The former England player's departure from professional cricket renews nostalgia for the 1990s, a decade of contrasts
For English cricket the 1990s was a period of rare generational frenzy. While the world around it basked in a kind of milky, slow-burn prosperity ? an era of mild premillennial angst, overly baggy shirts and bands with at least one member employed simply to dance like an addled marionette while making faces suggestive of triumphant chemical transport ? English cricket was transformed into a carousel of revolving ineptitude.
For this reason the 1990s is still the most unlamented of decades, an era that was never formally closed, but was instead simply allowed to pass, heaved without ceremony into the surf. Perhaps this is about to change. With the retirement of Dominic Cork this week I feel the time has come finally to mark the passing of cricket's forgotten decade. Stop all the clocks. Beep the horn of your sponsored Rover saloon. Because Cork is gone ? and it is unexpectedly sad.
Of course, this may just be me. You aren't really supposed to like Dominic Cork much. In fact the grandiosity of his self?belief could often irritate and for many he will remain an energetic second-ranker, an own-brand Botham, a market-stall Flintoff. This is unfair and overlooks not just his great qualities, but the mountainous statistical achievements of a 21-year career.
Cork bowled 79,905 deliveries in professional cricket. If the act of bowling takes roughly a second this represents more than 22 hours spent doing nothing but release a cricket a ball from his fingertips. And what a spectacle it was watching Cork bowl: that purposeful, almost angry approach to the crease, reminiscent in its manic urgency of a man pursuing the receding rear end of the last night-bus home through a post?pub pedestrianised city centre.
Beyond that there were the whooping, pistol-fingered celebrations, and above all that air of Partridge?esque self-possession, a defiant sense of provincial stodginess, the lurking possibility that you might look down halfway through his run-up and notice that he's bowling in string-backed driving gloves.
Cork will depart with regrets about the brevity of his Test career. I know this because on his personal website it says: "Dominic Cork is one of the finest cricket players to play for England." This is despite the fact he played only 37 Tests, taking (in his words) "an incredible 131 wickets".
There was one famous on-pitch falling?out with the skipper in South Africa and periodic talk of a loss of "nip", but looking back Cork was caught up more than most in the lost years, the new-Botham era that blighted so many lives. Corky, we were told, was feisty. He got up your nose. Perhaps there was too much pressure to fulfil the game?changing, nose-invading promise, rather than simply concentrate on his fine swing bowling. Either way it is a symptom of the era that Cork played so little, his Tests stolen away by a generic breed of in-and-out 1990s England all?rounder that I want to call "the Ronnie Iranis".
There were wonderful highs. He will always have that hat-trick against West Indies (the hustling away-nipper, followed brilliantly by two in-swinging lbws). But perhaps Cork's finest hour came right at the start of England's great decade-long rejuvenation, which began in earnest during the 2000 Lord's Test against West Indies, then still invincible on these shores. It was a Cork?ish triumph, sped by his second-innings mopping up with the ball and steered home by his resilient batting while all around gnawed their umbrella handles.
After which came the long domestic goodbye. If the 1990s was a period when everybody in the England team seemed to have wandered in from a different movie ? the parping slapstick of Phil Tufnell, the lonesome John Wayne heroics of Mike Atherton, the cannon-fodder bit parts of all those endlessly machine-gunned one-Test extras ? Cork at least found a franchise sequel in county cricket. Here he ossified into a reassuringly timeless figure, a constant of the Ceefax page and the buried county scores panel, a kind of modern pastoral sprite forever nosing his walnut-trim six-gear Ford Mondeo saloon around some county ground gyratory system.
Now that he is no more perhaps the 1990s can finally start to come in from the cold. There is still for some a sense of unexpected nostalgia for the decade cricket tried to forget. Confronted with the armour-plated competence of English cricket's current administration, it is tempting to slide into the same kind of furtive regret felt by some East Germans in the years of surging prosperity after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We love the victories. But somehow the horror had its own snagged and moreish fascination, even a kind of cosiness. What seems certain is there may never again be a generation of English players to match the 1990s survivors, players who carry with them such a palpable air of scar tissue, of wounded grandeur. Mark Ramprakash will be around for at least another year. But perhaps it was Cork who represented the 1990s most clearly, with all its rifts and collisions and spectacular charms.
No doubt he will now become a spiky commentator, part-time motivational speaker and reality TV carpetbagger. The sun will continue to shine on English cricket in his absence. It may, though, feel just a little milder, a little less dappled with fascinating contrasts.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/sep/23/dominic-cork-retires-english-cricket
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