England Have Gone Full Stick Cricket (And That’s Cool)

Before Bazball, there was only darkness (and Stick Cricket)...

I am 33 years old. I am, it is entirely reasonable to say, never going to make it as a professional cricket player. Yes, yes, Darren Stevens and all that but he was already a fully fledged professional at this particular staging post of life. Also, Darren Stevens is the actual king of Kent so there's that small matter as well. And no, before you say it, I'm no Richard Gleeson either (3 for 15 on T20I debut, aged 34, nice). No, regrettably, I will not be rapidly working my way up through the county circuit before turning out for England at Lord's in summer 2023. It's fine. I've come to terms with it, and you should too.

On Stick Cricket though, I was God incarnate; a consistent hitter of sixes, a conqueror of All Star Slog and World Domination, a talent. The game's bowlers saw me staring at them through the window that is my phone's screen, and trembled. "This is Clayton's world," they would say to themselves. "We're merely living in it."

The far-reaching influence of my work (yes, work) on Stick Cricket was perhaps most evident in Bairstow's no mercy approach and, let's face it, full-blown assault during that unforgettable final session against New Zealand at Trent Bridge last month. Quick toastie in the tea break for Jonny and bish, bash, bosh. Thanks for coming.

Back in 2006 and 2007, Stick Cricket was the drug of choice in my Sixth Form Study Area. When I should have been staying across my mounting pile of A-Levels work, I would often find myself mindlessly drifting towards fluctuating and sweaty palmed encounters with a cartoon run chase. That red arc when you absolutely middled one into the top tier? Hook it to the veins of my late-stage teenagehood. There was nothing like it.

Then, well, life got in the way. University, I decided, would be a good time to kick the Stick Cricket habit. There was lectures to attend, essays to write, new friends to make, bar crawls through the streets of Leicester to go on and, perhaps most importantly, the start of a new career on Football Manager to be focusing on (won Ligue One with Toulouse in my first season, took them to the Champions League Final in my second season). Like a treasured book you can't bring yourself to part with for good, Stick Cricket found itself boxed up and stored away in the attic of my heart. The ways of the stick people collected dust, and were forgotten…

Years passed, some stuff happened, and then there was a pandemic quickly followed by fear of Putin-induced nuclear annihilation; with England's Test match men turning being shit into a performance art piece sandwiched somewhere in the middle of it all. People are different, of course, and tend to react to existential crises such as modern-day plague, threats of radioactive armageddon and another devastating Scott Boland spell in their own way but the lever I reached for was escapism. What I did was dive headfirst back into a meditative, laser-focused, state which consumes all Stick Cricket players when they're 'in the zone'. Be stickman, see ball, hit ball. Be stickman, see ball, hit ball. Wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. Leave the world and its problems behind.

Pictured: The scorecard from my all-time best effort on Stick Cricket (yes, I did it with Zimbabwe)

While the England men’s Test team toiled in the Caribbean, forgetting how to win and turning balcony Joe Root into the ghost of a Dickensian workhouse boy in the process, I found solace in whacking the ball to all corners on a handheld electronic device. Before Bazzy Mac and ‘the vibes’, before Captain Benjamin 'We'll chase anything’ Stokes, before YJB put his foot so hard down on the pedals that he essentially kicked through the car floor and fully launched the team into rarefied space atmosphere, before Ollie Pope smiled at Mega Munch, before our Joe started reverse scooping Tim Southee and Shardul Thakur for sixes, before England nonchalantly made 378-3 off just 76.4 overs to win a Test match against India at Edgbaston (their fourth successful run chase over 250 in a row) there was the steady screen tap of Stick Cricket. 

Tap… tap… tap. Tap again, but better.

I haven't played Stick Cricket in months. Not because I don't rate it as a game, not because the world no longer feels like something to occasionally be escaped from, but because, well, Brendon McCullum has done something to the men's Test team that's impossible to look away from. The ebbs and flows of the cricket they’re playing demands attention, has eyeballs helplessly gravitating towards it. Sort of like that bit at the end of Animal Farm, where the animals realise the human and pigs have become indistinguishable from each other, that's basically where my head's at now when working out whether that really is Alex Lees in the middle tonking it to all parts. Unlike in the Animal Farm finale though, this doesn’t feel like a grim acceptance of a return to the before-times. It feels like something new, something exciting. Buckle up, England fans. The future is unwritten.