Tag: Oval

My First Ever Day At A Test Match, With Graham Majin, England v Australia Day 3, Oval, 27 August 1977

Bob Willis, photo by Brittle heaven~commonswiki, CC BY-SA 4.0

The diary entry is pretty blasé about this momentous day:

Went to test match. Mostly rained off etc. V good what we saw (Graham and I).

I’m pretty sure this was my first ever day at the test. But it seems that I was so laid back in those days, perhaps my first one entirely passed me by.

Graham Majin and I had spent a great deal of that summer together making our second animated film, Speare Trek. More on Speare Trek will appear on Ogblog in the fullness of time. (Including a link to the film once I work out a way of digitally patching it back together again). We’d finished filming earlier in August and I think (reading between the lines of the diary) the last of the rushes had returned to us from the processing lab earlier in the week of this test. Younger readers will need a glossary and a book on the history of film to understand what on earth I’m on about.

Anyway, one of Graham’s uncles was a journalist who tended to be given test match tickets for the Oval. A pair of hot test tickets for the Saturday filtered down to us.

The only problem that day was the rain. Lots of it. I suspect we got about an hour of cricket the whole day – here’s the scorecard.

I have a few good memories of the day. I remember the Australian players wandering around and chatting to the few hardy souls (which included me and Graham) who stuck around in the hope of cricket.

The Aussies had been beaten up in the test series (they were an insurmountable 3-0 down before this test started). They were also, unbeknown to us, riven by the Kerry Packer business, news of which was soon to break. Yet still they did their bit for the attendees. Respect.

I especially remember Kim Hughes as part of that wandering, sociable pack; I also remember some young women, near us, drooling over Hughes. Graham and I wondered what he had that we lacked.

Graham late summer the year before
Me late summer the year before: trophy but no cigar

Despite our extreme youth, the crowd-deprived bar folk of the Oval seemed only too happy to serve us beer. Thems was different times. I do not recommend that 14/15 year old readers try to emulate our behaviour.

But the central character of the day was Bob Willis. Renowned as a terrible batsman (he famously once went out to bat without a bat), he scored 24 not out in this innings, almost his personal best. After the innings break, he then took a wicket before stumps were drawn.

Graham and I still had beers in our hands when stumps were drawn and certainly weren’t inclined to drink quickly or rush away from the ground, so we stuck around a while before wandering down to the Oval tube station.

When we got down to that southbound platform, there, with his cricket coffin, was Bob Willis. We asked him where he was going. Bob explained that he had friends in Streatham and was going to stay with them for the Sunday – a rest day back then.

I don’t remember where the conversation went after that, nor indeed exactly how we all went our separate ways, each to subtly different parts of Streatham.

Graham might remember, but I doubt it. Bob’s even less likely to remember.

Meanwhile, that sighting of Bob Willis on the underground has gone down in King Cricket/Cricket Badger folk lore as the very pinnacle of “cricketer spotted” activity – click here for recent (at the time of writing) validation – an accolade indeed.

Start Of The School Holidays Of Summer 1976, Including A Visit To The Oval & Members Seats…But With Whom And Why? A Belated Alleyn’s School Field Trip, Perhaps?

Nano Banana 2.1 (AI) Depiction Of Surrey v Kent, Midweek, Oval, 1976. (My “small crowd, plenty of kids” description has been taken too literally – I love it!)

Saturday 10 July 1976 – went to A[nil] Biltoo for afternoon. TV Joan Crawford film [probably The Command, which was Joan Weldon, not Joan Crawford!].

Sunday 11 July 1976 – all OK. Lunched at Il Carretto. TV Once You Kiss a Stranger

Monday 12 July 1976 – went to Oval: members seats!! TV Star Trek, Get Some In.

This is Anil Biltoo’s first mention in my diary. In truth, I don’t remember our friendship forming until the following academic year, but clearly we had initiated our friendship towards the end of the 3rd year and saw each other more than once during the holidays that summer.

This photo of Anil from the summer of 1979, in Mauritius. The stick he is wielding is sugar cane.

Not a mystery, just one of those temporal slips that my memory tends to make.

The main memory slip mystery item from those first few days of the summer holidays is the visit to The Oval.

I most certainly remember the visit and I remember being shown around the pavilion, walking around no doubt open-mouthed at the pictures of great players and events from days of yore.

So stuck in my brain was the memory of being shown around, that it returned to me by way of a dream the night before my next visit to that pavilion – 21 September 2005.

Of course I had been to The Oval many times between those visits – not least nine days earlier, to see the magical 5th day of the 5th test of 2005. Other Ogblog pieces will/already do cover such other visits.

But the night before my visit to see Surrey v Middlesex, secure in the knowledge that my reciprocal member’s rights would enable me to use the pavilion, I dreamt of walking through that building. When I awoke, I wondered whether my dream had been an accurate representation of the place or just a dream-like replica. But when I got to the Oval and actually started walking around the pavilion, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, as I realised that my memory, in sleep, had accurately dredged almost every permanent detail of that building. It wasn’t a sense of deja vu – because I HAD been there before; more than 29 years before. If you had asked me 24 hours before that second visit to describe the inside of the building, I could not even faintly have done so.

The memory really is a weird thing.

Irritatingly, my memory has entirely suppressed…

…and my diary is no help with this…

…the answers to the following two questions:

  • WHY did I have members’ access on Monday 12 July 1976?
  • Who was I with for that visit?

My gut feeling is that it was a sort-of end of term Alleyn’s School field trip, organised a few days after the end of term to coincide with a match that was worth visiting. That sort of field trip has Colin Page’s fingerprints all over it.

Micky Stewart – after whom that pavilion is now named, is, of course, an Alleyn’s School alum. He might have been a helpful conduit for such a visit.

But in truth I don’t recall. I just remember the open-mouthed pavilion tour and watching what I thought to be some very good cricket. It cemented my view that I wanted to bowl like Intikhab Alum, if only I could work out for myself how to deploy leg (wrist) spin. Spoiler alert: I NEVER worked out how to deploy leg spin.

Here’s the scorecard from the match we saw in July 1976. I’m hoping the hive mind of the Alleyn’s folk who were with me that fine day can add to my memory of why we were there and what else happened.