Ragged Splendour

“The eyes behind these glasses tell a thousand stories”. A dishevelled and partied-out Andrew Freddie Flintoff spoke these immortal words at a victory parade in Trafalgar Square where 50,000 England cricket fans had come to celebrate the team which had just given them the summer of their dreams. The first England Ashes victory for 18 long years. One still heralded as the greatest Ashes ever.

Ben Wyatt’s Ragged Splendour is a personal memoir of that time, that heady, glorious summer, as one of the fans in the crowd that day who, like Fred, was blinking into the light wondering, “Did that really happen?”

A collection of 41 poems, Ragged Splendour captures the author’s experience of and emotional reactions that special cricketing summer – what was happening, what it meant to him, how his life organised around it – and it reflects what he saw in the dynamic of a young team of still forming talents, navigating their ambition and relations with each other under a firebrand captain, and the rising expectations that they could achieve something remarkable.

In amongst that, 2005 was a summer full of incident, sometime celebratory, sometimes harrowing. In July, London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games; a day later the worst terrorist attack on British soil struck the London transport system during morning rush hour.

The iconic moments across the summer are all reflected here – the Lord’s pavilion in uproar, Ponting’s cut cheek, McGrath collapsing on a ball, 407-7, the Pratt run-out, the first T20 International, that Flintoff over, Strauss’s Superman catch, Harmison to Clark, Giles and Hoggard at Trent Bridge, the last-gasp win at Edgbaston, the Flintoff-Lee handshake, the Pietersen 158, Richie Benaud’s final commentary, the party of 1,000 stories, Trafalgar Square (twice), the Prime Minister’s rose garden, and what actually happened to the dislodged bails that signified victory on the final day.

And then there’s Shane Warne. The Australian icon took 40 wickets that summer while on the losing side. The Oval crowd at the fifth and final Test serenaded him with “We only wish you were English”. Ragged Splendour offers a tribute to his memory and the game he made richer for his presence.

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