I was reminiscing about his last birthday, 2006. I took mum and dad to Lord’s for a birthday treat. Dad had no interest whatsoever in sport, but he did enjoy a nice meal and my parents had never before seen Lord’s.
It was good fortune that the Middlesex v Hampshire match went to a fourth day – indeed it eventually went the distance on that fourth day. I did have a Plan B, in case you are wondering, but Plan B was not needed.
As I reminisced just now, the piece seemed to be writing itself in my brain, almost as if I had already written it.
Just in case there’s anyone left on the planet who is bemused by the pseudonyms, I am Ged Ladd so my parents are “Mr & Mrs Ladd Senior”.
On re-reading that piece, I have little else to add about the day.
Here is a link to the scorecard for the match – interesting to see so many people who are now involved with England cricket and cricket at Lord’s (not only but including Middlesex) participating in that match. What a good match it was too.
One final reflection. I remember asking dad afterwards if he had enjoyed the day. His reply:
It was absolutely lovely. Thank you so much.
As much as anything else, it was nice to be with so many people of my own age somewhere other than the old age home.
I’m not sure that the Middlesex/MCC marketing people will be wanting to reuse that quote, but if they want it they can have it.
Like King Cricket, I first saw Tom Smith play in the summer of 2006, but in my case it was June and the weather was lovely.
My diary simply has a line through the Friday daytime and the word “Lord’s”. That means I went to Lord’s with me, myself and a heap of reading.
By the start of Day 3 (the Friday), the result of the match was barely in doubt; it was really only a question of whether Middlesex could salvage some pride and bat for a day on the road we call the Lord’s pitch.
I remember that day at Lord’s primarily for one silly thing, which, as it happens, did involve Tom Smith.
I chose to follow the sun (top up the tan for tomorrow’s party), so by the afternoon I had plonked myself in the front row of the Mound Stand, closer to the Edrich than the Tavern.
Scott Styris in particular was batting well; with some aggression as well as for survival. On one occasion Styris lofted the ball into vacant space, in my direction; a couple of bounces, then the ball bounced up and pretty much landed on my lap. To this day it is the only time I can recall the ball absolutely coming to me, personally, while watching a professional match.
I had on my lap at that juncture not only the book I was reading but also an apple I was about to munch by way of light lunch.
Tom Smith arrived to gather the ball. I considered throwing him the apple rather than the ball but momentarily thought better of it and simply threw him the ball. I then spent the rest of the afternoon regretting that I hadn’t played that practical joke on Tom Smith.
Smith looked very sharp as a pace bowler back then. I remember being very impressed with him, even though his figures for the day don’t look special. He looked “the lad most likely” that afternoon on a very flat track and I remember carrying high hopes for him as an England bowling prospect for a few years.
Saturday 24 June 2006
There is a line through Saturday which reads “party”, as it was the day of the famous “Arabian Nights/Moroccan Den” party at Daisy’s old maisonette in Sandall Close.
Tony (downstairs) let us use his garden as well as ours (in return for an invitation). Kim and DJ’s company, Theme Traders, themed the gardens up for the party (see picture above).
The weather was glorious for that one and the party really was a huge success. I struggled to take photographs on the night (enjoying myself too much and then couldn’t get the flash to flash) but perhaps some better pictures will emerge from friends.
I can just about make out Bobbie and John-Boy in the background. Tony in the foreground and a few members of the family.
There were quite a lot of people at the party; a few dozen anyway. I’m pretty sure I recall Bobbie, her Dave, Andrea and one or two others hanging around with us until very late indeed; it was one of those parties that people didn’t want to end.
I had just acquired my first iPod and I made up a good playlist for this party. I’ll dump the playlist in a file and attach it as an aside later.
Daisy (Janie) might well want to chip in with some memories of this party too.
Michael Mainelli and I had formed a tradition – I think 2006 was the third instance of it – that I would take Michael as my guest to a day of county cricket early season, before the crowds get larger and (most importantly) before the days get hotter.
Some like it hot, but Michael REALLY doesn’t like it hot.
So, Day 3, Friday, first county championship match of the season seemed just the ticket. In many ways it was. Middlesex v Kent. Good fixture. April.
The match was well advanced by the start of Day 3 but not too well advanced.
As tradition would have it…this sort of thing IS a tradition by the third time, possibly even by the second time…we watched the first session from the pavilion. Then, at lunch, as tradition would also have it, we perambulated on the outfield (smaller crowd than Middlesex’s glorious September 2016 match depicted above), then retired to Harry Morgan to grab some takeaway New York deli-style food – probably a chopped liver sandwich to share plus a salt beef sandwich each plus some pickled cucumbers.
We took our feast back to Lord’s in time to munch, drink some fine red wine and watch the second session of cricket from the Compton Stand.
The Compton Stand offered a rather binary choice; absolutely exposed to the elements in the upper tier, or caged in away from the elements in the lower tier. As I write in September 2019, that stand is being demolished, together with its smaller twin, the Edrich, to be replaced by more modern facilities.
Anyway, in April we opted for the upper and the sunshine while we ate our hot food, rather than the wind-tunnel cooling effect of the shady, cagey lower tier.
We finished our grub around about the time that Nick Compton’s fine innings for Middlesex entered the nervous nineties. I explained to Michael that the lad had been on Middlesex’s books for some years but this was, hopefully, to be his breakthrough season. He had just scored a big hundred in a University warm-up match but this might be his first County Championship hundred.
Shouldn’t we move now to a shady spot? Perhaps the pavilion again or the Warner?
I asked Michael, noticing a few beads of sweat and a slight reddening of the face. It was proper sunshine that day and by mid afternoon it was really quite warm.
Let’s wait and see Compton get his hundred. We should see Compton get his first hundred from the Compton Stand,
Michael replied; a cricket aficionado in the making.
Michael’s early effort in 1998; a Z/Yen & Barnardo’s & The Children’s Society match
We could go down to the lower tier and get some shade…that’s still the Compton Stand…
I suggested.
No, said Michael, we shouldn’t move. He’s in the nineties.
Now anyone who knows Michael surely knows that he is one of the least superstitious people you are ever likely to meet. He’s logical. He’s rational.
But cricket seems to get all of us…yes, even Michael, with quirky superstitions. Perhaps all sport does this to some extent, but cricket has superstition in spades.
And of course Michael had enough exposure to cricket through our charity matches and stuff to really understand that a century is a big achievement and a maiden century a really big thing…
…Nick Compton also knew the importance of making a ton, of course…
…so Nick’s nervous 90s went on for rather a long time…it seemed like a very, very long time…
…while Michael got hotter and hotter; ruddier and ruddier. I asked him a couple more times if he wanted to move, but Michael was glued to the cricket and absolutely intent on not jinxing Nick Compton’s century quest.
Within moments of Nick achieving his hundred, Michael was up and we were away in the direction of the shade. I think we went back to the pavilion for the rest of that very pleasant spring day.
Today, Janie and I were battling out the tightest of sets of tennis, as oft we do. We ended the match at 5-5 as a tie. We tend to do that if the scores are level at 5-5 or 6-6. Janie and I believe in ties.
Of course there is a huge difference between amateur sport and professional sport. But Janie also felt strongly that the 2019 world cup should similarly have been determined as a tie and shared between England and New Zealand. I’m not 100% sure; it certainly isn’t the modern way for tournaments.
But on the way home from our epic tennis tied match today, my mind wandered to a match that Janie and I witnessed in that glorious and exciting summer of cricket that was 2005. We went to Lord’s to see the final of the one day international (ODI) tri-series between Australia, Bangladesh and England; a final between England and Australia that ended as a tie.
How was that tie resolved, I wondered. I couldn’t remember. So I looked it up.
In fact, back in 2005, the playing conditions for that tri-series – presumably agreed between the three nations but ultimately under the auspices of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) rather than the International Cricket Council (ICC) – determined that final as a tie if the scores were level after 50 overs.
England and Australia shared the trophy.
No super over (I don’t recall ever seeing those back then), no boundaries count back (I don’t recall seeing that until this most recent ICC World Cup), no priority to the team with the most wickets remaining at the end of their innings (that method had been discredited quite early in the Duckworth- Lewis era as anathema to the mathematical logic of wickets and overs as being algorithmic-equivalent resources that can become exhausted).
It had been a great match, that 2005 ODI final. At first we thought England were way ahead…
…even when Australia crawled back to post 196 runs…
…until England ended up 33/5 and we thought England had blown it…
…until England somehow managed to crawl back to 196/9, securing a couple of leg byes off the last ball to tie the match.
Perhaps others in the crowd thought differently, but Janie and I left the ground feeling thoroughly satisfied with our day’s entertainment, the thrills and spills of the ebb and flow…
…and a feeling that justice had been done to a hard-fought match when the trophy was shared for a tie.
Who would have won on a super over? We’ll never know.
Who would have won on boundary count-backs? Australia.
Who would have won on the basis of fewer wickets lost? England.
Who gives a fig how the match would have been determined if the playing conditions had been different? Only a pedant, really, as either or both teams might have played the final few balls differently if other playing conditions were being applied.
It was a summer of fine margins, really. England prevailed in the tournament that really mattered, the Ashes…
Later that summer… (thanks to Charles Bartlett for the picture)
…we were there that day too – the final day of the 2005 Ashes series – to be Ogblogged in the fullness of time. But that Ashes win came as a result of a drawn match at the end and a couple of really tight finishes, especially the Edgbaston test (also to be Ogblogged in the fullness).
Janie and I formed part of a very sparse crowd for this National League match, which was meant to be 45 overs-a-side, in 2004.
The crowd was especially sparse because the game, which had been scheduled for the Sunday, was moved to a reserve day on the Monday because Leicestershire found themselves in the final (and indeed winners) of the almost new Twenty20 tournament that year.
But Janie and I had booked a day off that Monday anyway and the weather was deceptively good earlier in the day.
I remember only a few details about this match; Janie remembers less. I do recall sitting at the front of the Tavern Stand, with Darren Stevens fielding right in front of us.
Slightly later image, here with Glenn Hoddle of all people, from: https://www.londoncounty.co.uk/blog/2010/06/19/in-praise-of-darren-stevens/
Daisy (Janie) wanted to know about Leicestershire’s celebrations and party after their cup-winning success a couple of days earlier.
For a while, Darren Stevens played Daisy’s questions with a characteristically straight bat. But Daisy’s line of questioning and her persuasive manner can bamboozle even the most seasoned batsman. Eventually he failed to pick her metaphorical doosra, which was expressed roughly in the form…
Oh go on, you can tell me, I won’t tell anyone…
…at which point he spilled a few beans about the celebrations and party – now long-since forgotten by us, even if that victorious night remains memorable to him. The details he passed on will have been mere crumbs.
Still, when the rain came to interrupt Middlesex’s rather poor innings before it might well have in any case been brought to a premature end, Janie and I took refuge in the Middlesex Room.
There we and a few other refugees from the rain joined “the Middlesex gossips”, as I used to describe the regulars who tended to reside in that room.
I vaguely remember Auntie Janet expressing an interest in Mark Cleary, although Ottis Gibson and Claude Henderson had been the pick of the Leicestershire bowlers that day. I think this day might have been the only time I saw Charlie Dagnall bowl.
As it became clear that the weather was clearing up and that the Leicestershire innings would go ahead, reduced to 20 overs due to rain, the mood among the Middlesex fans became quite pessimistic.
“It’ll be a Twenty20 innings for them and they are the Twenty20 champions; we don’t stand a chance”, was the prevailing view. We (Middlesex) were offering a pretty depleted bowling attack that day too, due to injuries, wear and tear restings etc.
But Daisy’s view was laden with inside information:
I’m not so sure – they had one heck of a party to celebrate their cup win on Saturday, which by the sound of it went deep into yesterday…
Picture taken from the Compton Stand at a Test some 20 years later.
There are only cryptic messages in my diary, but I do remember this day well:
Cookie Lords
Charlie Barnett 98 before lunch
Olly
Heather Rabbatts
Cookie in this instance is James Cooke, who was doing a bit of associate work with us, mostly introductions. As it turned out, the most fruitful introduction Cookie made (from my personal/selfish point of view) was introducing me to Lord’s.
Believe it or not this was my first visit to Lord’s. Little did I know then how much of my time I would end up spending in that wonderful place.
Why Cookie mentioned and I wrote down that factoid about Charlie Barnett, is a mystery. Perhaps Cookie had met or was related to Charlie Barnett?
I wrote down the names Olly and Heather Rabbatts in different coloured ink from the other notes – I’m guessing I wrote the latter two while at Lord’s with Cookie. I cannot remember who Olly is/was. I do recall that Cookie wanted to introduce us to Heather, whom he knew. She was a high flyer who at that time had recently become Chief Executive at Lambeth.
It was an informal invitation – just the two of us, me and Cookie sitting in the Compton Stand. That stand was still quite new then and did not yet have the sweep/link to the Grandstand, as the new Grandstand was still a year away.
England were not a good side in the mid 1990s and looked out of their depth batting against that fine Pakistan bowling line up, which included Wasim, Waqar and Mushtaq.
I remember Cookie providing a splendid picnic – I guess that was to be the prototype for my informal hospitality picnics in the coming decades.
I’m sure I thanked Cookie at the time but there is no way I could have thanked him sufficiently for planting that Lord’s seed in my psyche. So 20+ years and hundreds of visits later, I’d like to thank Cookie again for the introduction to Lord’s.
