“I’m not here to have lunch; I’m here to work.” – Graeme Swann and his manbag throw a hissy.
Times Select
TELFORD VICE at Lord’s
IT’S 4am and hammering down the kind of rain that wakes you up and makes you look at your watch. Damn.
England are playing Australia in the World Cup at Lord’s. For a reporter who has written up South Africa’s shambolic performance at the tournament every which way and then some, and who will soon have to be back at that grim grindstone, this is as close to a day off as it gets.
Would that both these teams could lose. They can’t, of course, but you don’t really care who wins, you know the lunch will be decent, and who wouldn’t want to see what all that Ashes fuss is about, even if that’s proper cricket and this isn’t. And now it’s raining.
But only until around 7am. The sun doesn’t come out but a man on the Beeb, who arrived at the ground at 4.30am to be confronted by what he calls “Gene Kelly weather”, says the groundstaff are hard at work. He interviews Ashley Giles, once were spinner, now are suit, fresh from England’s hotel, where has breakfasted with Eoin Morgan.
“Some of the guys are still not up yet,” Giles says sunnily, trying to illustrate how times have changed. In the same vein, he tells a sweet story about England’s commuting arrangements.
“There’ll be an early bus that comes to the ground with guys who want to get into the nets early, and a normal bus for guys who want a bit of lie-in.”
A bit of a lie-in?! What would Geoffrey Boycott say? Or Grant Flower, who would punish himself for getting out to a poor stroke by refusing the bus ride from the ground back to the hotel. He would run instead.
“Only right,” Flower, now Pakistan’s batting coach, said on Sunday night, ale in hand and standing on the pavement outside a pub down the road from Lord’s, after helping to plot South Africa’s 19th nervous breakdown.
It was an interesting journey home that night, as it is in reverse, even sober. It’s 10 kilometres from the magnificently messy mixed masala of Bethnal Green, where this reporter was woken by the rain hammering down on Tuesday, to the strictly straight lines of St John’s Wood, where Lord’s lives.
That’s 10 kilometres of roads sludged with red buses and black cabs, and swarms of people who, like this reporter, are on bicycles.
First you dodge the Shoreditch hipsters, phone in one hand, keep cup in the other, ears plugged shut with buds, eyes locked on the screen, crossing the road. Then you negotiate the Old Street roundabout, a surprisingly efficient marvel of modern madness. Next you’re sweeping down Clerkenwell Road — past the Clerk and Well, geddit — and up the hill into Bloomsbury, where many of your fellow travellers on bicycles are en route to hives of higher education. Get through that as well as the cow’s guts of unlovely Euston Road, and you’re skirting the stiff gentility of beautiful Regent’s Park and its surrounds, where you can paint your obscenely expensive house any colour you like as long as it’s an insipid shade of cream. Bethnal Green? That’s on a different planet.
You feel sweat osmosing through the shirt on your back as you jig rightward through Hanover Gate and chug up Park Road’s gentle slope.
And there it is. Thomas Lord’s folly, a vast soufflé groaning grandly in the grey gloom. Not for the likes of us the grandiosity of the Grace Gates at the Pavilion End. Nope. The North Gate, the press’ entrance, is as prosaic as it sounds. No matter — a gate is a gate, ou pêl.
You inch through the milieu, and when you reach the entrance something magical happens. Here, at the stuffiest place anywhere the stuffy game of cricket is played, which stinks with the history of slavery and colonialism and class prejudice …
Where miserable stewards think nothing of yanking the accreditation pass around your neck closer to their failing eyes for scrutiny before they reject, with contempt, your request to have a quick word with someone about the pitch …
Where these same wastes of human spark have been known to demand that accreditation is worn by reporters on their way out of the bloody place …
Where men who have lived their lives in a funk of suspicion of all others who have ever and will ever live guard the doors to the Pavilion as if it houses the human queen bee herself …
Where a denizen of the Marylebone Cricket Club tells a tale of being robbed on his way from the airport building to the aircraft that was about to fly him out of Kingston. Thus relieved of his passport and the ability to identify himself to the satisfaction of the Jamaican police, he presented his MCC membership card instead. That was taken seriously enough to prompt the police to telephone Lord’s, where it was duly confirmed that the man was who he said he was. Oh, the power! The authority! The presumption thereof, anyway.
But, for all that, here, of all places, the gate is swung open for you and your bicycle. That’s right: you park your bike inside at Lord’s. No questions asked, no permission required. Excuse me while I smack my gob.
And so past Antony Dufort’s electrifying life-size bronze of an unnamed bowler in the throes of delivery, and the electrocuting shrillness arising from the champagne bar even at not quite 10am, and to the lifts at the bottom of each of the pillars holding up the space capsule of a pressbox at the Nursery End. Scotty beams you up into a lounge busily aburble with people you know, people whose names you know, and people you think you’ve seen before; probably on television. It puts you in mind of Brian Johnston, the late BBC commentator from a world where big-nosed men of questionable political views wore two-toned shoes, who was approached somewhere far from places like Lord’s and asked, “Aren’t you someone who was?”
Phil Tufnell lopes past, fringe more flopped than flopping, in shades and a sharkskin jacket, holding a bacon bap in his bare hand, on his way to another gig as the loveable rock star who never was.
On Sunday, Graeme Swann, miffed at having to put up with waiting at the door to the pressbox proper for his name to be ticked off a list, which gets you your lunch ticket, huffed, “I’m not here to have lunch; I’m here to work.”
He tossed his sarcasm over his shoulder as he strode into the box, the manbag on his hip bobbing in boyband tune with his fabulously flopping fringe.
Morgan wins the toss and fields, and David Warner is booed to the crease. As, in due course, is Steve Smith. True to his word before the match, and unlike Virat Kohli, Morgan makes no attempt to deny the spectators their freedom of speech.
A few overs in and Chris Woakes suddenly starts sending the ball squirting off the seam at all angles. “Roller’s worn off,” Derek Pringle, like Tufnell another of nature’s thoroughly human people, grunts as if all of us know what he means.
Say what, Pring?
“Sometimes, especially when it’s damp, the roller flattens the grass and you need a bit of time before it dries and kind of springs back up again — and that makes the ball move.”
Knowledge. You don’t find it in a manbag.
Aaron Finch reaches a typically beefy century with a lashed four through fine leg off Jofra Archer. As Australia’s captain raises his bat to accept his applause, the sun finally muscles through the cloud. The timing seems cinematic, not least because the scene is still bright when Finch hoiks Archer’s next delivery down deep third’s throat.
Australia squander a fine first half of an innings that should have seen them surge far past 300. Instead they end up with 285/7; an anaemic effort in this era of steroidal scoring.
But, after left-arm quick Jason Behrendorff does for James Vince second ball with a delivery that could hook a fish, and Mitchell Starc curls a couple around corners to remove Joe Root and Morgan, England are 26/3.
Then what? Dunno, mate. Best you ask Swann. I’m only here for the lunch.
Bulletproof Truth 