Ambrose and Walsh at The Oval

Nick Anstead has sent in this recollection for the normblog cricket memories series:

Anyone who has ever tried to explain their love of Test cricket to somebody who doesn't understand the rules of the game will be familiar with the puzzled expression that inevitably follows the statement that a game can last for five days. 'Sorry? What did you say? They play for how long?' This confusion does highlight something about cricket - it has a very unusual relationship with time.

The sport has a strange power to kaleidoscope and morph chronology. In the middle, time really is relative. A seemingly entrenched advantage constructed over several days can be completely overturned in just a few overs. I will always remember the feeling of disorientation, nearly bordering on physical sickness, that I felt listening to radio commentary of the last day of the Adelaide Test in 2006, when Australia crushed England, seemingly out of nowhere. But cricket's relationship with time is not confined to the progress of a match; it has a much broader significance. Many years worth of events - whether they be personal, cricketing or even social and political - can be perfectly encapsulated, bolstered or aggressively challenged in a few seconds of play.

I most strongly experienced this phenomenon on the last day of the English international season in 2000. The West Indies were visiting and England were leading 2-1 going into the match. A win or a draw would give England their first Test series victory over the Windies in more than three decades. The first four days of the game had gone strongly in England's favour, with the home side establishing a substantial first innings lead, and then Michael Atherton scoring a hundred in the second innings.

An England victory against the West Indies would have been the end of a very long personal journey for me as an England fan. The very first cricket tour that I really followed and understood was in 1992, when the Windies were still widely thought of as the best team in the world. England played their hearts out and managed a two-all draw. But my first series raised my expectations of the England cricket team far too high - and thus made their torrid underperformance in the 90s all the harder to bear. Beating the West Indies (even though they were obviously a hugely diminished cricketing power) would, in some sense, create the English cricket team that I believed in when I was 11 years old and also go some way towards offsetting all of those years of disappointment.

So I just had to go and see the end of the match for real. Back then, the tickets for the last day of The Oval Test were sold on the gate with no pre-sales. I live just about an hour away from The Oval by train, so I got up very early - I wanted to be outside the ground by 9.00 in the morning, to ensure I got in (a wise precaution as it transpired – 5,000 people were turned away that day).

But one particular moment in the day summed up another change that had taken place in the decade since I'd started watching the game. The moment was the dismissal of Curtly Ambrose (the ninth man out, putting England only one wicket away from victory). The change was the tragic decline of West Indian cricket. Ambrose's dismissal, in his very last Test, led to a huge standing ovation. This swelled even further when he was replaced by his new-ball partner Courtney Walsh. As the two great fast bowlers walked past each other, the crowd rose as one, cheering them. And rightly so - this was the last time these two remarkable players would be seen in England on a cricket field.

My sadness at this moment, though, came from two things. Firstly, that Ambrose and Walsh really were the last of the great West Indian players with a direct link to the great, world-conquering teams of the 70s and 80s. They, after all, had played with Richards, Haynes and Marshall. Brian Lara, for all his sublime genius, was never part of a great West Indian team. It felt rather like watching the last act of a wonderful play. And, secondly, there was, correct and proper though it was, something strangely farcical about the whole moment. These two great fast bowlers being applauded as they came out to bat and to fight for an inevitably losing cause. We knew they'd fight - that was what they did (Ambrose actually had a very good knock that day, as I remember). But wasn't it tragic that their team-mates had put them in this position? That said a great deal about the state of West Indian cricket. Not only was the moment an ending then, but also a prologue to the repeated failure of West Indian teams since the turn of the millennium.

The passages below are from Wisden 2001:

Earlier in the season, a critic of the sport had described cricket as "a grey game played by grey people". The misguided journalist should have been at The Oval on the final day to see the conclusion of a momentous contest, itself the culmination of a memorable series. This was sport at its vibrant, colourful best, and it rekindled the public's love affair with cricket. Some 18,500 spectators crammed into the ground; thousands more were turned away...
.....
England formed guards of honour for Ambrose, playing his final Test, and Walsh, his last in England, as they strode to the crease, but there was nothing either man could do to reverse the result.
.....
The extraordinary scenes on a sunlit, early September afternoon at The Oval aptly and vividly illustrated the contrasting states of English and West Indian cricket at the start of the 21st century. England had convincingly won the final Test to secure the series 3-1 and regain the Wisden Trophy that had been in West Indies' assured possession for 27 years. As captain Nasser Hussain and his triumphant players stood on the balcony, showering themselves with champagne, their achievement was hailed by thousands of joyful fans below, many of whom had not been born when Ray Illingworth was the last England captain to claim the Trophy on July 1, 1969.

[For links to the other posts in this series, see here.]