On the weekend, a friend and I went walking. As we strolled along the River Goyt, a sweet smell hit us like a packet of Love Hearts, which, as it turns out, is pretty much what it was. We had inadvertently walked past the Swizzels factory – producer of Parma Violets, Rainbow Drops and more in the Sett Valley since the company moved out of blitzed London in 1940, to an old textile mill in New Mills, Derbyshire.
Alongside the sugary cloud drifted a junk shop of memories, sweets handed out at jelly and ice-cream parties, shared on the curb outside the corner shop, sucked on the way home from school. Later on, we passed a man pushing a mower to and fro on his front lawn and that fresh hit set off a whole other chain of flashbacks. As a cricket lover, you probably know where this is going.
In the UK, where there are four seasons, albeit more confused these days, and the winters are long and damp and quite barren of natural smells, cut grass is the first sign the cricket season is on the way – quite quickly on the way now. There are only 16 days until Surrey walk out (probably wearing beanies and carrying handwarmers) to start their County Championship title defence.
Smell is the most underrated of all the senses; the least glamorous, the most neglected, often held at bay by the indignity of a runny nose. But it is also the sense most connected to memory and is linked to the part of the brain involved with emotional and behavioural response. Which is why we have such a strong reaction to mown grass: sitting next to the cricket season to come is also the cricket season past, with people and players we have loved, but who have now slipped away to rest a while on the bench in the shadows.
Alongside the lawnmower and the daffodils and the hawthorn blossom and the rudely fragrant hyacinth bulbs calling out from shop fronts, the world is slowly coming to life as the days stretch towards the spring equinox, first overs and beyond. It is one of the great pleasures in life to go for a walk in March and smell possibilities all around.
But this isn’t the way for every cricket lover or every cricketer. There are at least two Test players who have never sniffed the linseed oil, the groundsman’s cuttings, stale kit or Deep Heat or, in Mike Atherton’s case, even the odour of sweet toasted corn floating out of the Kelloggs factory round the corner from his former home ground, Old Trafford.
Atherton has no memory of having had a sense of smell. His mum first noticed when he was six or seven years old. “We lived in a village called Woodhouses [in Greater Manchester] where there are more pig farms per square mile than anywhere else in the country,” he says. “At tea time, they would feed the pigs and there was apparently an almighty stink and she began to realise I was not registering any of this stuff.”
However, it wasn’t something that he had ever thought about until the Covid pandemic. “Then, when everyone else was talking about losing their sense of smell, and what a loss it was, I thought, for the first time, what am I missing?”
Practically, it means he needs someone to tell him if his food smells bad and he has begun to think his taste buds might be different to everyone else’s – he sometimes struggles to tell the difference between tea and coffee and tends to like spicy food rather than anything more subtle. It also means he may have made a few olfactory faux pas in his time: “My teammates could probably tell you about some stinky shirts I might have worn out of ignorance.”
But he is typically no-nonsense about the whole thing, signing off with: “What goes in my nose is air, it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re going to lose one sense, then that is the one to lose.”
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Another Test cricketer without a sense of smell is Simon Katich, who lost the ability to sniff an old baggy green after an attack of glandular fever. That also knocked him down the waiting list for a Test place after the rookie Ricky Ponting muscled into the vacant spot in the Australian middle order while Katich languished in bed. Not being able to sniff the difference between parsley and sage did not hold him back when he got to the semi-finals of Australia’s Celebrity MasterChef in 2009, impressing the judges with his crispy salmon with wilted spinach and mashed potato, and then a 10-layer crepe cake.
Can we take anything away from these two fine cricketers being unable to smell? Could it be that their inability to register the stinking pheromones of an angry fast bowler – thinking here in particular of a furious Allan Donald pawing at the ground at Trent Bridge in 1998 – helped keep them calm? Might a lack of flamboyance at the crease be related to their inability get a sensory hit from a morning espresso or never having to endure the whiff of a post-match nightclub?
Fun as it might be to ponder, no amount of ruminating can stop the passing days. There is something in the air: the season is coming.