Posted by Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.)
Ged Ladd writes…
Our Heavy Rollers group has sat in either the Priory or Raglan Stand at every Edgbaston Test since the previous millennium. When I tried to book there for the 2026 Test, the system drew a blank. We were to be homeless. I booked excellent seats in the South Stand instead.
At the same time, July 2025, I also booked a seemingly excellent apartment in Moseley for me and Daisy. In September 2026, fewer than 24 hours before we set off for Brum, AirBnB informed me that our booking had been cancelled. Total dumpster fire.
By good fortune, in the nick of time, I found a place we’d stayed in before – not ideal for picnic-istas, but well located.
Day Zero: Dinner with Nigel Father Barry
Over dinner the night before the Test, when I told Nigel Father Barry our late cancellation story, he sympathetically said that such stress could make anyone turn to drink.
Day 1: Picnic hell and art heaven
Making the picnic in an ill-designed and barely equipped kitchen is not a job for wimps, yet I mustered smoked salmon bagels, flame grilled chicken and mayo brioche rolls, strawberries and veggie options for Harsha.
Daisy loves graffiti art and there is now plenty of it around Edgbaston.
My picnic worries were exacerbated by the concern, for reasons too cricket to explain, that I might only need to provision picnic for one more day, but might need to do so for two more days. I forged a Plan A and a Plan B in my mind.
HARSHA: Don’t you use a spreadsheet for planning and implementing the picnics?
GED: No.
Day 2: Our party complete but rain also to compete
We were joined by Neophyte Gazza, a first-timer for our group. He asked one of the stewards to photograph us all. Edgbaston stewards are almost universally friendly and helpful.
Following the precautionary principle, I persevered with the most perishable food for the Day 2 picnic, so that no food would be wasted if there was no Day 3 picnic. Hence smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels, strawberries, then chicken, avocado and hot honey sandwiches. Harsha had falafel and hummus instead of the salmon, then feta instead of chicken.
When the rain came, the others rushed away, while Daisy and I sheltered until the rain stopped. Wise locals (and Pakistan fans) did similarly.
Day 3: How might we celebrate the end of our trip?
When we arrived on Day 3, I ran into Bamm-Bamm Rubble and Pebbles Flintstone, clearly lost at the back of the South Stand.
I directed them to the Eric Hollies. Later we saw them, together with a battery of other Flintstones, on the march.
Our former home, the Priory and Raglan Stands, will from next season be a hotel and the Dennis Amiss Stand. Nothing amiss about that naming – Dennis was one of my childhood heroes.
The construction workers were hard at it that Friday afternoon.
I too had been hard at it early that morning. Pickled herring bagels (feta cheese and hummus for Harsha), grapes, then cheddar cheese with spicy tomato chutney brioche rolls for all. “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” as Marie Antoinette almost certainly didn’t say.
We didn’t lose our heads, but we were heady with the joy that Test cricket with friends brings. Edgbaston also looked rapturous.
Daisy and I were the only ones staying over on Friday evening. After the others had gone, I suggested that we might continue celebrating our successful event, deep into the night.
GED: Let’s go out on the razz.
DAISY: Nah, I think we’ve had enough Raz today.
Daisy was right. We went back to our emergency AirBnB for a much needed early night.
The Edgbaston Ashes tickets are £165, not £115. Possibly lower price for restricted view or some such.
We read that the cheapest adult tickets across the first three days are £115. £165 in the Hollies Stand.
“Up to £115” sounds like a maximum price. It is a minimum price, for restricted view and Stanley Barnes scaffolding add-on seats – the makeshift construction you see, next to the Eric Hollies, shuddering from the noise and foot-thumping. All of the civilised seating areas are £145 to £180, mostly £165, with the Eric Hollies (uncivilised) also priced at £165.
Then don’t get me started about the £2.50 per ticket service charge. A £165 ticket with a £2.50 per ticket service charge is a £167.50 ticket.
I’m an economist, I understand why, when demand is so high, the pricing is accordingly high. I just don’t like weasel wording suggesting that the pricing is lower than it really is.
Yeah, we’ve worded it badly because we omitted so many words for headline purposes. It’s ‘cheapest tickets have gone up to £115 from X this year’ which would be ambiguous even if the detail were in the main body – which it isn’t.
It’s not you I’m railing at, KC. You simply grabbed the words and numbers that were served to you.
I am railing against the carefully selected, misleading words and numbers emanating from the test match grounds, implying that the Ashes tickets are not as expensive as they actually are. They are all doing it.
I suspect this is the way of the world now and I could observe similar dissembling marketing messages for other sports and entertainment events.
I should go and lie down now, before stealing myself to the task of writing up the Daisy and Ged experience at The Metro Bank One Day Final. Ticket prices – £28 to £38.
It was only the absence of an amuse bouche on Day One, and short supply of petit fours for the late tea (post interval) that led to the rating remaining at last year’s ****. (Determined by a renowned food critic. Possibly).
Still feels harsh, given Ged’s capacity for providing delicious personalised fare, individually wrapped with cricket-themed serviettes. Ah well, his capacity for overcoming adversity, and yet still pulling a mighty feast from the depths of an Airbandb disaster, must earn him a deserved break from such future responsibilities?
Yup, I’m on picnic making sabbatical for the Ashes next year. The Michelin Star will have to wait,
Mitchellin Starc
Top punning, Mike. I really did laugh out loud.
Marvelous report.
A battery of Flintstones is a splendid collective noun for that family, I had thought myself it might be something like a rockery or a quarry.