Ridiculously, not bothering to purchase an online ticket in advance, I arrived 45 minutes before the start of play, proffered my bank card at the ‘gate’ for ‘swiping’, only to have to watch the attendant type lots of stuff into his laptop – including typing out my bank card details – before providing me with my ticket! He was very cheery about it all, but the whole process took some 3-4 minutes and so it was just as well there were only two people behind me!
As it happened, it was a somewhat bizarre day of few-and-far-between rewards for bowlers (just 6 wickets all day) and batsmen reaping the benefits of a good batting wicket (a double centurion, a centurion and a double-century stand). Surrey ended 603 all out and Gloucestershire 86-0*.
I love the rather pedestrian routine of cricket-watching… the almost exclusively ‘aged’ spectators – many no doubt sitting in the seat they always sit in and many of them apparently far more interested in reading their newspapers than watching the cricket! A couple of old blokes in front of me (the very talkative one announcing to all those within earshot that he was 76 years old and the other one occasionally correcting his friend’s memory!)(I changed position three times during the course of the day!) seemed to spend most of the time trying to recall various somewhat obscure sporting facts – mainly to do with football(!), such as: “Did you know that Spurs last got relegated to the second division in 1977?” or “What was the name of that Italian geezer who played for Middlesbrough in the mid-1990s?” (Ravanelli)… “and did you know he scored a hat-trick against Liverpool on his debut?”.
Oh what fun!
After lunch, one of the elderly committee members (I presumed he was ‘on the committee’ from his loud remarks about him having to “go to Lord’s next week for an important meeting”!) came to chat to a couple of nearby spectator friends of his. He was a very posh, know-it-all ‘gentleman’ who seemed to spend most of his time preparing agendas for various club-related matters (“never enough hours in the day” etc). During the course of their conversation, he described his experiences of undertaking zoom interviews with some prospective committee members (or whatever the vacancies were for): “A couple of the chaps we interviewed (note: they were ALL chaps!) were appropriately dressed in jackets and ties – they’d made an effort – but this other chap was there in his T-shirt for goodness sake!”.
How DARE he!
Obviously, I was concentrating on the cricket ALL the time.
Despite the occasional sunny intervals, it was pretty cold. I wore a thermal vest, shirt, jumper and a fleece – by mid-afternoon, a bloke sitting in the same row of seats wrapped himself in a blanket to keep warm. Hot toddies should probably have been the order of the day. In the morning, I scribbled a quick sketch of a group of nearby spectators – each of them wearing woolly hats and thick jackets… it definitely didn’t feel like cricket weather. There seems to be a huge irony for those of us who love watching county championship games that the powers-that-be have effectively relegated these fixtures to the coldest times of the season (ie. April+May and late August+September).
Who said cricket was “a summer game”!?
PS: *I’m writing this post on the day following my cricket ‘trip’ and it seems that the bowlers continue to struggle for wickets… at lunch, Gloucestershire were 215-0!
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