My all-time favourite cricket moment (bear with me) happened inside the Santiago Bernabéu gift shop. It was August 2019, and I was in Madrid for an old work colleague’s wedding.
With a free day going spare after the celebrations, my mate and I did what every football-obsessed adult male with time to kill does in the Spanish capital and headed to the home of Los Blancos for a tour. The previous day, we’d both been feverishly checking our phones for updates on England’s latest Ashes capitulation. Chasing a record 359 to win at Headingley, after being bowled out for a dismal 67 in the first innings, Joe Root and Ben Stokes had dug in to take England to the close of day three on 156/3. A decent fightback, sure, but still well short of what the Australians had set us for victory.
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Before walking around football’s most legendary colosseum and cathedral to all things El Clásico, with its ludicrous trophy cabinets that stretch down corridors for an eternity, my mate and I decided to keep tabs on what was happening in Leeds via the BBC. Root had gone early (on the way to the stadium). Bairstow had rallied, then went (not long after we’d bought our admission tickets). Stokes was ramping up his aggression, but was surely going to run out of partners soon.
When Buttler, Woakes, Archer, and Broad were dismissed without really troubling the scorer (this all happened in and around the historic kits of Real Madrid section), we figured the game was done and turned our phones off. If an Aussie wearing a weird little green hat cheers a win but nobody’s following, has it even happened at all?
If you know your cricket (honestly, bear with me), you’ll know what happened next. Stokes, supported by the last man Jack Leach, pulled off one of sport’s most remarkable and dramatic heists: a final partnership of 76, featuring some of the best big hits of a cricket ball you will ever see in your life and, from Leach, the most important 1* that’s ever been played. We missed all of it, of course, only finding out what had happened when we turned our phones back on at the tour’s end.
Surrounded by replica Real Madrid kits and official mugs and keyrings, watched by confused staff wearing the club’s famously regal badge on their polo shirts, we celebrated loudly before emerging into the sun in a bewildered daze. Delighted, yet also feeling like we’d maybe, just possibly, missed the most cinematic thing that had ever happened in an English summer (or at least since Southgate and his waistcoat, the previous year). All because we were fake-cheering for an obligatory blue-screen photo with an invisible Thibaut Courtois.
I tell this story because cricket and football coming together in this way, even incidentally and on a very personal level, feels quite rare these days. In that time and space, though, the worlds collided and the fabric curtains between the dimensions blurred into one, forever mushing together Stokes and the Galácticos in my mind like Jeff Goldblum and the genetic makeup of a fly in The Fly (but, you know, in a good way).
Alfie White