It’s just cricket

21st November 2025

I hope that it’s been a good week. It’s been cold, but clear and cold seems much more manageable than the wet, windy and warm weather of last week. Next week has a very different shape with Friday being the Trust’s Professional Learning Day. The children and young people will have the INSET Day off and the staff will be in, working hard on training, collaboration and professional development.

The cold this week is a marked contrast to the weather down-under. That naturally brings us to the most eagerly anticipated Ashes series for years. It is now underway. I didn’t stay up to watch the start (2.20am is beyond me – to be honest 10.15pm is beyond me these days!) but start it has, and with a bang. To those who know and understand this will make sense, to those of you who don’t ‘do cricket’ it might not… But wow! 19 wickets on day one. It sets the series up so nicely. It will be tight. It will be a contest. It will be entertaining.

Not quite a lesson in cricket but for the purposes of the rest of the message …

A side must get the ten wickets of the opposing team, twice – so twenty wickets are needed, over five days. This must take place without you losing all your ten wickets, twice, and you must score more runs over those five days. Clear? Maybe not.

More inclusively then can we focus on the five days element? Test match cricket is scheduled to take place over five days. Five full days are not always needed but, despite the way England now seem to play and the events of the past day’s cricket, Test matches do take a long while to complete – it’s always days, not hours.

For the cricket nuts and obsessives that might not seem like revolutionary news, but for many who don’t watch this particular sport and may, instead choose to be entertained in other ways, be that football, the theatre, the cinema, pop concerts, eating and drinking, this must seem very strange, unnecessary and something of a waste of time. Maybe. Maybe not.

There is a narrative, more broadly, about taking some time to complete something, even to be entertained. The slow gestation, the concentration and the subsequent fulfilment of doing something that demands patience, peace and quiet and dedication might be being lost in our fast-moving world: the stimuli are so great; the temptation to scroll so intense; the need to move on so alluring.

In our schools, in the college we do work to encourage, and even train, our children and young people to stay on task, remain committed to that task, take responsibility and even go further, achieve more, than they might have imagined. This is important and no bad thing. Despite the demands placed on our children and young people beyond our hours/gates we can find the space and time to support our charges as they do something which is, by its nature, a challenge yet incredibly fulfilling.

Like watching a five-day test match, some things are just that bit better for some slowness, some deliberate focus and some considered reflection. In this way the outcome may well be that bit better.

‘The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.’ George Bernard Shaw