Ashes 2019: On the day Lord’s shimmered red, Andrew Strauss shows the most powerful side to sport

Gamely, if a little uncertainly, Luca Strauss grabs the rope and rings the Lord’s pavilion bell. It’s a little louder than he was expecting, and he recoils at the din, cupping a hand over his ears to protect them. Alongside him, his older brother Sam smiles and gives him a hand with the clapper. Behind them, their father Andrew beams a smile of paternal pride. And that’s that. Day two of the Lord’s Test is underway.

Day one was washed out by rain, and during those long cold hours of waiting forlornly for a break in the weather, you begin to grasp just what a gift cricket is, the emptiness it leaves behind when this most delicate of pleasures is denied to us. But Thursday dawns to brilliant sunshine, and as the bell peals loud and clear, Lord’s shimmers red: as red as a fresh new ball, as red as the blood that pumps on the first morning of a big game, as red as life.

It was Luca’s 11th birthday a few weeks ago. As luck would have it, the date coincided with the World Cup final, and as England triumphed over New Zealand on that golden Sunday evening, Luca and Sam lived and breathed every moment of one of the greatest finishes ever seen at a cricket ground. But naturally, the joy was tinged with something else. “That morning,” Andrew would later relate, “is when it hits you. That there are three of us now, not four.”​

“Supporting the suffering you don’t see”, goes the motto of the Ruth Strauss Foundation. And for the most part, the Strauss family have had to do their suffering in private. When Andrew steps in front of the television cameras, as he has been doing regularly to promote the charity he set up in his wife’s name, he’s the embodiment of professional respectability: sober, measured, concise. The grief and the pain of the last 18 months is evoked in word alone. The sense of loss, of a beloved wife and mother taken by a rare form of lung cancer last December, is both unimagined and unimaginable.

So what we do, instead, is sublimate. We dissemble. We make - in the words of the poet Kayo Chingonyi - wine from the bad blood of history. Red caps and red suits, a red flag on the outfield, red advertising hoardings around the boundary perimeter. How did Sam and Luca feel, I wonder, as they arrived bright and early at Lord’s on Thursday morning to find the place bedecked in their mother’s favourite colour, to see the collection tins bearing their mother’s name? How did Andrew feel arriving at the ground that was his place of work for close to two decades, as a Middlesex player, and then as an England captain, and then as an administrator?

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Perhaps it was something in between pride and sadness, something in between grief and celebration. Ruth was older than Andrew, and if she bequeathed him one lesson - and of course she bequeathed so much more than that - it was that life must never be defined by sport. When he was out for a low score, when the strains of captaincy began to weigh on his shoulders, when text scandals reared their head and the vultures began to circle, Ruth would tell him - over and over - that he was “not a cricketer, but a man who plays cricket”.

The irony is that had it not been for cricket, we would never have known of Ruth Strauss at all. We might never have heard of her warmth and strength, the dignity with which she faced the unspeakable. We might never have known of the rare form of lung cancer that cruelly afflicts non-smokers, most of them young, most of them female. We would never have seen Lord’s festooned as never before, we would never have seen Joe Root and Tim Paine stepping out in red caps, we would never have seen more than a quarter of a million pounds raised for charity, for the research and support that the Ruth Strauss Foundation will fund.

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Sport is at its most powerful when it brings people together like this, and cricket - with its long weeks on tour and long hours in dressing rooms and pavilion bars and press boxes and chilly plastic seats - is never more powerful than when it harnesses its innate kinship for the greater good. Never let anyone tell you that cricket doesn’t matter. But equally - and this is just as important - never let anyone tell you that cricket matters.

“Then it hits you,” Andrew said during a recent BBC podcast on how he processes his grief. “And it doesn’t hit me for a whole day. It hits me for 10 minutes, an hour, two hours. It’s like this deep guttural grief I haven’t even got close to experiencing ever before in my life. You grieve different elements: you grieve your wife who’s gone, you grieve the fact she had cancer and you had to watch her die, you grieve the fact the life you built isn’t going to be the same as the one going forward.”​

In the cricket, Australia closed on 30-1 in reply to England’s score of 258 all out.

https://ruthstraussfoundation.com/