When Ben Stokes took us on an Ashes journey, cricket’s kinship with hiking was plain to see

In the latest in his series of reflections, Will Gore considers the connection between his two favourite pastimes

Saint Ben’s miracle draws parallels with being in the great outdoors (Getty)

I was almost one of the lucky ones.

I had a ticket for the Headingley test last weekend – but it was for the Saturday. Still a very fine day of cricket indeed; but little could we have guessed at the Ben Stokes magic which was to follow.

On Sunday – Stokesday – I was back home in Hertfordshire, nervously listening to the BBC’s Test Match Special or checking various live blogs, lest one of them might be loading quicker than another.

At seven wickets down and still nearly a hundred runs short of victory, parental duty – a trip to the local swimming pool – briefly intervened. I was feeling pessimistic at that point anyway. As we exited the pool an hour later, I asked the guy on the reception what the score was: 30 to get and Jack Leach in. I left the children trailing as I ran home to turn on the radio.

After the stunning denouement, we went for a trog in a local wood, the late afternoon sun meandering between the peculiarly deliberate mix of deciduous and evergreen trees that are entangled there – like English and Australians doing battle while simultaneously producing beauty through their inextricable entwinement.

Wandering in this place I tuned in to TMS again, letting Agnew and co burr quietly from my top pocket as we went, just I have done so many times over the years – alongside Hadrian’s Wall in 2005, in the murky Yorkshire Dales in 1993 and lots more besides.

Cricket and hiking have always been, for me at least, inseparable bedfellows. It may reflect the simple fact that they are both (up to a point) summer pastimes. What’s more, the time involved in playing a test match means the chances of the two activities coinciding are considerable.

But I wonder if there is more to it than just that.

Five-day cricket is meant to be circuitous, to take players and spectators on an unlikely journey – mapped out to an extent, but with the possibility of unanticipated detours, wrong turns and the occasional bad decision. As with hiking, on hot days extra drinks breaks are necessary.

Most crucially of all, what a love of test matches and of long walks requires is an ability to see exquisiteness in the mundane – to recognise beauty in a forward defensive shot at chilly Edgbaston; to find joy in a leafless Chiltern track.

For it is by identifying the glimmer of light in the rain-affected draw and the grey scree, in the tortuous collapses and the boggy valley, in the days of watching the opposition score 236 in 90 overs for the loss of two wickets (India at Headingley, 2002), and in the miserable path by the busy A-road, that we can bear to keep waiting for the moment when something completely extraordinary happens.

When Stokes or Botham smite the Aussies, and Atherton keeps the South Africans at bay. When Warne bowls the “ball of the century”; when Brian Lara scores 400; and when Gary Pratt effects a run-out.

Or when you reach a peak that has been shrouded in murk, only for the cloud to lift and for the world below to emerge as if from nowhere. When the path ahead is so perfectly conjured in its mysterious twisting that it must have been chiselled from the pages of a John Buchan novel.

Or when you sit down after a long slog by the side of a dull reservoir and turn on the radio...