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Published online: 17 June 2025
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025
Cricket has a grip on me that I cannot properly explain. Nor, if I am honest, do I wish to. There has not been a day since I was ten years old that I have not thought of the sport. My first act in the morning is to check on games that were played overnight. I reflexively practice my batting in the mirrored office lifts and have been known to pretend to bowl in the hallways. I have a ball in my office, somewhere. I am even watching a game as I type and I am following the scores of two others on my phone. A third game will start soon. I am, it must be noted, a terrible cricketer.
I could try to rationalise all of this. I could tell you about how I would play with my neighbour as a child, which allowed a shy kid to develop friendships. Or that cricket has facilitated a sense of belonging to people and places that would otherwise be absent. Cricket has also enabled me to maintain connections well beyond their original context. None of this, however, can adequately explain why I have been known to wonder how a cricket ball would bounce if bowled down a church aisle or hospital corridor.
In Jack Black and Joseph S. Reyneso’s terms (p. 1), I am “stuck” in cricket; my investment in cricket (and sport in general, as it happens) “belie[s] any rational explanation” (p. 5) and goes against my well-being (and that of my family). As they suggest, while “the sporting fan and participant may be conscious of what it is that they are doing, the unconscious desires, fantasies, and fears that drive them to do so are not always so readily made sense of, or even understood” (p. 5).