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So, what’s sport all about then? What is it for? Why do we do it? What does it mean? I’ve been trying out various answers of the 32 years I’ve been writing for this newspaper, and I think it’s only right to leave you with just one more. So let’s take two games of father-son cricket.

I always think of Mike Atherton when I play cricket in the garden. His son Josh is, not unexpectedly, a promising cricketer. Athers has talked about the parental questions he must answer: the need to walk the line between indifference and pushiness, always supporting, never forcing.

I have never seen them at their net sessions down at the local cricket club, but I have imagined the scene many times: the action purposeful, direct, skilled, graceful. Glorious to watch because dealing with the moving ball really is the most natural act for them both. Doing something well, aware that you are doing it well and in Josh’s case reveling in the joys and frustrations of getting better. Fun, for sure, but not without its serious side. It’s a beautiful thought.

Eddie, my younger son, is a couple of years older than Josh, and he, too, has a taste for cricket. He has Down’s Syndrome, as some readers may know. Our games of cricket are not purposeful or graceful. Eddie bowls. He hasn’t tried batting: perhaps he suspects the co-ordination required to hit a moving ball is beyond him.

I’m not sure he’s got the idea that he’s suppose to try and hit the three tall blue plastic stumps, although I explain the idea to him several times a session. The concept doesn’t really interest him. He just likes to hurl the ball in my general direction and observe the consequences. He bowls right-handed underarm moon balls, a bit like the Conan Doyle story of Spedegue’s Dropper.

And I deal with them as best I can. I was never the most naturally gifted batsmen in me Tewin Irregulars days, so I am not teaching him great cricket by example. Sometimes – quite often – he bowls the ball direct to the mid-wicket boundary, which is the house, sometimes out to cover and the garden fence, I try and retrieve these with one-handed tennis strokes. Sometimes he’ll field energetically at other times he’ll watch the ball settle into a flowerbed and contemplate it for a while.

Our games are faintly surreal. The competitive element has been almost entirely phased out. So has the skill element. Just about everything that you normally find in sport has been refined out of existence, and yet we continue to play and to gain great pleasure from it. And here comes another skier, hurrying down from its apex; it’s actually straight this time, so I play a theatrical miss and let it hit the stumps. Well bowled, sir! Well bowled indeed! And now perhaps it’s time for your bath.

Cricket, but not as the world knows it. What’s the point? You might as well ask the point of Eddie. The point is that we’re playing, the point is that we’re doing it together, and trying, in our way, to do it well.

Sport joins people up. It’s about contact: between people the same age, between generations, between genders. You need other people for sport, you need other people for life. Sport is one of the ways we can fulfill our human, our animal need for others; to do things together, to share things. It’s deeper than mere words but not as committed as an embrace. Sport begins like this: in the need to have some kind of meaningful but largely non-verbal exchange with another.

Sport moves on from this to be many other things, sometimes complex and disturbing, sometimes beautiful, sublime, inspiring, humbling, and joyous. Sport is many things and sometimes feels like all things. But sport starts with sharing. The sporting impulse begins in our dread of isolation, in our soul-deep need for contact.


I’m going to get Eddie to try batting. I’m sure I could bowl hittable balls to him. Must try it. Pushy parent, eh?