When I wrote about my teenage crush on the England cricket team of the 1990s in the Observer magazine, I thought I was admitting to a shameful secret. The piece was accompanied by a photographs of the posters I’d painstakingly made from newspaper cuttings, A3 card and sticky back plastic that make me look, in retrospect, like a trainee serial killer.
And yet, within minutes of the article going up online, I had dozens of people telling me that I was not alone. They, too, had plastered their schoolbooks and bedrooms with clippings and photos, and displayed similarly frightening fanaticism. They, too, had assumed that no one else did the same thing. “I really thought I was the only girl with pictures of Athers decorating her teenage bedroom!” said a woman called Alice, instantly making me wish we’d been friends 20 years ago. “I began sixth form with a Yorkshire team photo glued to a blue file,” said Sally. “I still follow them.”
Several readers rued their unfinished sticker albums (perhaps we should set up a swapsies group) and Tiffany shared a photograph of her old homework diary, which had glued to it, beneath carefully written reminders to do her German exercises, a picture of two England cricketers. “I also painted a massive portrait of Allan Donald for GCSE art,” she said.
My teenage instinct to hoard my personal cricketing memorabilia never left me. My loft is full of boxes of the stuff, untouched for two decades until I started researching my book on 1990s cricket when, finally, they had a use. It’s amazing to discover, 20 years on, that I’m not the odd one out.
We would love to bring together all those memories and artefacts, so, if you can find and dust down your posters, match programmes, ticket stubs and magazines, send us your photos through GuardianWitness and we will publish a selection of contributions on the Guardian.
