But in the week leading up to that historic match, it felt as though I had more runs than England’s record runs. You know what I mean. It started with, I thought, indigestion in the early hours of the previous Tuesday and built from there. I’ll spare you the details, dear reader.
Not a good idea ahead of a bank holiday/birthday weekend; especially one where you are due to go to Lord’s on the Saturday.
On the morning of Lord’s itself, around 8:00, at the flat, Janie and I more or less gave up the idea of venturing to Lord’s at all. But I didn’t feel poorly over the next hour or so, therefore we hatched a plan to get a limited form of the picnic ready at a gentle pace, watch the first hour or so on the TV at the flat and see how I feel.
Indeed, by 11:30 I felt that England were very well placed and that we’d be able to cab it and just stroll in to Lord’s without queues or stress. I was grateful to myself for having impulse bought those front row seats I spotted on the on-line system, as the rover/membership pass route might have been a bit awkward in terms of getting half-decent seats at that hour.
To be honest, the match/crowd lacked atmosphere to a greater extent than I can remember at Lord’s for a long time. A sense of inevitability and the cricket being secondary. Very different crowd sitting near us, compared with the test crowd in the same seats. Unfriendly to say the least.
King Cricket readers straying here might, due to KC’s obsession with the champagne corks at Lord’s – for context click here – be interested in my cork report. Just one lone cork sitting on the patch of grass in front of us where, just a few months before, there had been a veritable sea of corks. The MCC instructs its members and customers not to project their corks onto the pitch; those members and customers obey. That’s what stewardship of the laws and spirit of cricket can achieve. Makes me feel proud that Lord’s is my local.
We met up with The Friends for a while in the Coronation Garden towards the end of the innings interval, which was a very pleasant interlude for us. They asked us to join them for the second half of the match – they had a spare rover for Janie, but we thought better of it, especially as I wasn’t sure that I could cope with much more and I sensed that Janie wasn’t desperate to stay much longer.
So, we went back to our seats, watched for another hour or so, convinced ourselves that the Root/Morgan partnership was a winning one and so chose to leave once Morgan was out.
It does only take 10-12 minutes to get home by cab, so we watched the end of the game from the comfort of the flat. The result can be seen on the scorecard – here.
Despite eating little and drinking nothing but water, I still felt pretty rough the next day, which is a bit of a bummer on your birthday but these things happen.
Janie’s healing skills got me better by bank holiday Monday, much of which we spent in the Brent Cross Apple Store trying to heal Janie’s very sickly iPhone. Apple chose to replace said phone, which was a good result, but frankly this was a bank holiday/birthday weekend to forget.