An unexpected death can hurt even when we never knew the person. Within moments of hearing about Shane Warne, my cricket-loving friends and I were texting each other, with no words to express how we felt except an impassioned, collective “what???” His sudden departure seemed impossible, even prankish—it was like being told Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge had mysteriously disappeared—and revealed what a monumental and much-loved fixture in our sporting landscape he had been.
The first person I thought to message was my mother, only to remember, in the nanosecond before I picked up my phone, that she was gone too. We lost her last September, two years after her leukaemia diagnosis, and my family are still in the stage of grieving where we tell everyone that we’re doing “pretty well, considering.” We focus on the positives, as Mum would have done, feeling grateful that we could make the most of our time together, and that her physical sufferings were few.
Mum was the person who instilled my love of cricket—of all sport—and Warne had been right there when she did. It was 1993, an Ashes debut for both him and me. By the time I began following the action on TV, Warne had already bowled the “ball of the century”— the corkscrewing leg break that bamboozled Mike Gatting in the first Test at Old Trafford and began his legend. My mother believed, back then, that there might come a time when the England batsmen got the better of him. They never did.
The following summer, she took me to my first game. It was, incidentally, hers too: despite a lifetime of loving cricket, she’d never had anyone to watch it with before. In securing us tickets to the Saturdayof the Lord’s Test, Mum unknowingly started a tradition that endured for the following three decades. Over the years, we showed up at the gates annually to watch the England team lose, unexpectedly rally, and then lose again.
My mother’s consuming passion for sport was a mixed inheritance. As well as a profound love and an enduring loyalty, she was passing on a future of inevitable disappointments, not to mention some problematic prejudices towards rival nations that would need uprooting in later life. My teenage obsession with cricket—and then, swiftly, any other game involving a ball, a stick or a track—plunged me into an emotional whirlpool.
Only as an adult did I realise that my early experiences in sporting fandom were a safe space for the tumultuous feelings I would face elsewhere in life. Attaching them to cricket had given me a guide rope, with my mother at the other end, showing me that it was OK to care deeply, while modelling how to keep a measure of perspective. It was Mum who taught me, in the depths of despair about England’s latest batting collapse, that this, too, would pass, and that the most important thing a person can ever do is to pick themselves up and try again tomorrow.
Immunocompromised as she was, my mother spent most of the pandemic confined to the house. But last summer, as her treatments failed, the doctors said it was up to her to weigh the risk of infection against what was important to her in her final months. Mum had no hesitation: Lord’s reopened to spectators after successive lockdowns, and if she was going to do anything, it was watch the cricket. Dad dropped us off at the gate for the start of the fourth day of England’s Test against India, while the stewards hovered nearby with a wheelchair. Mum waved it away and leaned on my arm as we walked to our seats, bathed in warm sunshine.
It was a perfect day for lovers of longform cricket; an old-fashioned tug-of-war between bat and ball, with India’s batters digging their heels in and England trying everything to winkle them out. Mum had conjured up the lavish picnic that she always brought to games, and I had brought a bottle of champagne that we finished by lunchtime. We spent the afternoon giggling, and the evening session cheering as England’s bowlers finally made the breakthroughs they needed.
I try not to think about this year’s trip to Lord’s without her—after all, weren’t we lucky to have that wonderful day, and those extra years together, and so much of life in common? But the sudden absence of Warnie—we were never shy to call him that, as if he were a family friend—is forcing me to confront some new truth of grief, some sadness I haven’t been ready to acknowledge before. Because when I picture England’s cricketing nemesis now, I don’t just remember his greatest moments on the field. I imagine Mum, bending his ear at a bar somewhere in heaven, telling him how her daughter fell in love with sport the same year he made history—as the poor guy is just trying to order a drink.
