Lord’s Cricket Ground
St. John’s Wood Road
London NW8 8 QN
Thursday September 22
2016
We recently calculated
that while we had tackled most of the military museums we had not been near any
of the 5 sporting ones so today, rather to my dread and fear of boredom, we
headed to our booked tour of the the MCC Museum and grounds. This is an expensive venture –
£20 or £15 concession – and what the website does not explain is that on a
match day you do not gain access to the pavilion, changing rooms or ‘hallowed
turf’ but you do get to sit in the stands and watch whatever match is on, which
actually is quite a bargain given the average price of tickets.
I followed (and mainly
overtook) the ranks of blazered gents heading out of St John’s Wood Underground
as the Grace Gate is about as far away from both tube stations as you could get
– Jo had wisely come by bus. Most of our group were overseas tourists, mainly
Australians and Indians and very keen and knowledgeable fans. I’m not sure the
tours get many unaccompanied women and they seem to form a small part of the
crowd likewise – given that cricket happens during the day and all day that
rather limits its supporters to being either the idle rich, the retired or
both. The weekend crowds may be different but I had certainly never seen quite
so many garish ties and blazers in one place.
Interestingly the
story told us by the guide does not quite match the one related here. True, in the early days the blazer was the
composite of the Oxford and Cambridge colours – so dark and light blue –however
when the money ran out, as it did when the club moved for the second time, a Mr
Nicholson whose fortune came from gin agreed to bail out the club to buy them some
new land and ‘in thanks’ they revised their colours to go with the gin bottle
label --- early sponsorship in other words. This site is the third home of the
Marylebone Cricket Club (when I was little and still lived in a Middlesex, which was not yet part of Greater
London, I assumed the M stood for that county but no...) previous sites having
proved too clay ridden or having to make way for the Paddington Arm of the
Grand Union canal. The various stands (which
are of course all seats) are named after various famous cricketers, of whom I
had heard of some.
Back to WG Grace (who
was one of the famous medical students trained at Bart’s – see blog entry. Having heard about his frequent cheating –
it’s probably just as well he played more cricket than practising medicine – WG
claimed the public came to see him, not any random bowler who might
get him ‘out’ so he would blatantly ignore the umpires who soon learnt to bend
to the old man’s will... His bulk and presence would have been quite
intimidating and even today the bearded busts and statues are immediately
recognisable.
In the Museum itself,
which is laid out over two floors with a commemorative window showing the
refurbishment dating to the Nineties, there is a range of floor to ceiling
glass cabinets. To be honest we did not look at them in detail (we were free to
return at the end of the tour but had other things to do) but can be summarised
thus – as bats and balls, caps and facts. So for instance there is a section
devoted to famous/record-breaking wicket keepers including their padding,
similarly for bowlers of different ilks. Cricket is a sport obsessed with
records and dates so alongside each battered ball or signed bat is the relevant
record – in both senses of the word. One of the most interesting manifestations
of this attention to statistics is the classic score book – meticulous pen
strokes on very narrow lines recording each ball and its outcome…
Our main talk took place
in front of the display containing ‘The Ashes’ – it was good to hear the full
story though if you know it skip this bit! The first ever Test Match took place
in 1877 and seven years later the Australians came over for a test on the last
day of which the English team collapsed and sustained their first ever defeat
on English soil. Thereafter the Times newspaper wrote a half serious ‘obituary’
for the death of English cricket. By September of that year the English team
set sail for Australia, where a revenge match was due to take place early in
the New Year but of course the sea voyage would have taken most of the three
months!!! The team arrived for Christmas and were invited to stay with the chair/head
of the Melbourne Cricket Club, at his palatial pad. As a joke the wife of the
chair emptied a perfume jar she had (that’s why the urn is so small) and filled
it with the ashes of a set of bails and presented it to the English captain,
who took it in good spirit and thence back to the UK. In 1927 the widow offered
it to the MCC , where it has remained ever since save for two short trips away,
one in the care of the Duke of Edinburgh. I had always thought that like most trophies
the ‘thing’ stayed with the winner until the next match – not so. As the
winners don’t get anything except the glory and honour there is now a Waterford
Crystal vase which does go with the winners and why it is currently here at the
MCC. The current tally is 32 wins each
for England and Australia.
Our guide went on to
tell us about the origins of world cup cricket, which has been a growing
competition and has accounted in part for the developments of the whole Lord’s
complex. Once out of the museum we were taken on a half circle under the stands,
each with a different name, and where you find the facilities – toilets and
bars mainly. Once the MCC had taken Mr Nicholson’s gin
money they have continued to have sponsors and these are also in evidence as
you go round the ground. We quite liked the fact that Hardy’s wines, an old
established Australian firm, sponsor English cricket…
Our guide led us out onto
what is known as the Nursery Ground – acquired after 1900 from a plant nursery –
and where the teams warm up/practice prior to the real matches. From there you
get an excellent view of the pod which arrived in 1999 – the MCC realised with
a pending World Cup there would be more media interest than they could comfortably accommodate and held an
architectural competition to design a new centre for journalists and broadcasters.
The winner, chosen by the committee and not the members who hated it, was a
Czech architect who had probably never seen a cricket match and never visited
Lord’s but came up with a design that fitted the brief and was a lot more
exciting than his competitors – it also won the the Stirling Prize for 1999 up against the Reichstag in Berlin!
Close by is a very unassuming
building which used to house the ICC which for reasons you can probably guess
has moved to Dubai.
Other tours would have
got you into the Pavilion – seating for members only – and the changing areas.
The ground currently seats 29.000 with building in progress to increase this to
32.000 in anticipation of the crowds for the next World Cup. The average age
for membership if the MCC is 72 (so bang on for Jo & me) – previously you
could put down some-one’s name at birth, now they need to be 18 and as there is
a 29 year waiting list it takes a while…
The grass, we were
told, had to be re-laid post Olympics (they held the archery contests here to provide
a scenic background on TV) and the slope, apparently famous, was kept…
It lies on a bed of
about a metre of gravel so drains better than your average London on clay
grass.
At this point in the season
– and it has been quite hot – the wicket looked pretty worn.
So there we were in
good seats, under cover, able to watch the last 20 minutes or so of play
leading up to lunch at what was probably the halfway point in the key match
between Middlesex County (no win for 23 years) and Yorkshire (wins pretty
often). Yorkshire were batting and doing quite well so we saw some-one getting
out – clean bowled – and a catch and quite a few runs including a boundary (automatically 4)
so actually quite a bit of action for
cricket which can appear static and dare
I say boring in contrast to football – what’s more it takes days to
resolve anything. [Pleased to report that Middlesex won the match the following
day.]
To say I had been
dreading this visit would be an exaggeration but I had difficulty in getting
enthusiastic about it ( I shall feel the same about the Twickenham experience
when the time comes) and actually found it was an interesting tour on a subject
I know little about, and am pleased to have completed.
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