If our friendships are the best measure of our worth, then Martin Crowe must have been a great man. A better batsman even than his average signified, and a brighter thinker than his writing suggested. Crowe died of lymphoma last Thursday, at the age of 53. In the last five days he has received an extraordinary, almost unprecedented, number of exquisite tributes. In this paper, Mike Selvey spoke of Crowe’s “ethos of fair play, responsible behaviour and enjoyment”, and admired the “rational fortitude” with which he faced his illness. Greg Chappell described Crowe’s enquiring mind, his obvious “talent and athleticism”, his “intelligence and desire to succeed”. In The Times, Mike Atherton wrote of “one of the game’s keenest minds”, a man who stood up to “rampant ego, selfishness, boorishness, bullying”.

They go on. On Cricket With Balls, Jarrod Kimber marvelled at the perfection of Crowe’s batting, a “beautifully illustrated coaching manual come to life”. In Wisden India, Dileep Premachandran described the “unflinching honesty and vulnerability” of Crowe’s writing. Cricinfo, where Crowe did much of that writing, surpassed itself and everyone else. Mark Nicholas wrote that Crowe had become “an irresistible conscience for those of us left behind”. Ed Smith addressed Crowe’s two lives, the first as an “effortless technician”, “majestic and lordly”, the other as a thinker, “equally deft and assured”. And then there was Gideon Haigh, whose eulogy for Crowe was too fine to fillet for a single line:

Martin’s love of cricket was fathomless: so passionate he needed to break from it from time to time; so profound he always found his way back to the fold. His great theme in the last while was anger and ill-feeling on the cricket field. The world was so full of it; why could cricket not provide some sort of refuge, a better example?

Few cricketers have received so many moving tributes, or provoked such an out-pouring of fine and thoughtful praise. Each article is affecting when read on its own, and taken all together the collection is entirely overwhelming. In death Crowe inspired the best of his colleagues in the press box, just as in life he once inspired it in his team-mates on the field. The sorrow of it is that he wasn’t around to read all these words, but you hope they will provide some solace for his family in their grief. Crowe seems to have touched so many people. There are others, too: the men he played with and against, and the ones he mentored once he was done.



As for the man himself, it feels like there’s little left to add, least of all from those, like me, who only knew him from what they’d seen or read on page and screen. Because, aside from their subject, the one thing that each of these articles shared was that their writers had a personal connection to Crowe. Selvey and Chappell both spoke of seeing him for a final time in New Zealand. Kimber mentioned meeting him in India. Smith, Atherton and Premachandran referred to their email conversations. Haigh and Nicholas talked at length about their friendships with him, Nicholas’s forged early in Crowe’s playing days, when he was still a student, and Haigh’s made long after Crowe had quit playing, though not studying, the game. Friendships forged on cricket fields can sometimes seem just a little stronger and longer-lasting than those made elsewhere. And as Haigh says: “With Martin there was no such thing as a trivial contact. Perhaps because it was his own aim, he made you want to be your best self.”

Add them all up, and they serve as a remarkable testament to Crowe’s own qualities, and also to those of the game he loved so much. He shared that love with this disparate range of writers, from England, Australia, and India, some young, others old, some great Test players, others strictly amateur, all equally smitten with cricket. Crowe’s memory, like the sport, is so well-served by such an array of fine minds and talented writers. The internet has made so many publications from so many different places so much more accessible that readers are spoiled for choice.

Had Crowe been able to read any of these tributes, he would have been delighted, you guess, not only by the praise for his own batting, captaincy, and writing, but also the way in which his passing provoked such an expression of love for the sport itself, and so brilliantly illustrated the way in which so many people, from so many different parts, are bound together by their mutual enthusiasm for it. “What we can strive for is to restore our sport’s lost integrity and loving feeling, so the fans can be lifted once more from their daily grind,” Crowe wrote in his final column. “International cricket, nation v nation, is about patriotism and a bit of tribalism, but not hate.” His death seems, for a time, to have bought the community around cricket just a little closer together, united as so many people in their feelings for him.

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