One of the many joys of this Ashes series is that this summer my daughter has begun to care about cricket.
And there is nothing that reminds you of the beautiful weirdness of the game so much as trying to explain it to a relentlessly curious five-year-old.
First there’s the language of cricket, which frankly bears no resemblance to language we use in the rest of our lives. We’ve resorted to calling “overs” “turns”, “runs” “points” and “bowling” “throws” to help her understand what we’re talking about.
There are the obvious explanatory challenges presented by the rules – watching my husband try to explain lbw (leg before wicket) was a sight to behold – and then there’s just the variability of the game.
“How long does it go for?” she asks. “Five days, but it could be four, or three,” we tell her.
Or – as was the case for the first men’s Ashes Test this year, when we promised her it would still be on the next day when she woke up, and then Travis Head obliterated England’s bowling attack – two.
“But who is winning?” she has asked more times than I can count over the past month. “Well, it doesn’t really work like that,” we say.
What sort of sport is this?
Cricket is also a drama of personalities and her observations of the human element of the game have demonstrated a child’s delightful clear-eyed perceptiveness.
“Why is he so grumpy?” she asked when the camera kept cutting – with a regularity that bordered on cruelty – to Nathan Lyon as 12th man during the Test at the Gabba.
Then when his return to the side in the third Test was cut short by that furious dive in the outfield she was alert to my strong reaction. “What did he do wrong? What’s a ‘numpty’? Why is he too old to do things like that? How old is he?”
My favourite of her reactions was when Ben Stokes was hit in the groin by a scorching delivery from Michael Neser. She was perplexed by the response, both from her parents and the commentators who couldn’t stop laughing. “Why do they keep showing it and laughing if it hurts him?” Bless her.
Also, alert to injustice in the way that children often are, she observed one day: “There are no women talking.”
We jumped in to tell her there is the excellent Alison Mitchell but she’s right. Like Paw Patrol with its six heroic dog characters, only one of whom is female – also a source of outrage in her life – this is not an acceptable gender mix.
I am under no illusions that a key part of the appeal for her is that cricket is television, hours and hours of television that is permitted by her parents, who normally keep screen time reasonably rationed.
Television on while we’re at the dinner table? Never. During the evening session of the pink ball Test? Absolutely.
She can’t believe her luck.
The weirdness of cricket, which I am seeing afresh this season through her eyes, has made me deeply grateful to my parents (and brother and grandad) for indoctrinating me into the sport as a child. I don’t profess to be a cricket expert – as I’m sure this article will attest – but I know enough to enjoy it.
It’s a sport with a high bar of entry. I’m sure you can pick up “enjoying cricket” as an adult but, as with learning how to swim, or speak Mandarin, it’s much easier as a kid.
Maybe it is because of this that I have loved watching my daughter’s nascent love of the game – the moment she squealed with delight when she watched a batsman hit a cracking four and yelled to us “He did something good! The referee [sic] went like this!” and waved her arm horizontally in front of her.
I love, too, the way that cricket can be a salve in an otherwise hard time. This summer, already scarred by violence and tragedy just a few weeks in, cricket has felt for me, I think probably for many, like a small bright spot.
A flicker of normality in the dark fortnight we have all just lived through. A – respectfully – ultimately unimportant contest that has allowed us to have something to cheer about or just quietly follow, at a time our hearts are broken.
I wonder if this has been part of the appeal for her, too, perceptive as she is.
This summer hasn’t had an easy start for my little family. Apart from the cataclysm of the Bondi attack, which would be more than enough in itself, we have been dealing with the death of someone very close to us.
Cricket hasn’t fixed anything, or balanced the scales in any way. I don’t want to overstate things. But it has given us something to cheer for, something to distract and delight us and – given we are not England supporters – something to care about that doesn’t break our hearts.