How cricket helped a writer come to terms with grief

“Cricket didn’t talk back to me and it didn’t offer advice. It didn’t tell me what to do nor how to feel. Like a best friend, it was just there for me, willing to embrace me and allow me just to be, w

“Cricket didn’t talk back to me and it didn’t offer advice. It didn’t tell me what to do nor how to feel. Like a best friend, it was just there for me, willing to embrace me and allow me just to be, whatever mood I was in.” This is Ian Ridley on coping with the loss of his wife, Vikki Orvice, in The Breath of Sadness. Ridley is a football writer and author of a dozen books; his wife, who succumbed to cancer at 56 was an athletics and football writer for The Sun, which was exceptional in an all-male field. Reading The Breath of Sadness feels a bit like peeping through the curtains into another man’s pain, but it is equally an assertion of the power of sport, cricket in particular, to make sense of grief, and help to come to terms with it. Where the writer is unflinching in describing his feelings and his relationship, the reader might sometimes flinch at the rawness of it all. Ridley writes with feeling on mourning a loved one in a book that finds companionship with two similar ones written by the surviving spouse: A Grief Observed by C S Lewis and the more recent The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. That word ‘magical’ is used by Didion as a synonym for ‘insanity’, where one believes (without any reason) that a particular action can lead to a wished-for result, however crazy that might sound to an outsider.