I have written up my take on England’s ejection from the first (1975) cricket world cup, click here or below:
I did not witness that 1975 ejection, but I clearly had it on my mind that day.
But by 1979, it seems, not only was I (once again) too busy pottering around with actual cricket at Alleyn’s School to witness the match, I don’t even mention the cricket world cup in my diary.
had lazy day (scored) easy evening
So lazy was I, that day, I abandoned capital letters and most punctuation.
“Scored”, on that day, will mean, “scored a school team cricket match”, not the other (chasing girls) type of scoring.
Sociologists of the future will be delighted to learn that, at age 16, I was doing my fair share of the other type of scoring; the page before and the page after in the diary attest to that.
But that week had been an exam week at school.
I have a funny feeling that this particular episode of scoring lazily for the school team was a match at Battersea Grammar School (or I should say Furzedown, as that school had, by then, become) playing fields, which at that time was situated a lazy stroll away from our home in Woodfield Avenue. I say that only because I remember being asked at the last minute to score such a match around that time and the use of the term “lazy” infers that I went to little bother all day, possibly including even an absence of travel bother.
The way that world cup final match turned out is well described on Wikipedia here.
The way the Alleyn’s School match turned out is lost in the mists of time, unless some archivist somewhere kept the scorebooks. Anybody know if such archives are available for inspection? If so, let’s just hope my scoring handwriting was better than my diary handwriting.
The MCC has put up a rather charming half hour highlights package from that 1979 world cup final match – jolly decent of them – in two sections – here they both are: