Something & Nothing in Particular: Cricket Lovely Cricket...

Groucho Marx was once a guest at Lords Cricket ground for a days play of an England test.After an hours' play he turned to his companion and asked "Has it started yet?"

Many people feel this way about England's Summer game.The title of this post should point you to which camp i belong...The 20/20 and one day stuff is all fine and dandy but give me a five day Test match any day.I love the nuances,the individual games within the game.Primarily a team game where each individual can take centre stage to help his team win the Test.To my mind any game where the teams two worst batsmen can hold out for an hour against the worlds No 1 team to earn a draw after 5 days flow and ebb is to be cherished.Many would see that as a waste of 5 days play,but that drawn game was the catalyst to England becoming World No1 themselves...

Growing up in Staffordshire--as it was before my Town became part of The West Midlands---we never had a county team and the names Worcestershire & Warwickshire meant nothing to me.To be honest i have never really taken much notice of the County Championship,more interested in the International scene.This will no doubt piss off the purists among you but that's the way it's always been and the way it will remain.

I was never much of a player.At school i made the team but frankly it was to make up the numbers.Whenever they did actually make up the numbers with decent players i was relegated to the archaic ritual of "scorer".I enjoyed it all though and had no illusions about my talent--or lack of it--You can only get so many first ballers or be smacked through mid wicket by a myopic acne ridden schoolboy so many times before it's obvious that you were never destined to play for England...

When i was growing up all the Test matches in England were on the BBC---Yes it was that long ago when the Beeb cared about sport---So even if you could never get to one live you could see the world greats in your living room...The names trip off the tongue from that era in the 70's/early 80's.Gavaskar,Bedi,Lillie,Thompson,Haynes,Greenidge,Holding,Richards,Kallicharran,Lloyd,Engineer,Zaheer Abbas,Boycott,Snow,Underwood,Botham etc...A mind boggling array of great players all of whom i have had the pleasure of watching live...

This is the Theme Tune that greeted us at 10-50am every match day on the Beeb.

There's also the wonderful TMS--Test Match Special--to listen to if you can't get to watch the game.Indeed so ingrained into the English Cricket fans psych is TMS that many watch on mute with TMS on the radio or even go to the game with specially designed headgear with headphones to pick up the programme.

If you have no interest in the game and stumble upon TMS you'd be forgiven for thinking it's just seven hours of old men chatting about cake,pigeons and buses and you'd not be far off.On occasions they even discuss the Cricket...

I suppose it harks back to an era that never really existed,a pre war amble through a picture perfect English village with the verger and his wife where a Cricket match is taking place on the village green.There's even a break at Noon for the Shipping Forecast.Every avid listener can probably namecheck all the shipping area's that surround the British Isles...

The Duckworth Lewis Method can sum it up better than i ever could...

I still manage to go to at least one day of Test cricket in any given summer but to be honest a paucity of tickets and prohibitive pricing means that's my lot...Still in love with the game though.If nothing else it's the perfect antidote to the hullabaloo of the Football season.

Here's some of my photos...