The wicketkeeper-batsman’s ever-changing Test role has not offered him the best chance to flourish in the longest format
One summer, when he was 16 years old, carefree and on the very verge of life itself, Jonny Bairstow and a few of his friends went on a surfing holiday to Cornwall. One evening, he tells us in his autobiography, A Clear Blue Sky, they were sitting blissfully on the beach in Newquay when someone asked what everyone’s father did for a living. Bairstow explained in an even voice that his own father had died some years earlier. There was an awkward silence. And then someone laughed: a cruel, disbelieving, illogical laugh. Feeling the tears welling inside him, shaking with rage and embarrassment and loss, Bairstow simply got up and walked away, walked until he could walk no further.
The lesson Bairstow learned that night – a lesson we all learn and relearn in various ways – is that the moments of greatest pain frequently arise out of the moments of greatest joy. Often they come wrapped in the same clothes. Out of the golden memories of his father, David, comes the bitter recollection of his death when Johnny was just eight. Out of the grief comes a resolve to honour his memory by following him as a wicketkeeper-batsman for Yorkshire and England. Out of this lifelong ambition comes some of his most crushing disappointments. On it goes: pain and joy pursuing and nourishing each other, a bittersweet compact that can never truly be broken.
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