Giles Coren

Giles Coren on fathers (him) and sons (Sam, aged five). This month: it’s just not cricket

His latest report from the sidelines of fatherhood is an appeal for the brilliance of cricket

it’s just my luck to have a beautiful, strong, handsome young son suddenly getting into cricket at a time when the professional game is completely fucked. As Sammy approached his fifth birthday and began nagging for grown-up kit, replica shirts, membership of a club and to be taken to matches — a time which should have been the happiest of my cricket-loving life — England were being smashed in a test series by the limp-wristed sandal-wearers of New Zealand, Australia’s captain was being banned for ball-tampering and Ben Stokes was facing prison for assault.

In the months prior to that, my cricket conversations with Sam had been straightforward.

“Are England any good, Dad?”

“Pretty good, Sam. We’ve got some very experienced bowlers and a fine young captain in Joe Root.”

“Who’s our best player, Dad?”

“Ben Stokes.” “Who is the best team in the world, Dad?”

“Australia.”

It was good to have these straight, positive answers to fire back at a boy who, like most kids, is bombarded with football all year round and inhabits a snowflake world in which cricket is misguidedly denigrated as old-fashioned, posh, post-colonial, slow, boring and overcomplicated.

Without my firm hand to guide him towards the harder but more beautiful game, I knew that Sam, like all his friends, would descend into the goonish, dribbling, mush-brained thuggery of football which, even in the school playground, seems to be all about stupid goal celebrations, pathetic crowd-pleasing drag-backs, diving, crying, tribal antagonism based on shirt colour and, no doubt, the distant dream of huge salaries, pant-modelling contracts and spit-roasting teenage girls in seedy hotel rooms while watching Match of the Day on an iPad propped up on the bird’s back.