Cricket

‘How should one live?’ the philosopher asks. Cricket may not provide the whole answer — but it offers a pretty good place to start.

One of my earliest memories is of my grandfather placing a cricket bat into my hands and showing me how to hold it. He had played for Worcestershire and seemed to know, even then, on my sixth birthday, that this was the most practical inheritance he could offer — not money, not advice, but grip and stance, the small rituals of taking guard. It felt, even then, like being handed both a gift and a tool: something with which to meet the world.

I was never much of a cricketer, but I recognised that an understanding of the game was an education in disguise. Cricket prepares you, almost without your knowing it, for the vicissitudes of life: triumph and disaster, hope and disappointment, reversals, recoveries, the random comedy of luck. It teaches you how to wait, how to dare and how to return to the crease after a setback. It is, in its own peculiar way, a moral and emotional apprenticeship: a guide, a companion and a passport to a different world.

One Ball at a Time, The Cricket Lover’s Guide to Life, will be published in May 2027. It follows the shape of a day’s play and lets its rhythms guide us toward living well. From the bright optimism of Play to the long shadows of Stumps, each chapter draws on the game’s persistent wisdom. Cricketers and thinkers share the same crease — Grace, Hobbs, Sobers and Botham batting alongside Cicero, Chekhov and Montaigne — while childhood matches return in flashes: the first cleanly struck six, the miraculous catch, the friendships forged, the chances squandered, the innings that mattered more than the runs.

It is cricket, philosophy and memoir all at once: a book about the game, of course, but also about everything the game quietly teaches us about being human.