My son soon rises from the ashes of a cricket loss

I’ve written a fair bit about the joy my son’s cricketing life brings me. Sam is a good little player and he loves it. But the terrible thing about cricket is that as well as joy, it can bring disappointment, loneliness and pain. And when that happens, you have to tell your little boy this is what sport is for: to enact the dramas of adult life in a safe space, with fixed rules, where nobody dies and you come out of it a stronger person. But it’s hard sometimes.

On Sunday he played in the biggest game of his life so far. A county match, to all intents and purposes. And it did not go quite as well as he had hoped. It was