A RETURN VISIT...
I took this photo a week or so ago on a rare outing to the St. Lawrence Ground at Canterbury, where Kent were playing against Northants. It was all of eleven years ago that I paid my last visit to Canterbury, on that occasion to see Shane Warne captaining Hampshire for the last time, so a return visit was long overdue.
My eldest son drove us there and acted as my carer for the day and we settled down in the Frank Wolley Stand and watched as the Northants bowlers dismissed Kent for not much over 100. When it was their turn to bat, however, the Kent bowlers took centre stage and had the visitors in some trouble before bad light ended play just before 5.00pm. I found that a curious decision, since it had been pretty gloomy all day but the floodlights had come on to illuminate the scene, so I can only imagine it was yet another obscure cricketing law that applied to red ball cricket. No matter, we had enjoyed a good, entertaining day.
One thing that occurred to me was that, despite the terrific improvements to the ground and the facilities since I was last there, the sense of being `somewhere else` came back to me again. Once you are in the ground and concentrating on the cricket, it is as if the only thing that really matters is what is going on inside the ground; and that anything beyond the boundary - the noise, the mayhem, the anger of the world - means absolutely nothing, at least for those precious hours when one feels immune to anything other than the one truly beautiful game and the protected species that the cricket ground has become.
Anyway, we enjoyed it so much that we are hoping to go back next week to see Kent`s last home game of the season against Glamorgan and once more to be immersed in that rarefied atmosphere before the madness of winter, football and the rest of the world takes over. Some people would call that the real world - they clearly cannot be cricket buffs.
My eldest son drove us there and acted as my carer for the day and we settled down in the Frank Wolley Stand and watched as the Northants bowlers dismissed Kent for not much over 100. When it was their turn to bat, however, the Kent bowlers took centre stage and had the visitors in some trouble before bad light ended play just before 5.00pm. I found that a curious decision, since it had been pretty gloomy all day but the floodlights had come on to illuminate the scene, so I can only imagine it was yet another obscure cricketing law that applied to red ball cricket. No matter, we had enjoyed a good, entertaining day.
One thing that occurred to me was that, despite the terrific improvements to the ground and the facilities since I was last there, the sense of being `somewhere else` came back to me again. Once you are in the ground and concentrating on the cricket, it is as if the only thing that really matters is what is going on inside the ground; and that anything beyond the boundary - the noise, the mayhem, the anger of the world - means absolutely nothing, at least for those precious hours when one feels immune to anything other than the one truly beautiful game and the protected species that the cricket ground has become.
Anyway, we enjoyed it so much that we are hoping to go back next week to see Kent`s last home game of the season against Glamorgan and once more to be immersed in that rarefied atmosphere before the madness of winter, football and the rest of the world takes over. Some people would call that the real world - they clearly cannot be cricket buffs.
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