In the sun-drenched months of spring and early summer it often felt as though the most memorable aspect of the English cricket season of 2020 might be the fact that it contained no cricket.  For all that the game’s late-season rebirth gave rise to moments of magnificence – Stuart Broad’s bowling, Zak Crawley, Maxwell and Carey at Old Trafford – the pervading impression left by the game’s bloggers was of their responses to a game that had come to an unexpected and painful halt.

In April, as the peak of the first wave of the pandemic coincided with what would have been the early rounds of the County Championship, Sean Buckley, at Being Outside Cricket (beingoutsidecricket.com), wrote movingly of the significance of cricket in his life and the effect that its absence would have on him, a feeling which any other committed follower of the game could relate to.  ‘The thing about sport is it can act as a comfort blanket when things are a bit rubbish, it can make you turn from a normal human being into a quivering wreck…it can take you to a place that is out of your reality.  Sport is in our psyche, it’s a chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones, it’s a chance to immerse yourself in the action…it’s a chance to live unfulfilled dreams invested in others and of course it’s the perfect opportunity to debate, dissect or argue about the outcome’.

Gary Naylor, at 99.94 (nestaquin.wordpress.com), shared those feelings but saw a life following the game as good preparation for the longueurs of lockdown: ‘These are strange days indeed as we sit, confined to barracks, while a virus flits its fatal paths in the outside world.  We may never have had more ways to distract ourselves, to hold back the boredom, to ease the passage of long days that we can’t quite fill.  But it’s still tough, as March dragged into April and April slides on towards May.  But for some of us, it’s not so bad.  And for that, Chris Tavaré, I salute you’.

Away from the narrative of loss, there was some fine writing about elements of the game which were lent greater significance as they temporarily faded from the realm of direct experience and into that of memory.  CricketMASH (cricmash.com) and 81 All Out (81allout.com) gave an Asian perspective on the game’s past, present and future, while the voice of South African cricket, Neil Manthorp, at Manners on Cricket (manners-on-cricket.com), charted the waning fortunes of his cricket nation, on field and off.  

Cameron Ponsonby’s debut article at The Full Toss (thefulltoss.com), Watch The Ball.  Play It Late.  Don’t Be Scared, in which he drew on personal experience and interviews with professional batsmen to dissect the experience of facing fast bowling, was ambitious, enlightening and evocative.  Simply reading Michael Carberry relive the experience of facing Mitchell Johnson at Adelaide in 2013 was a timely reminder of what cricket had been and would be again.

From a vantage point in America’s Midwest, Matt Becker observes the game through the prism of genuine love, and his writing at his personal blog Limited Overs (limitedovers.com) is distinctively personal, elegiac and often beautiful:

‘This is the power of sport.  To pick us up and place us down somewhere else.  There are days when I think of it as a gift.  And there are days when I do not.  But it brings memories like cannon fire, because those losses are always in the fall, when all we know is loss and decay, when we cannot see the green that will come, cannot even imagine it.  We grieve collectively, always, all the time.  And then we move on.  We look out the window, and wait for spring’.

Now, more than ever before, cricket waits for spring.

Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, 2021