Scrubbed up for the Friday evening bash – photo by Jonathan Ellis-Miller
This year’s Ogblog report on this wonderful MCC event is authored by a special correspondent, “Two Loos” Le Trek, who chooses to write up my experience in the first person. My noms de plume are getting out of hand.
Build Up & Day One: Friday 31 January 2025
I received a somewhat excited WhatsApp from Giles Stogdon just over two weeks before the event. He’d learned that we’d been drawn to partner each other. We agreed that we were both pleased with that idea and found an opportunity to partner for an hour of doubles before the weekend, as we have recently spent more time opposing one another than partnering.
We both found ourselves in Group B again this year. I wrote about my sense of imposter syndrome when finding myself in the B group last year…
…this year I had no trouble banishing the negative thoughts, other than my slight concern that my mobility issues resulting from my cartilage-free hip might hamper me in battle with the high-achievers that populate Group B.
Anyway, I threw myself into practice and match play in the run up to the 2025 tournament:
On arrival – quite late in the morning Friday as our two matches spanned lunchtime – I plonked myself in the pavilion home dressing room, as the tennis dressing room was heaving by then.
My Ged Ladd persona has written about this phenomenon elsewhere:
But let us return to the club weekend tennis.
Unlike regular matches and tournaments, the club weekend comprises vignette matches, played on the clock for 25 minutes including changeover and warm-up. When the alarm goes, only completed games count.
On Day One, Giles & I got off to a slow yet solid start. We drew our first round robin match, against Iain Harvey & Roger Davis, but managed to prevail in our second match against Nick Davidson & Paul Wickman.
I have scraped my matches (along with some highlights of the whole tournament for the “official” match report) onto YouTube.
If you are sufficiently potty, you might choose to watch some or all of the play in these YouTube films.
A Sufficiently Potty Subplot: A Tale Of Two Shitties
Peter Luck-Hille, a doyen of real tennis if ever there was one, has, in the last year, been through the hip replacement process. He has provided me with lots of helpful advice over the past few months.
Peter kindly offered to lend me his raised toilet seats, which are an absolute must, at least for the first few days or weeks at home, until the recovering leg is comfortably mobile enough for a normal-height toilet seat.
“No point you buying them – you’ll not need them for long”, said Peter.
Peter was due to play in the tournament, so we planned to shift the bulky goods from car boot to car boot on the Friday of the tournament.
But plans sometimes go awry. Unbeknown to me, Peter was poorly in the run up to the tournament and withdrew. Despite his indisposition, he kindly transported the seats to Lord’s earlier in the week, where they adorned the pros office in the run up to the tournament.
Chris Bray accosted me as soon as he saw me and asked, as politely as only he is able, to get those hideous things out of the pros office as soon as possible. He said they were lowering the tone of the place.
“Don’t you mean raising the tone?”, I said, “they are certainly in the business of raising something”.
We agreed that I would shift the items into my car after I had played my Friday afternoon matches.
I didn’t particularly want to be seen struggling through reception and into Car Park No 6 with those items, so I picked what I thought was a tactically smart time to do the deed – towards the end of the rubber after mine, when most of the players who were still around would be watching.
Yet somehow, despite my seemingly cunning timing, I was of course destined to bump into friends while I did the deed. Piers Vacher, for example, and Rob Stain, the latter bringing some nominative determinism to this comedy of embarrassment.
“If only I had my camera with me”…
…said, Rob, kindly.
I changed and stopped over at the flat Friday night into Saturday morning. The loo seats remained in the back of my car, covered with tarpaulin, until I returned to the house on Saturday evening. For some inexplicable reason, I chose not to schlep two loo seats up into the flat on Friday afternoon and then back down again on Saturday.
The Friday Evening Bash – Concluding With A Differently Potty Tale
On Friday evening, dinner in the Committee Dining Room was great. I sat next to Clive Picton on one side and Tony Joyce on the other – both people I have played with and chatted with over the years but had not caught up with for a while.
The food was very good, as usual. A smoked salmon fillet thing with interesting garnish as a starter, a chicken supreme with mushroom sauce and trimmings as the main and a crumble of some description for afters…
…can you tell that I forgot to grab one of the menus as I left?
The after dinner speech was by realist Lindsay MacDuff, aka The Culture Colonel, then cheese, port, coffee, chocolates and all that. I was quite abstemious by the standards of most, but not THAT abstemious given the special occasion.
I was among the last few to leave, yet knew nothing that night about the curious…some might say potty…incident that occurred at the end of the evening. I learnt about it the next day from Jonathan Ellis-Miller.
The Mouse Cricket Caper is a lovely book, authored by MCC member and realist Mark Trenowden, set in the Lord’s pavilion. The climax of the story depends on an unfortunate incident on the night after the traditional MCC v Melbourne match in July 2013, in which a comedic MCC member named McCrackers gets locked in a pavilion toilet and then, after breaking out of the loo and into the pavilion proper, witnesses the pivotal match between the Lord’s pavilion mice and a team of chancer rats.
In truth, I found it hard to suspend belief at the bit where McCrackers gets locked in the toilet, as I have always imagined the stewarding to be especially sharp about making certain that the pavilion has been vacated.
Yet, somehow, at our event, Nigel Smith and Piers Vacher conspired inadvertently to get themselves locked outside on the Committee Dining Room balcony at the end of the evening. Apparently they were enjoying one last crafty cigarette and admiring the beauty of the ground while doing so.
Fortunately the story has a happy, albeit comedic ending, as Nigel & Piers were able to alert staff who were still clearing up inside and escape relatively unfrozen. It would have been a long cold night stuck out there, that’s for sure.
I haven’t asked either Nigel or Piers if they saw any rats or mice during their lock-in adventure. In any case, they might not be reliable witnesses to their own perception of murine match play (or lack thereof) at that late stage of the evening’s libations.
Day Two: Sweet Success, But With Cats Set Amongst Pigeons, Will It Be Enough?
Never mind fictional rats and mice, metaphorical cats started to scurry around metaphorical pigeons very early in Day Two – long before Group B combatants started to do battle that day.
In elite Group A, two pairs Rufus Parkes & George Dickson, plus Tony Joyce & Foreman Wickes had shown very strongly on Day One, with Ben Martin & Kate Evers also showing well. On the Friday evening, I suggested that the matches between those three pairs, plus the match in which Ben Martin’s pair would do battle with his dad’s pair, Simon Martin & Ronald Paterson, were to be “the popcorn matches” of the round robin stage.
Unfortunately, as I settled down with my metaphorical popcorn at the flat to watch the stream on Saturday morning…it was more like cornflakes than popcorn in truth…Foreman Wickes sustained a horrible-looking forearm injury during warm up. Foreman bravely laboured through the bout and Paul Cattermull kindly stepped in to take his place in the subsequent matches, but that incident really opened up Group A.
Group D was relatively cat and pigeon free, with two pairs, Adrian Fox & Anton Eisdell, plus Sebastian Maurin & Brian Woodbridge, showing strongly on Day One and continuing to shine on Day Two. There were plenty of close matches though, not least a third pairing, Douglas Brewster and David Shannon, who stayed close to the top two throughout the tournament and pulled off more draws than…[insert your own, potentially politically incorrect, metaphor here].
It was the first Group B match of Day Two that sent my group into a “cats among pigeons” maelstrom, when Davidson & Wickman defeated Lay and Wise in an exciting and well fought round robin match, opening up the group to all manner of possibilities, not least that those two teams might now be the ones to progress.
Similarly, in Group C, two pairs – Piers Vacher & Peter Brunner plus Ben Havey & Sam Walker had shown strongly on Day One, with fancied pair Matt Glyn & Andrew Hinds narrowly defeated by the latter of those pairs late on Friday. But the first Group C game on Saturday, between reigning champions Brunner & Vacher v Glyn & Hinds, was another thriller which ended in defeat for reigning pair.
Is it possible that the near miss on the Committee Dining Room balcony affected Messrs Vacher and Smith the next day? Neither of them recorded a win with their respective partners on the Saturday.
In truth, Nigel Smith might look to his partner, Jonathan Ellis-Miller and wonder what might have been against me and Giles Stogdon that afternoon, had Jonathan tried a less forceful style. Giles and I had agreed that, if we lost the toss, Giles would take Nigel’s serve (which often requires twisting to the backhand side) and I would take Jonathan’s, not least because Jonathan was bound to try and hit my serve to kingdom come. After the event, word is, Jonathan had promised Nigel that he intended to do just that. What could possibly go wrong?
It was actually a very close match, but the percentages were, I’d suggest, in our favour, given the predictable attacking approach. Ellis-Miller hit three grilles in the above short match. I managed one grille but also achieved a chase off when chasing better than half-a-yard. I think it is only the second time I have ever landed on better than half-a-yard to win or neutralise a chase. The other occasion, which won the chase, got me a bottle of champagne in my first ever Lowenthal Trophy appearance in 2019. #justsayin.
Returning to Lord’s in February 2025, Giles Stogdon and I knew that our match against Giles Pemberton & George Richards, towards the end of Day Two, would be a “more or less must win” rubber.
It was a nail-biter of a match which we did, narrowly, win:
Thus, we went home at the end of Day Two with three wins and a draw, but still we knew that we would probably need one or two points off Lay and Wise the next day to qualify.
Day Three: Dénouements Aplenty
I must have been in a state of great excitement first thing that morning. I wanted to watch the stream for a while, not least the first match of the day. Had Pemberton & Richards overcome Davidson & Wickman, it would have resulted in my pair being guaranteed a semi-final place. But it wasn’t to be. We would need a draw or a win.
Janie left for her Samaritans shift while that first match was in progress, suggesting that she might get more sense out of her callers than she was getting out of me that morning. Fair point.
I continued pottering at home and watching the stream, even catching the excellent “father against son” popcorn match…more like a fistful of kikones in my case to be honest… that was S Martin & Paterson v Evers and B Martin…
…which was a very good match. There were strange clattering noises off, coming from the side gallery, as the players left the court (see the end of the above film). Both Simon & Ben Martin deny that it was argy-bargy between them. They have clearly paid off the witnesses, as Andrew Hinds claims, unconvincingly, that the noise arose when he sent a few water bottles flying while trying to do that “pass people in the side gallery” thing. Hard to imagine, that.
As I had done on both the other days, I went to Lord’s via BodyWorksWest, my health club, to do some stretching and warm up ahead of battle.
Our last round robin match was, to all intents and purposes, a quarter-final, from which a draw would have been good enough for us, whereas it was a must win game for Lay and Wise.
It was a really good game. We stayed close, getting to 3-3 and at one stage were a couple of points away from pulling off a win, but it was not to be for me and Giles Stogdon. Still, an honourable third in Group B and getting to within two points of topping our group and a semi-final place, is a pretty decent result.
After a break for some lunch, shower and change, we were ready to watch for the rest of the afternoon. We caught both of the A/B semi-finals, the C/D final and the A/B final.
Did you say you want to see those matches? OK then. All are good, but I would say that the first of the four films below – Lay & Wise v Parkes & Dickson, is the most watchable of the tournament, followed closely by the Evers & Martin v Davidson & Wickman semi-final:
Neither of the finals were quite so tight, but the spirit in the dedans gallery was terrific, with lots of people sticking around to watch, cheer and clap.
So that’s it, for now, for me. No more matches and tournaments until I am all better with my hip – hopefully just a few months.
It was a wonderful weekend – such good fun tennis, plus social time with the wonderful friends I have made through this extraordinary game.
No doubt I shall dream of all that while I sit on one or other of my elevated on-loan-thrones over the next few weeks.
And perhaps, before all the anaesthetics and sedatives have fully worn off, I might envisage teams of rats and mice playing rodent-realers against each other.
