Anyway, Daisy and I did our usual thing in Leamington – stopping there for a game of real with Dr Snoddie & his pals; also lunching and shopping in that fine spa town, before driving on to Birmingham (Moseley).
This time we had taken an out house in a family home as our Airbnb, which was less eccentric than the 2024 place but not quite as spacious and posh as the 2022 place in Edgbaston.
Still, plenty of room for producing smoked trout and smoked salmon bagels, smoked chicken, duck and cheese sandwiches, grape and strawberry courses and assorted snacks.
Nigel joined me and Daisy for dinner at Sabai Sabai the night before the test started. Harsha was unable to join us until Day Two, hence his absence from the pre-test repast. He (and we) had very much enjoyed that place in 2024, much as we all did in 2025.
A fairly large table, including cricket writers Simon Wilde and John Etheridge also dined in Sabai Sabai that evening. Being cricket writers, they must be discerning folk who know what they are on about food-wise.
Nigel, Morg, Jonny & Me – photo by Daisy
Here we are gathered at the start of Day One, brimming with antici…
…pation.
Jonny Twophones was making a third appearance this year, while his friend, Huge Morg, whom I had met through Jonny at Lord’s a couple of years earlier, was making his first appearance at a Heavy Rollers event. Unfortunately we neglected to conduct Morg’s initiation ceremony this time, so it will have to be a more extreme version of the initiation next time. Something for everyone to look forward to.
Did Sam come and visit us at lunchtime on Day Two?
Yes. As well as this selfie, he also took the headline photo for us. Thanks Sam.
Of course he did.
Daisy took a good few photos around the back of the Eric Hollies Stand over the three days, which will find their way as an educational feature on the King Cricket website in the fullness of time. A link to that feature will be annexed soon after that fullness.
Here is an example of such a photo, not used in that feature.
Knight time is the right time.
My performance in the traditional Heavy Rollers prediction game was dismal this year, whereas Daisy, professing to “knowing nothing” did quite well for a change.
As always, the days seemed to fly by and sooner than we possibly could imagine we were all on our way.
I had hoped to get to Lord’s a bit earlier than 4:15 on Disability Cricket Day, but work and other necessities intervened. By the time I got to Lord’s, most of the peripheral activities had finished, although there were still plenty of people enjoying their day around the Nursey Ground, especially the small stand at the side of the Cricket Academy.
Some of my steward friends urged me to hurry round to the pavilion side of the ground, lest I missed the whole of the flagship match between England and India, as England were seven-down for diddly-squat.
But this was no day for hurrying – I ambled around with my tennis equipment in hand, with a view to stowing the equipment and working out where to sit.
I had no jacket and tie with me, but suspected that it would be a “relaxed dress code” day and that my smart casual look would be sufficient to gain entry into the pavilion.
I asked one of my steward friends whether it was relaxed dress code today.
Totally relaxed – they’ve even told us we can let people in wearing flip-flops today.
I was flabberghasted.
I wish I’d phoned to ask before I left home. I’ve always wanted to wear flip-flops in the pavilion.
Relaxed dress – I still have this longyi somewhere…and flip-flops
On asking one question about the nature of this disability match, another friendly steward handed me a programme – then I found a seat on the front terrace.
The programme was helpful in answering my questions about what “mixed disability” is. In short, there are three categories of disability cricket:
Physical Disability;
Deaf / Hearing Impairment;
Learning Disability.
This mixed disability format requires a mixed team because all three categories of disability need to be represented in the top four batting and each category needs to bowl at least 25% of the overs – thus requiring a minimum of two bowlers from each category.
Clever.
By the time I had got my head around it, the England innings had revived somewhat and were making a good game of it for the last few overs of its 20 over allocation.
That said, India set off in the power play looking as though they would make short shrift of the 124 target.
At that juncture, I realised that I needed to go to the dressing room and change for my next gig – real tennis club night, which I curate, so it would be rude to be late.
On my way out, as I progressed through the Long Room, I ran into Arfan Akram, besuited in a conventional MCC stylee, whom I know well from his role with Essex and my role with the London Cricket Trust.
After greeting me warmly, and us both agreeing that the disability cricket day seemed to be a great success, Arfan asked,
are you going to write this up on your blog?
You don’t say no to Arfan without good reason.
Yes, of course,
I said.
In truth, I was really impressed by the quality of the cricket. It is the first time I have seen this mixed disability format. I think it is a great idea, to showcase the best of the disability cricketers and to encourage players in each of those three disability categories to aspire to make the most of their talents.
I can’t find any video from the match I saw, but here is a YouTube of the mixed disability match earlier in the day, MCC v Middlesex D40 First XI, which was also a humdinger:
I tried to explain to anyone who’d listen to me that I should be allowed to represent at mixed disability cricket, given the ravages of time and the advent of Pinky, my brand-new hip.
I was politely informed that I wouldn’t be good enough, not that I really needed anyone to tell me, given the quality of cricket I had witnessed.
No such impediment for real tennis club night. We play a mixed ability format, the criterion for which is quite straightforward – all are welcome regardless of ability.
Just as well that criterion is simple, because real tennis is a complex game which we amateurs play on handicap. For “all are welcome” sessions such as club night, where several of the players tend to be of unknown or unsettled handicaps, I favour the use of sliding handicaps, to ensure that each set will tend towards a tight finish. Works almost every time.
Again, no footage from club night itself (heaven forbid) but I do have some footage of several of us regular “Club-night-istas” at play in early February, just before I parted company with Pinky’s organic predecessor.
Of the four of us depicted, only me and Mike Lay were at Club Night this June. Mike was my nemesis on that February “quarter-final-like” occasion, and proved to be so again at Club Night, even though my ability to move has already come on leaps and bounds since February and the op.
It is wonderful, though, to be back on court playing with my friends again, without pain and at something starting to approach the level to which I aspire.
Back To Lord’s The Next Morning For Some Endorsing, While The MCC & MCC Foundation Launched The Knight-Stokes Cup
Young people…at Lord’s…enjoying themselves? Whatever next?
After a physiotherapy session first thing (planned, I hasten to add, not a reaction to the tennis the night before, which my body seemed to absorb most satisfactorily), I returned at 9:15 to Lord’s for a full morning of candidate endorsing.
When I agreed to endorse on the morning of 26 June, I didn’t realise that we’d end up doing the interviews in The President’s Suite of the Grandstand, while the MCC and the MCC Foundation launched the wonderful Knight-Stokes Cup for independent schools:
In some ways, there was something incongruous about conducting candidate endorsement interviews on such an auspicious occasion. Hardly any, if any of the candidates we interviewed that day had been to a state school. Still, the MCC can only do its best to try and widen its demographic; the Knight-Stokes Cup is one of the better ideas behind which the club is throwing its weight.
My interviewing partner for the session was Steven Bishop, another real tennis enthusiast who, coincidentally, had been one of my nemeses in the 2024 real tennis club weekend – on that occasion in a nail-biting semi-final:
But I digress.
We mostly interviewed young folk in this session and tried our best to present a very 21st century demeanour. Steven, in particular, spoke with them in detail about the MCC Foundation and the wonderful work it does, both nationally and internationally.
Steven did, however, on one occasion, while waxing lyrical about all the wonderful work the Foundation does overseas, mention Zaire, which slightly took me aback, partly because I had no idea that the MCC Foundation was active in DR Congo (I’m not 100% sure it is), and secondly because that country hasn’t been called Zaire since the previous millennium (1997 to be precise). I held my tongue. At least that small error is steeped in the late 20th century and not the 19th century, where the typical and unfair caricature of an MCC member, blissfully unaware that Queen Victoria is no longer with us, is perceived mentally to reside.
After six interviews I parted company with Steven and progressed, after a very short break for some lunch, to…
Steep Myself In The MCC’s 19th Century History – Research In The Library On Spencer Ponsonby-Fane & Other Related Topics
As part of my research for my forthcoming talk & small treatise on the emergence of the laws of tennis (lawn variety) around 1875, a central character in that story is Sir Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby-Fane, who chaired the MCC Tennis committee at the time those laws emerged and who also founded what is now MCC Heritage and Collections, including the Library and Museum.
Alan Rees in the library, as usual, was enormously helpful and had found some fascinating stuff for me to examine – some of which is highly pertinent to my talk and some of which is the sort of wonderful rabbit hole down which I like to dive when doing this sort of research.
When Alan told me about it, I thought the Ricardo in question was John Lewis Ricardo, perhaps the most famous of the nephews of the great political economist David Ricardo. But no, the cricket-loving Ricardo who was one of the first members of I Zingari and thus hanging out with Spencer Ponsonby and the like, was one of John Lewis Ricardo’s younger brothers, Albert Ricardo, whose wife, Charlotte Ricardo, aka Daisy, compiled the album.
It’s a shame that John Lewis Ricardo was not the cricketer, as I wanted to say that he was “never knowingly under bowled”. I’ve said it anyway.
Soon after 4:00, I decided that it would only be polite for me to return home and start preparing the birthday meal that I had promised my own Daisy, so I headed off around 4:15, almost exactly 24 hours after I arrived for the first of my four activities, having spent more time at Lord’s during that 24 hour period than away from the place.
In an unusual act of punctuality, King Cricket published my (Ged Ladd’s) write up of the four days I spent at Lord’s enjoying the ICC World Test Championship Final between Australia and South Africa, amongst other leisurely pursuits.
Pretty much everything I want to say about that match is included in that article.
Daisy likes these Lord’s double-headers, where you get a nice, reasonably quiet women’s match in the afternoon, followed by an increasingly noisy and boozy men’s match in the evening. The Hundred is her preferred choice of such double-headers, following a confusing experience in 2023, watching Sunrisers in May, as reported 18 months later on King Cricket:
This year, the women’s team has reverted to being Middlesex Women, so the idea of a Middlesex double-header of Middlesex v Sussex made a bit more sense and attracted us to attend.
Naturally Daisy’s favourite sun deck was the location of choice. Naturally we brought lashings of ginger beer with us and resolved to make a meal of the Long Room Bar Baps and salad (gammon again, seeing as you were going to ask).
Unlike Daisy, I prepared for this event inadequately, by assuming that at least one of my Middlesex caps was in my Middlesex bag. Neither of them were. In need of head protection, and with Daisy having doubled-up in the head gear department, I tried to look sensible in Daisy’s floppy hat.
In truth, I was struggling to look sensible in that hat.
Eventually I gave up trying to look sensible in that hat:
I took a stroll between matches – firstly to move the car and then around the ground, which took a long time as I ran into lots of people I knew – some regular friends from Lord’s but also, somewhat surprisingly, Andy Shindler.
We enjoyed our grub between the two matches. So much so that we didn’t even photograph each other eating the food. Older people like us just don’t get the entire purpose of eating out – which is to photograph the event and show your so-called friends that you know how to eat.
As the place started to fill up for the men’s match, Daisy became less enthralled and more aware of it being a bit chilly. After about half-an-hour, it became quite obvious to us which way the match was likely to go and we resolved to catch the end of it on the TV when we got home…which we did.
The weather smiled on us – oh boy did it smile on us – for the first day of the cricket season.
Even as recently as Wednesday, Janie was wondering whether it would be warm enough for her at Lord’s in early April. She’s never forgotten an icy day at Lord’s in June, on her favourite sundeck:
Anyway, 4 April 2025 was no such day. Glorious sunshine. More than 20 centigrade in the shade. Who said 4 April was too early for the start of the cricket season?
A sizeable crowd at Lord’s for the first day of the championship. We ran into lots of people I know, but there was still plenty of time/room for us to sit a little and wander round the ground a few times. What bliss.
Middlesex batting four down…
Middlesex were doing quite well when we arrived…
…but soon they weren’t.
…Middlesex bowling without joy.Scrubbed up for an afternoon outDaisy took on the chin a minor reprimand earlier, for entering the pavilion sleeveless. The steward ever so politely told her to put her sleeve-endowed top on!It isn’t just youngsters who can do double-selfies, you know.
Zara Larsson making a mockery of the pavilion dress code.
Janie and I went to the final of the Hundred…again.
Pretty much everything I want to say about the day is beautifully summarised in the King Cricket piece, “authored by Daisy”, in which I am Ged and Janie is Daisy:
If anything were to befall the King Cricket website, you can read that piece here.
The only details to add, as King Cricket match reports religiously omit anything about the cricket itself, are:
the women’s final was Welsh Fire v London Spirit, which the latter won. This was the first time a domestic home side had won a white ball trophy at Lord’s since the 1980s, so we were dancing in the seats of the Lord’s pavillion that afternoon;
This brace of matches (women’s and then men’s) was also a Nell Mescal concert.
Pretty much everything I wanted to say about our afternoon and evening was captured in a King Cricket piece, which was published with alarming speed, I think because it touched on one of KC’s pieces about Dan Lawrence’s gyratory bowling action.
As is so often the case with these matches, the women’s one was closer and in that regard far more entertaining. We didn’t stay to the end of the men’s one. We rarely do, regardless of how it is going. You CAN have too much of a good thing – especially when it starts to get a bit chilly in the evening.
Should a mishap ever befall the King Cricket site, a scrape of that piece can be found here.
Daisy omitted to mention the excellent meal Harish, Daisy and I enjoyed at Sabai Sabai in Moseley. We vowed to return there and stuck to our vow in 2025.
Back then, I wasn’t a member of the MCC but I did know how to tick boxes on a form requesting a chance at returns if there were any.
This time, I simply applied for a guest ticket and this time, now that diversity is all the thing, I could even take Janie as a Member’s Guest into the pavilion and enjoy a relaxed dress code in there.
Janie loves the upper sub deck. Given that the sun indeed chose to shine on us that evening, that is the spot I picked, getting to Lord’s early enough to secure good seats up there.
Last time I travelled to Lord’s separately from Janie for the sun deck, Janie walked straight past me up there, so I decided to take no chances and sent her a selfie so she might recognise me…or at least recognise my shirt.
I hope readers have noticed the little nod to MCC colours about that shirt.
Janie arrived in good time, as evidenced by the headline photo, which she took.
England had already secured the series by the time this match came around. We didn’t think they batted brilliantly but we guessed they’d batted well enough.
As it started to get a bit colder and my picnic got depleted, we decided to catch the end of the match at home.
My only other comment/memory is a conversation I had with a charming fellow when we were milling around in the Tavern Stand awaiting the post match presentations and inevitable Jimmy farewell ceremonials. He had come down to London from a remote place in the North of England, the exact location of which escapes me but I think Northumbria. He was recently retired and was also recently widowed. He had treated himself to some fancy photographic equipment and was delighted to be able to photograph Jimmy’s last match at close quarters and seemed similarly delighted that he could talk photography with someone like me while he waited.
Did my new friend get better pictures than me?
Almost certainly. But mine with my phone are not too shabby.
