A skeleton early crowd on the last day - a Saturday. Madness.
I sat down in the ground bright and early to see the start of play at 11.00, and as often happens with the last day of a 4-day match, I had plenty of room to choose my spot, especially when that last day is a Saturday. The cricket authorities in their infinite wisdom have regulated (over the last 10 years or so) that most 4-day games will start on Wednesday and continue through the rest of the week, because that's when the businesspeople will come over and lunch luxuriously in their complimentary hospitality boxes, while the poor old cricket fan has to lump it in the wind and the rain (and just occasionally the sun.) As usual it comes down to money. In the good old days of these things the match would start on the Saturday, for which a healthy crowd would bolster things up as the game continued through the rest of the week.
In the case of today the football fixtures taking place elsewhere were an added distraction for sports fans (West Ham, Colchester, Ipswich and Spurs among them), and depending on where I sat today, there was a regular update from people's radios of the latest football scores from 3pm onwards.
By that time Worcestershire had built on an excellent platform set up for them by Darryl Mitchell and Stephen Moore with an opening partnership of 102, and apart from two hiccups either side of lunch, when Moore was out to a bat-pad catch off James Middlebrook, and his captain Vikram Solanki likewise (out for a "pair" in this match), the ball seemed to be coming onto the bat much easier, and Essex were inevitably feeling the loss of their Pakistani leg spinner Danish Kaneria.
A lunchtime drink under the trees.
By teatime I said to a couple of visiting Worcestershire fans that they had this game sewn up with only 2 wickets down for 219, and Graeme Hick still waiting to bat. He duly got his chance shortly after teatime, after Mitchell was out for a match-winning 102.
21 years ago I first saw Graeme Hick bat at Castle Park in 1987, where he scored 156. Back in those days he was the great wonder boy who couldn't qualify to play for England (as a Zimbabwean) for another 4 years. When the great day finally came, it was a bit, like The Phantom Menace, a case of too much hype. Nevertheless, in time he went on to a reasonable Test career for England, and now at the age of 42, watching him still bashing and stroking fours to the boundary, it truly felt like the ghost of Cricket Past.
Worcester comfortably knocked off the seemingly difficult target of 347, with Hick hitting the winning four at 5.45pm. Soon afterwards a very boisterous celebration chant could be heard inside the small Visitors' dressing room, whilst I nipped off to London on the 6.00 express to see some friends in the Shakespeare's Head Wetherspoons in Holborn, after they had been to see Star Wars: The Clone Wars this afternoon - ah, more ghosts of younger days. By an interesting coincidence, this mirrored the previous Worcestershire-Essex fixture earlier this summer, when "the Groovy Gang" gathered to see another Lucasfilm in Birmingham (blog).
BBC Match Report
No comments:
Post a Comment