More than one in five people report severe loneliness, and on the back end of COVID, studies showed three out of five, so that's 60% of people, Saf, over the age of 55 felt lonely and isolated.

Yep, it's, um, it's real.

I mean, it's very difficult for the people of my, my age group to actually get our heads around it, because it wasn't a thing that we spoke about.

It was just a get on with whatever.

And for the time, it worked okay for a lot of people, but I'm sure there's a lot of people that, uh, were missed in that, uh, in that transition period as well.

But one thing I've learnt over the last, oh, probably, I'll say three or four years, maybe even longer when, with COVID coming in, I, I f- I used to find people that weren't e- ex-cricketers generally, and I'd find people that weren't... were doing it a bit tough, and I'd just give them a ring out of the blue.

And I used to get off the phone saying, "That's unbelievable.

Mm.

But

there's a word called respect as well.

And with respect, it comes in different forms.

And as for an example, coaching at the SCG, one of my players turned up for training and There was a sleep deprivation problem and was not at his best.

So when it come to a fielding drill at the end, he was all over the shop throwing there and throwing there and it just wasn't right.

And I said, what's your problem? And he said, I don't have a problem.

I said, yeah, you've got a problem.

Was that he? No.

We had a good time, didn't we?

We had a marvellous time.

The game of cricket is probably missing out with a lot of those good times right now, but, yeah, it was a great era.

We can sit back, as we do, and we have a coffee together and we talk about the good times.

I'm not sure you can really explain it to other people how that era sort of worked because it was all about the friendships you build, the camaraderie off the park, a little bit of devil in everybody, and I guess it worked very, very well.

It was a common thing.

These days, people don't do anything like that.

I was in the room celebrating with

We had a good time, didn't we?

We had a marvellous time.

The game of cricket is probably missing out with a lot of those good times right now, but, yeah, it was a great era.

We can sit back, as we do, and we have a coffee together and we talk about the good times.

I'm not sure you can really explain it to other people how that era sort of worked because it was all about the friendships you build, the camaraderie off the park, a little bit of devil in everybody, and I guess it worked very, very well.

It was a common thing.

These days, people don't do anything like that.

yeah, you know, it was all good fun at the time.