Tower and Town, September 2021

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The Breath Of Sadness: On Love, Grief And Cricket by Ian Ridley

For those of a certain age, the first half of the title of Ian Ridley's moving, poignant and ultimately uplifting book will be familiar. It is taken from the 1989 song Sit Down by James: "Those who feel the breath of sadness, sit down next to me." The quotation formed part of a tweet by Ridley on the morning of 6 February 2019 to announce the death from cancer of his wife, Vikki Orvice, aged 56. "Hers was a dashing innings, rather than a ground-out half-century," he writes.

As well as the love of Ridley's life, Vikki had been a pioneering writer: first female sports reporter on the staff of a British tabloid newspaper; vice-chair of the Football Writers' Association; first female chair of the British Athletics Writers' Association.

 Shortlisted for the 2020 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, The Breath of Sadness recounts with searing candour how Ridley, also a sports journalist, dealt with Orvice's illness and how, after her death, he coped with the mass of raging and, at times, frighteningly dark emotions. Counselling and conversation play their part but it is through watching cricket that Ridley starts to put his wife's death into some kind of perspective. 

 Not just any cricket – Ridley eschews the bish-bash of T20 cricket and the international glamour of Test matches in favour of the county game, whose unsung heroes perform in front of sparse crowds, as the wind howls across the greensward and crosswords are slowly filled in.

And so the summer of 2019 gradually unfolds: Sussex (Hove, actually), where, on the first day of the season, Ridley encounters "like-minded souls… with time on their hands… and newspapers and thermos flasks in their backpacks"; Hampshire (the Isle of Wight), where "tea and cake in the marquee with fellow cricket lovers… to interrupt my melancholy was a comfort"; Yorkshire (‘Scarbados’), where, during a break in play, "Vikki would have loved the three young girls having a game of their own in the middle of the ordered joy".

Watching cricket does not heal Ridley. Part of him will always be broken. But, he writes: "Cricket didn't talk back to me and it didn't offer advice. Like a best friend, it was just there for me."

Ben Tarring