions, yes. But sports? Sure, I could get swept up in the competition and all those stories of human endeavour, triumph and failure; the journeys, the revealing of character. After all, watching the sheer joy on Kelly Holmes’ face in 2004 is one of my most vivid sporting memories. I’m not ashamed to say I shed a tear. But just like I wouldn’t watch X Factor for the music, I wouldn’t watch the Olympics for the sport.

From the moment in 2005, during that truly golden summer for British sport, incidentally, that London was awarded the Olympics, it didn’t take much to predict that cricket would take a back seat in 2012. It would be tough being cricket. But even with the fortunes of England taking a tumble after the highs of winning in Australia and topping the Test rankings; even with South Africa only granted a derisory three-Test series, there was, in my humble opinion, more to marvel at in the world of cricket than in the Olympics. True, most of it was carried out by a formidably good South African side, but KP’s innings at Headingley took the breath away. It was genuinely genius in a way that simply running or throwing or jumping or rowing or swimming or cycling – or snatching, cleaning and jerking for that matter – could ever be.

That most Olympic events are so basic is hard to see as a good thing through the prism of cricket. Running round in circles. Spear chucking. Artistic falling in water. Mincing on a horse. Try explaining cricket in such simplistic terms. Cricket is cricket, and that’s the beauty of it. Why would you stop a game of cricket – in all its multi-contextual intrigue – and retire to the nets to see who can bowl the fastest or whose cover drive the judges will award highest for artistic impression. You’re athletic? You’re gymnastic? Well done. Now do something with it! Incorporate it into a more interesting contest. Imagine if Michael Holding or Thierry Henry had settled with merely running fast in a straight line. Conversely, imagine if the Jamaican 4x100m relay team were carrying on the tradition of terrifyingly fast bowling in the West Indies.

To me, sport – like art – should reflect humanity. Haven’t we moved on from who’s the fastest, strongest, has the biggest … ? It’s what separates us from the animals. A fish can swim, greyhounds, horses, camels, even cheese can race, but try pitching Monkey Tennis to the BBC. Or, for that matter, teaching a monkey to bowl leg-spin, bust out a Cruyff Turn, rack up a 147 break or hit a ton-eighty. People laugh when darts is suggested as an Olympic sport. “But they’re not athletes!” To me, compared to javelin, darts has taken spear chucking to another level. I’d never thought that I’d be using darts as proof of evolution, but there you go. And if I can use darts then imagine what I can do with cricket, sport’s greatest reflection of (and gift to) humanity.

Just as sport is for the individual a way of expressing oneself, sport itself tells a story. Essentially these are thrillers – whodunnits, or whowonnits – and clearly some are more thrilling than others. I like to think you either love cricket or you don’t understand it, and for those lucky lovers it’s clear that cricket, and Test cricket especially, is the most thrilling of all. The suspense, the ebb and flow, the twists and turns, the stories within stories, the wide and diverse cast of characters – it all adds up to a narrative as rich and complex as any novel, and demands the same investment of time.

It used to annoy me so much when Channel 4 interrupted its excellent cricket coverage for horse racing. By all means tell us the result. We’ve got time, the tale of the tape is not a long one. It’s accurate, though, I’ll give it that. So accurate it’ll save us the bother of watching it. Let’s face it, we don’t need to be there – just like we don’t need to watch the national lottery draw. We only really care about the result. The result is the story.

“Who’s winning?” If you’re asking the question you just don’t get it, and I can only pity you. But I’ve come to realise that this unanswerable question is what makes cricket so great. Anything can happen. The situation, the pitch, the weather, the ball, tactics, decisions, form, fitness, confidence, luck – these factors are forever changing. A score update can tell you where we are but can only hint at where we are going. It is the same at the end of the game. The result is merely the last chapter in an epic story – a story that a scorecard can only begin to tell. Perhaps it is no coincidence that cricket, of all sports, has the richest literary tradition. There is room for more than just poetry in motion.

In this context, where cricket is a novel, I like to see gymnastics as a handwriting test and athletics as speed typing or a competition to write the longest word. I know what I would rather read and, as an aspiring writer, write. As a sports fan, I know which I’d rather watch – and think, talk and write about. As a batsman – and I sometimes wonder if that is what defines me most; it’s certainly the time when I feel the most (happily) myself – I know what I’d rather play. Incidentally, what I watch and what I play amount to the same thing: football, cricket, and anything you can play in a pub, basically. My brother quotes a mate at Uni saying “there are things that I’m good at and there’s things that are shit.” Who knows if I wouldn’t think better of athletics if I was a little more athletic. I suspect I would still find it dull. I don’t have the mindset to enjoy anything so mindless, so lacking in skill and creativity. I’d like to think I’d still love cricket, a game of the mind and soul as much as the body, even if I was hopeless. Which is a good job as, a year on, my body is falling apart.

“Do what you have to do to get yourself back loving cricket,” was among the many supportive things my captain said when I told him that I was thinking of jacking it in. I do love cricket. I always will. It’s unconditional. It’s for more than a fortnight every four years. I’ve just read On Warne, Gideon Haigh’s excellent biography, inside two days. I’ve listened to every match of the Champions Trophy. I can’t wait for back-to-back Ashes series. It’s not you, cricket, it’s me.

June 2013