Cricket Dreams Passed Down Through Generations: A Parent’s Hope

A week ago, my youngest son was born, and I have already convinced myself that his long fingers will lend themselves to mystery spin bowling. My five-year-old son has relatively broad shoulders—perhaps he will hit a hard length and bat in the middle order. This is how cricket colonizes the brain: it turns otherwise rational adults into talent scouts studying toddler anatomy.

Every cricket-loving parent knows the feeling—not quite a feeling, more a tiny flicker of hope. A ridiculous, irrational hope that the gods who once touched the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Ellyse Perry might one day do the same for their little sprog. You hold your breath the first time you wrap their chubby hands around a plastic bat; you dream absurd dreams when they accidentally smoke a tennis ball into the couch.

Maybe your child will be different, despite the fact that you were at best a middling club cricketer with an exaggerated pull shot and a weakness against spin. In all likelihood they won’t become the next superstar, and that’s fine. What you are really hoping for has little to do with fame, contracts or Test caps—you hope they fall in love with the game.

Perhaps there is a club out there that will one day call them “the Gallan-Cohen lads.” They are still young: the eldest has not shown an inkling of interest, and the youngest cannot yet lift his head, let alone a bat. But I am a cricket tragic; I understand the value of patience and the power of hope.

Cricket parents start relating everything back to the sport. During labour, I was essentially Jack Leach to my wife’s Ben Stokes at Headingley in 2019: anxious and sweating, operating the TENS machine with awkward determination, desperately trying not to let my teammate down while she produced something miraculous.

Now, a week into life with two children, we strategise meal times and bedtime routines like captains discussing bowling changes. We position furniture and childproof the living room as though we are setting fields. Once cricket embeds itself deeply into your life, it becomes less a sport and more a language through which everything else is understood.

But these fantasies and metaphors are secondary to the real dream: sharing a field with my boys one day. “I got to do exactly that with my dad in my second ever senior game,” says Sheehan Arnott, a handy club bowler in London whose father remains the record run-scorer at Bentley Cricket Club in Perth. “We’ve played hundreds of games together. I captained him in his 500th game when he hit a ton. I remember welling up when I gave the pre-match speech that day. The thing I’ve wanted most in cricket was to play with my dad.”

There is, of course, a danger of wanting this too much. Every cricket parent probably walks this line. The temptation to project unfinished dreams onto small children is as precarious as driving on the up. The trick, I suppose, is to pass on the obsession without passing on the burden. This is where the game’s intricacies can lend a hand.

There is joy to be found in a properly filled-out scorecard; there is an art in precisely packing a cooler box for a full day’s play; there is skill in caring for an ageing ball. Cricket’s grand tapestry is made with a million tiny stitches, and sharing this wisdom with the next generation is both a responsibility and a privilege.

I inherited cricket in exactly this way. I was about six when my parents first took me to the Wanderers. My dad was motivated partly by the on-field action and partly by Friday night beers with his mates. My mum—and she will tell you herself—was drawn by the outline of Richard Snell’s backside. Whatever their motivations, they both completely invested in my love for the game.

My mum drove me to endless coaching sessions; my dad offered infinite throwdowns in the garden, despite possessing the shoulders of a man who had worked a full week. Every scratchy knock on an artificial pitch felt, to them, like a Test hundred. Every time I spooned a gentle off-spinner to midwicket they absorbed my disappointment. Even now, as a 38-year-old father playing at a gloriously low level, they are still the first people I want to tell when I have scored a few runs.

“Sharing a life in cricket with your children is a gift,” says 73-year-old Mark Cooper, who has played alongside his three sons and his daughter with the nomadic Millfields CC since the 1990s. “You watch them go from children, to teenagers you have to drag out of bed, to adults with their own lives. Cian [now 37] was 11 when he started, fielding fine leg to fine leg. Once I ran him out on 96. Another time we walked off together having hit the winning runs. That was magical.”

Which is why I am holding on to the dream, even if my boys inevitably scoff and roll their eyes whenever I begin a sentence with: “When I played …” For now, the eldest has not shown an inkling of interest, and my youngest cannot yet hold up his head, let alone a bat. But I am a cricket tragic. I understand the value of patience. More importantly, I believe in the power of hope.

This is how cricket gets you: it turns otherwise rational adults into talent scouts studying toddler anatomy. It colonises the brain.

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