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Remember when Eoin Morgan was the exciting one. Remember how you used to shout “Morgan’s in!” when he came to the crease and how the person you were shouting to used to respond: “I don’t care. I don’t like cricket.”
Remember how you used to flaunt your knowledge by telling everyone within earshot that those miraculous rubber-wristed shots were down to Morgan’s background in hurling. Remember how, shortly after, you use to flaunt your knowledge by telling everyone that actually, he didn’t play those shots because of hurling, because he never really played the game.
Good times. Great memories. Different times. Old memories.
Nowadays Morgan’s a middle-order rock. He’s not the flamboyant one. He’s the guy who’ll hold things together with a nuggetty 45 off 38 balls while the guy at the other end switch-hits reverse-ramp maximums and canes it to cow corner.
Reverse sweeps are passé. Morgan’s an anachronism. Sometimes, if you squint quite a bit, it even looks like he’s smoking a pipe and wearing a monocle when he’s walking out to bat, as if he’s just set down his glass of port and risen from a Chesterfield wingback armchair.
We’re not even sure that he has any tattoos. Maybe he does, somewhere – but not so many that he looks like a guy who’s going to try and sell you some stilton in a canalside pub in some dark corner of the Midlands.
He doesn’t even keep wicket. Just think about that. Here’s a guy playing short format cricket in 2015 who doesn’t bowl and who also doesn’t keep wicket. Of course he’s the captain – they had to give him something to do other than bat.
WiFi on aeroplanes, paleo diets and Eoin Morgan taking second, third or fourth billing in an England one-day batting line-up. The modern world is a strange and unsettling place.
Morgan can in fact keep wicket. He’s got a glove icon on ICC 2005, which as we all know is the authority on such things.
That’s an excellent fact.
I gave the lad a pep talk this summer, soon after the ECB, in its infinite wisdom, decided to give Eoin a second chance as skipper, after selling him a dummy for the World Cup.
As usual (in the rare aftermath of Ged or Daisy feeling motivated to give a pep talk to a cricketer), the rest is history.
Raises the question of how many he might have scored this year if Daisy had given the talk
Unquestionably more, Howe.
But in any case, my pep talk was specifically about captaincy.
Short format anchor? Is this the cleverest way yet found to mock a diminutive England batsman’s lack of height?
Our Eoin’s not that titchy – he only looks small when he squats on the ground prior to each delivery he faces, or when standing next to such colossi of the game as Joe Root…
I once ate a McFlurry outside a canal-side pub in a dark corner of the West Midlands.
Shortly afterwards, I lost my virginity.
I fear I may have said too much.
On the contrary, I think you might have said too little, Sam. Details are required for stories such as this, so we can properly picture the scene.
Did you get crushed Oreos?
What ales were on in said pub? Doesn’t matter if you didn’t drink there (sounds like you didn’t). We still want to know.
We’re thinking Marston’s Pedigree and/or Bass.
It’s probably that dismal M&B stuff, although the optimist in me envisages a Banks’s pub with a good fresh barrel of the mild on show.
No idea. I was 15 or 16 at the time. It was the Flapper and Firkin in Birmingham.