Cricket and the Rolling Stones have got a lot of Satisfaction from each other. Many players have been Stones fans. And Mick Jagger, the band’s lead singer, enjoys cricket and is friends with several cricketers, including India’s Dilip Doshi.
Charlie Watts, the band’s drummer, who died on Tuesday at the age of 80, loved cricket too.
Watts and Jagger were at The Oval when Virat Kohli’s India faced Australia in the 2019 World Cup. India won the encounter, with Shikhar Dhawan scoring a century and emerging as the player of the match.
Watts had also triggered excited murmurs when, in 2018, he quietly showed up at an England vs Scotland match in Edinburgh. Hours earlier, the Stones had performed at a concert nearby.
In 2014, too, the band had blended work and play. After performing at the Adelaide Oval, the home ground of Sir Don Bradman, Watts and Jagger met Bradman’s son John and took a tour of the Bradman Museum. Watts was excited to even be at the Adelaide Oval pitch.
“I remember when we first went to Adelaide, I went to the square in the middle, it was fantastic,” Watts said in a radio interview in 2013.
At that time, Michael Clarke was a batsman he enjoyed watching.
“Obviously I’m an England fan, but Michael Clarke is a great-looking batsman,” Watts said in the interview.
James Brayshaw, a former Australian first-class cricketer and commentator, once said how Watts appeared without notice in the commentator’s green room at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
“We’re at the MCG, right? Boxing Day Test, sitting in the green room,” Brayshaw recounted on a talk show. “Every now and then in those sort of places you realise someone’s there who shouldn’t be [there] or is different or whatever. I looked around and there was this old bloke, dressed impeccably. No one there with him, no entourage or anything, just on his own. I looked at him, and as a lifetime Stones fan, I said, ‘That’s Charlie Watts’.”
The soft-spoken Watts had a question. “Is Shane around?” he asked.
Brayshaw said, “Charlie, give me two seconds, he is there, mate, and he’ll be devastated if he misses you, so I’ll go and find him.”
Brayshaw found Shane Warne and told him, “Warney, f-----g Charlie Watts is in the commentary box.”
Warne and Brayshaw then spent nearly half an hour chatting with Watts. “He was the nicest man, most generous with his time,” Brayshaw said. “He answered any question we had about the Stones.”
It's no surprise music lovers all over the world have expressed sympathies at the passing of Watts, even though he was not a devil, at least not as much as his band mates.
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