Image by Google Flow Nana Banana 2 Lite, instructed by me
Janie and I visited Shenley for the first time on the Saturday of this match during my first full season as a member of Middlesex CCC.
Shenley is a beautiful ground and a charming place to watch cricket. Any ground with a Corn Field End has to be a pleasant place to watch cricket in good weather. The weather smiled on us that day.
We ran into Alan Curtis and a very young Alex that day – I think Caroline might have been with them or perhaps Alan was relieving Caroline of the child-minding duties while being a top notch cricket dad by introducing Alex to cricket in his infancy. I mentioned this occasion when I proposed Alex for MCC membership in the early 2020s, as evidence of a lifetime of metaphorical “cricket sheep dip”.
Not that there are sheep at Shenley. Ought to be. There are plenty of sheep around Wormsley.
I was reminded to write this up as I was writing up the other visit Janie and I made to Shenley that season – to see a women’s test match for the first time:
This was the first time that Janie (Daisy) ever visited Lord’s.
It was my second ever, and last, visit to Lord’s in the 20th century. It was also the only time I actually bought tickets for Lord’s that century, having been taken as a guest on my sole previous visit there:
Unaccustomed as I was to buying tickets for Lord’s back then…oh boy have I made up for it since…and probably a bit slow of the mark for the World Cup to boot, I ended up getting Lower Compton seats some rows back. All has changed since (he says, 25 years later), but back then the Lower Compton was a wind tunnel affair through which you got a somewhat restricted view and in particular had no clear view on a scoreboard.
Who knew that it can be really cold in London at a cricket match in June? Who failed to learn from this 1999 experience?
Once I became better acquainted with Lord’s for a while I would book the Lower Compton front row, which avoided the wind tunnel and tended to have a decent view. But never again did I make the mistake of buying tickets in the middle or rear of that stand. The new Lower Compton is SO much better.
Returning to 1999, we nevertheless had a great day, despite the ordinary seats. It is so difficult not to have a good day at Lord’s. It was even, somewhat surprisingly, a good match, with Neil Johnson & Murray Goodwin keeping Zimbabwe in the hunt for most of the match. All the Cricinfo resources for this match can be found here.
