Competition Is Overrated

I don’t talk about cricket anymore. My American friends can’t really understand it, and my British friends turn it into an Ashes argument nobody needs. So I pretend it never mattered, even though it stole most of my childhood. Long weekends in cheap polyester, odd white pants, waiting six hours to bat for eight minutes with a bout of heat stroke in an odd wool hat. I’ve done my time.

When Kai was eleven, he came home from school and said he’d played cricket in PE. He asked if we could hit some balls at the nets on the weekend. I felt genuine dread. Not metaphorical dread. Real dread. The kind where your brain shows you a montage of everything you thought you’d escaped. But I said yes, because that’s what you do when your kid is excited about something.

We went to the nets and I did what every washed-up ex-junior cricketer does. I overprepared him. Full kit. Pads, gloves, Hector protector, the lot. I even explained, with way too much enthusiasm, that the red ball I’d brought was new and challenging and could really hurt. He smiled politely the way eleven-year-olds do when their dad is reliving something.

Then I walked all the way back to my bowling mark, shining my ball furiously. For my American friends, this is the cricket equivalent of winding up the trebuchet. The longer the run-up, the more serious the bowler thinks he is. My knees were already asking questions, but I ignored them and charged in like it was 1998. I bowled faster than I had in years, which isn’t saying much, but to an eleven-year-old it may as well have been test-match pace.

(And before my American friends panic, “shining my balls” is not what it sounds like. It is simply what grown cricketers do in public while pretending it is a legitimate athletic requirement. You take the red cricket ball, rub it aggressively on your white trousers with the confidence of someone who once peaked in Year 9, and insist it makes the ball swing. Every cricketer pretends they understand how to swing a ball. But they don't and they don’t (Swing it). It is half physics, half superstition, and half middle-aged adults trying to feel useful between overs to stop the boredom.)

Three balls in, Kai put the bat down and said, very calmly, “I don’t like cricket anymore, Dad. Can we go home now?”! “That’s fine, Kai”, I said. We packed up, went surfing instead, and just like that, I completed life’s greatest act of cricket sabotage (and stolen dreams).

But there was a time when cricket wasn’t something I accidentally ruined for my son. It was the thing I used to measure whether I was any good at anything.

When I think about competition now, I realise how much of my younger life was shaped by the belief that progress meant beating someone else. I didn’t question it, and adults reinforced it. The system reinforced it. Every sport, every schoolyard, every male conversation seemed to orbit around the same idea that improvement was a race and that someone else’s success came with an implied message about your own ability.

The moment I first felt the weight of that belief was in Adelaide when I was a teenager. I’d been invited to a development program, and the whole thing felt too big for this irresponsible, ego manic 19 year old kid (me!). I was batting (that’s cricket talk from my American friends) in the nets with Rod Marsh (Australian Royalty), which felt surreal in itself. He had a way of cutting through any illusion you had about your talent. You knew exactly where you stood by the time you stepped out of the net. I walked out buzzing and unsettled, still replaying every ball, trying to decide whether I’d shown promise or exposed my limitations (I still do that after every meeting or a night on the cans).

Then Ricky Ponting walked in.