Geoff Lemon's Ashes Diary: Today is gonna be the day

It’s late, it’s warm, and the entire England cricket team is sitting in the middle of The Oval wearing whites with a guitar and beers, singing ‘Wonderwall’.

The floodlights have long been switched off, and a kind of sleepy darkness washes across the ground, only some scattered lights in the pavilions lending a warm photo-filter glow to the scene.

It’s still tonight, and their voices carry clearly across the grass to the stands. Off outside the ground, an apartment building with a rooftop terrace still holds the scattered remnants of a cricket party. Various members of the England entourage join in the chorus from their own balcony in the members’ pavilion.

Team allegiances aside, it’s a beautiful and humanising moment. For so much of the time, everything these players do is under such intense scrutiny.

Each dismissal or over can be described as career changing, each failing is magnified, each unguarded comment in a press conference is spun into self-aggrandisement or grievance. Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you.

But sitting here, the dusky orange light spilling thick across our skin, the passing sirens of London mercifully absent, the music burbling through the air, you can feel the sense of relief. You can feel the satisfaction in achievement, the bond among the group. It’s generational, too, even the song of choice telling you about the Britain these players have come from, as opposed to the other variants through Ashes history.

Before each series, the pressure built up on these players is immense. They have hundreds of journalists watching their every move, tens of thousands of spectators coming to watch.

The margins in cricket are so arbitrary and small. On any day you can only do well or not well, but when you succeed you’re exalted, when you fail, condemned. In what other line of work would this apply? Imagine being a plumber or nurse or graphic designer whose good work was talked up in such elated fashion.

“That was just magnificent work by Pablo there, changing the washers on those taps. He’s got those fixed so they won’t leak for years. Absolutely extraordinary wrench action, he’s got such elastic wrists…”

Imagine having a room of people interview you every day after you knocked off, asking how you felt at having changed those washers so well, and what would it bring to your washer-changing over summer? Imagine reading write-ups in the paper because you’d achieved your daily tasks to a reasonable level.

The crowd attention brings its own pressure. Being cheered is not necessarily any more comforting than being booed. The greater your support, the greater the feeling you owe them success, that you could let them down.

And now, in this moment, the terraces are empty. All around these players, bank on bank, are seats stretching to the back of grandstands, vacant, not paying the slightest attention to the middle, or at least watching without judgement.

The 30,000 eyes of this place have blinked shut. The ground is once more just a cricket ground, not a stage; the only important part is the middle, where the game was played.

The act of observation in itself changes the thing being observed; to track the movement of an electron you need light, and the photons bouncing off the electron change its trajectory. The game is the same, changed by those who watch it. Now, there are no spectators. Now, there are just cricketers and cricket.

For me there’s a related, if smaller scale, sense of completion. With the adrenaline of the close-run draw wearing off, the Ashes are done, my diary tour completed. I’ve come to a new place, been challenged and interested everywhere I’ve gone, met people in their hundreds.

We’ve filmed across the country, walked foreign streets, talked with luminaries from Rahul Dravid to a shitfaced guy in a clown suit, done our best to get punched by Ian Botham, and avoided the scorn of Derek Pringle.

Now there’s that combination of poignancy and anticlimax that comes at the completion of a major achievement. You get your degree, you launch your book, you buy your first house, and there’s an expectation that somehow everything will change.

But the initial moment of celebration passes, and then you realise it’s all in the past, and that no-one else really understands or cares about the feeling. Suddenly the thing you’ve invested so much effort in is a little empty.

For Cam the Cameraman and I, this tour was exciting and intimidating. Suddenly, lifelong cricket fans and absolute nobodies, we found ourselves working in the same room as Vic Marks, Jonathan Agnew, Michael Atherton.

Henry Blofeld was wandering down the stairs in his pyjamas. Warnie laughed at one of my jokes on a rooftop smoking a cigarette. Phil Tufnell made idle chat at the urinals. We tried not to sound completely ignorant talking to Jim Maxwell. I became known for asking the stupidest question each press conference.

At lunch one day, the only empty seat in the entire press room was at a table with Glenn McGrath, David Lloyd and Simon Hughes. They all chatted amiably. Cam was on another table with Michael Vaughan, who didn’t.

In short, it was completely bloody surreal. Tonight, I feel that I’ve finished something momentous. But for most of these guys (and they are almost uniformly guys, we’ve met about half a dozen women covering the tour), it’s just another job, another circuit of the merry-go-round.

Cam has already left, in fact. The first day of the fifth Test, he flew out to California. It had been an intense few weeks, living in each other’s pockets. We’d driven a full circuit of Iceland together sleeping in a tent.

We’d spent every minute of the day together, work or social. Cricket ran from morning to evening, then we scripted and shot footage, wrote columns. His alone time – editing videos – involved listening to my voice for hours.

I’d send an article by 2am, he might work on videos till 6, then back for another day’s play. Yet somehow, we’d managed to not only not kill each other, but also have an excellent time. The night before he left we were still working in the kitchen, cracking each other up with immature jokes.

Over these weeks we have struck up good friendships with some of the press circus, nodding acquaintanceships with others, studious ignoring of the high fliers. Tonight, a few are around for a couple of quiet beers, but it wraps up quickly. There is no great end-of-season bash, nothing to mark the occasion I feel it is.

And so those strains of song coming from the England players and staff have an extra poignancy as they roll around The Oval. They, at least, are indicating an end to the ride we’ve all been on, as separate as theirs has been to mine.

Missing out on a chance to win today won’t bother them much, nor should it. England did nothing to put itself in a winning position, the chance was handed to them. And tonight, they know they’ve won the series 3-0.

It must a tremendous feeling, a tremendous relief. All the pressure, all the tension and attention, is suddenly gone. You have an oval that’s yours, your ground, to soak it in. You have the company of your teammates, and a beer, and a chance to get a bit rowdy and classless, and a song.

“By now you shoulda, somehow, realised what you’re not to do,” they sing, even as the waste of electrons (photons notwithstanding) that serve News Ltd publishing start running prurient stories about England players pissing on the pitch.

Who cares if they do. It’s their pitch, and their series. My series is done. The adrenaline from the close finish has faded, the warm blanket of beer has descended, a feeling of finality and closure remains.

I linger a few moments more, then leave England to their night. The last cricket field of my trip passes from view, the sound of song recedes, and coming out of the dark concourse to head toward the Tube, all the lights that light the way are blinding.