Josh Baker’s parents: ‘Life without our son is getting harder, not easier’

A few hours after their son’s sudden death at home aged 20, Josh Baker’s parents drove to New Road. “We just stood where we were when he took his first first-class wicket for Worcestershire, just to be close to him.”

Paul Baker is talking with his wife, Lisa, in the kitchen of their home in Redditch, reliving the day promising cricketer Josh died from a heart defect on the fourth morning of a match, and two weeks before his 21st birthday in May this year.

“It’s like having your whole world turned upside down repeatedly. The minute you wake up in the morning you are still in this nightmare. We’re just surviving really, aren’t we?” says Paul.

While we are chatting a builder is upstairs refurbishing the bathroom where Baker collapsed in the shower on May 2 and desperate attempts to revive him failed.

The Bakers want to talk about Josh and insist nothing is off limits. Over the course of an hour over coffee they describe in heart-wrenchingly raw terms the loss of their son, who died before he had lived a life, let alone fulfilled a promising cricket career as a young left-arm spinner with his home county.

The end of season, as summer turns to autumn and veteran players retire, feels like an appropriately contemplative moment for the Bakers to speak publicly for the first time. Except in their case, Josh’s leaving was unspeakably shocking and it is a tragedy that has hung over the season.

Somehow everyone has carried on. His parents are surviving the loss of their only child with determined dignity, sketching out plans to set up a foundation in his name. At Worcestershire, the incredible team spirit helped them to put the awful loss of a young team-mate to one side and preserve their first division status against the odds.

There are tears as we chat but lots of good memories too of a young “smiley, happy lad” whose dad Paul says “just wanted to grab life” and loved cricket from a young age.

The hardest part, understandably, is describing the events of May 2 that unfolded in the family home on a quiet street in Redditch. Both take moments to gather themselves and pause before going on to revisit a Thursday that started normally with both going to work while Josh was still in bed.

He was playing a second-team game against Somerset at Bromsgrove School and had taken three for 66 on the Wednesday. He was in great spirits, looking forward to a season that promised plenty of first-team opportunities.

Josh was due to be picked up by team-mate and friend Henry Cullen. When Cullen could not get any answer from ringing the doorbell he contacted his own father, who phoned Paul. “I then tried to phone Josh, couldn’t get any answer, so I phoned Spencer. He said, ‘Yeah, everything is fine – I can hear Josh in the shower.’”

Spencer is Spencer White, a young Australian cricketer who was playing for Astwood Bank Cricket Club, Baker’s club, and staying with the family. He plays for Northern Districts in Sydney, the Baker family have long family links with that club and Josh played grade cricket for them in 2023.

“I spoke to Spencer and thought, OK, fine, he’s there. So I went into a meeting at work, when I came out I had missed calls on my phone from Spencer. We have a Ring doorbell, and I looked and I could see a paramedic at the front door, on the doorbell camera. So I knew then that there was something wrong. So I phoned Lisa and said you need to go home as soon as possible.”

‘I’ll never forget the journey home’

Lisa drove home. “I turned into the road. There were two ambulances, fire engine, paramedics, police, everything. They wouldn’t let me in the house,” she says.

Spencer had tried to resuscitate Josh and had called the emergency services. “I just had that gut feeling there was something seriously wrong driving home,” says Paul. “I’ll never forget the journey home. Lisa got home 10.10am, I got home by 10.30am. The critical responders were trying to resuscitate him. And then after about half an hour, they said, ‘That’s it.’”

We take a moment. Paul breathes deeply before carrying on. “So then at about 11.30am they turned all the machines off. They put him into bed so we could say goodbye. By which time family and friends were round, and then, this sounds hard, but by 12.30pm, the undertakers had taken him away and we were kicking around here. We didn’t know what to do. So we went to New Road and stood where we were when he took his first first-class wicket just to be close to him. It was a memory, it was something I wanted to do. It felt the right thing to do.”

Baker was a type-one diabetic, diagnosed aged 13. All professional cricketers undergo heart scans and his came back clear. “We’ve subsequently discovered that when Spencer heard the shower on, we think the shower had been on for an hour and a half. He’d obviously got up, sent a message to the girl he was seeing, just to say good morning. And I think he’d gone into the bathroom and put the shower on and just collapsed.”

As Lisa holds a tissue in both hands, she rubs the tattoo on her wrist of Josh’s fingerprint that she had inked recently along with his signature on her middle finger.

“It means I see him all the time,” she says. “It’s just like your world’s been turned upside down from being a normal Thursday morning to the most devastating thing that can happen to parents with no warning, nothing. What’s really hard is the fact that you don’t get to say goodbye, all of those things. I mean, the night before he was talking about a cricketer that had just been told they couldn’t play anymore due to a heart condition [Ben Wells of Gloucestershire].

“He literally said the night before, how sorry he felt for that cricketer that wasn’t going to be able to play cricket anymore. That was the last conversation we had with him.”

‘He loved to dance, he loved to sing’

We flick through the photobook together of Josh’s life. It has snaps of him in Australia as a boy watching England on the 2010/11 Ashes tour at the MCG and SCG and shots of him growing up to be a professional cricketer, wearing his England under-19s shirt and Worcestershire strip. The family had it produced for his 21st birthday, two weeks after his death. The Bakers went ahead with a party at Astwood Bank CC, using it as an opportunity to remember and talk about Josh. “He was a party animal. He loved to dance, he loved to sing,” says Lisa.

A talented youngster, Baker won a scholarship to Malvern College. He was not taken on by the Worcestershire Academy and contemplated giving up becoming a professional but his performances in club cricket and academy/second XI sides earned him another chance. He then had a quick rise from the second team in 2021 to the first XI and a rookie contract. Last year he signed a three-year deal.

He played 47 times for Worcestershire, taking 70 wickets across all formats, and making two appearances for England under-19s on a tour to Sri Lanka. His parents would watch him whenever possible and were regulars at New Road. “I would obviously watch him more than anybody else, and I never thought at any point that he looked nervous or was shying away,” Paul says.

His first real impression on the game was not exactly positive, when he was struck for 34 in an over by Ben Stokes, bristling with intent days after being made England Test captain in May 2022.

That night Stokes sent him a text message to lift his spirits. “He walked through the front door and went straight upstairs. We left him. He just needed to come out in his own time. And then an hour or so later, he came down and he said ‘guess who’s just texted me?’ And I was just like, hopefully it’s Ben Stokes,” says Lisa. “And he went, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And I was like, Oh, wow. What does he say? And he told us then what he’d said. That lifted him absolutely. It was a lovely thing to do.”

“After the game Josh bumped into him in the car park and asked him, what point in the over were you thinking six sixes and Ben said it was well before you even bowled a ball,” says Paul, taking up the story. “Without that message on the Friday, I don’t think Josh would have had the courage to go and speak to him in the car park. That was lovely. I think it was part of his boasts on nights out with lads, ‘look, I’ve got Ben Stokes’ number here’, not that it was ever used. And he said, ‘at least people know me now. I can’t change it. It’s happened. Embrace it.’”

I watch and think ‘What would he have done here?’

Josh will be proud of his parents and the way they have carried on under unbelievable strain. Young themselves, Paul is 48, Lisa 55, they planned to spend the next few years watching their son all over the country. They still have his cricket gear at home, and have not cleared out his locker yet at New Road, something that feels like it will have a sense of finality about it. “We’re not quite ready. That will be tough,” says Paul.

They have been regulars at the ground, supporting the team. They went to training on the Tuesday after his death, wanting the players to see them and feel comfortable approaching them to talk about Josh. “We didn’t know them that well but wanted to give them some support. If they wanted to talk it was fine. Some do, some don’t. Everyone is different. It was just about being there for other people, then hopefully other people would be there for us, which they have been,” says Paul.

They attended the first championship match after his death against Kent at Canterbury where the teams lined up for a minute’s applause on day one and three Worcestershire batsmen scored centuries, dedicating them to Josh. “I watch Worcester games, wish and think ‘what would he have done here?’” says Paul. It is obviously not easy. “I think that is what we’re fighting hard as well,” says Lisa. “Cricket was our life as well. We would look at cricket fixtures pre-season and pick out going down for weekends and stop over.”

A post-mortem established that Josh died of sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, a condition that affects around 500 people under the age of 35 in the UK every year, devastating the families left behind. “The way I describe it is normally you have nightmares during the night and wake up in the morning and generally things are good and life goes on, but this is the reverse of that,” says Paul. “We can be in bed dreaming of happy times with Josh but wake up in the morning and then the nightmare starts again. It is a kick in the stomach each morning. It doesn’t get any easier. It is getting harder, not that it hasn’t been hard all the time, but it is just a longer time without him which makes it feel like it is getting worse.”

‘A song will come on and I’ll hear him singing it’

The family asked mourners at the funeral to wear flowery shirts and bright colours, making it a celebration of life with humour and music. “It was a short life but it should be a celebration of it,” says Paul. “We wanted people to tell funny anecdotes and people to laugh. Lots of tears but laughing just makes things a bit easier.

“We put packets of sunflower seeds out for people to take away, just hopefully go and grow. Josh was tall. We put a note in saying ‘Josh was 6ft 5in, let’s see if you can grow this above that. Please send us your photos’. We had some come in today.”

Lisa’s own sunflowers didn’t germinate. “I’ve got a pack for next year. I will try again.”

Messages still flood in from the game. Alan Richardson, the Worcestershire head coach, and Ashley Giles, the chief executive, have been pillars of support. The players wear JB33 – Baker’s squad number was 33 – on their shirt sleeves and use the hashtag JB33 on social media posts.

The family are in the process of setting up the JB33 Foundation in his memory to raise money for cricket kit, coaching, scorers’ courses and anything related to cricket to help people looking for an opportunity in the game. “It will evolve as time goes on and give us a focus over the next few years to drive it forward,” says Lisa.

Josh’s bedroom has not changed, his framed, signed shirts hang on the wall over his bed. He no doubt would have added to that collection. This has been a rejuvenating summer for English cricket. Players like Shoaib Bashir and Josh Hull, similar ages to Baker, played Test cricket. Jacob Bethell was an England under-19 team-mate and debuted in the white-ball series against Australia. Baker may not have made it that far. Who knows? He had played quite a lot of first-team cricket by the age of 20, more than Bashir and Hull, and the Kookaburra ball would have benefited his bowling in mid-summer.

Paul cannot contemplate how his career could have unfolded. And this is a family grieving a son, not just a cricketer. The sport was only a part of the life he lived. They remember a cricketer, for sure, but also a son who loved music. “That is what I find really difficult,” says Lisa. “A song will come on and I hear him in the shower singing it.”

His parents are trying to cope with their loss but also have to deal with the grief of others too, and their concern for everyone else shines through. “Have we given you enough?” Paul says at the end of the interview.

“We’re just grateful to everybody for what they have done for us and continue to do,” says Lisa, holding her tissue and glancing down at the tattoo on her wrist.