The Summer Field

201 was in the country captaining MCC, nowhere near Chittagong; he was not to blame for once; the ‘terrorists’ wanted Indian independence. Despite one ‘outrage’ (to use the Duchess of Atholl’s word) after another against English Test grounds – the bomb hoax that stopped the Lord’s Test in 1973, the damage to the Headingley pitch that cut short a 1975 Test — the authorities persisted in their amateurism. They did not treat threats as seriously as they could have; and when they did do something, they tried to do it on the cheap. For instance, in August 1984, when Sri Lanka played their first Test in England, Lord’s recruited 226 stewards, in case of Tamil demonstrators. One of them, Tim Heritage, told his story in Wisden Cricket Monthly that November. As Tamils were fighting a civil war on the island, there was plainly a risk of trouble; yet if the stewards were at all trained or equipped, Heritage did not say so. He recalled he first had to get past ‘a sour-looking giant custodian at the gate, with an official letter from MCC inviting me to be a steward’. After five days, bored and with a sore rear from sitting on a wooden bench, at least he had been paid to watch a Test match. In 2001, when pitch invasions of one-day internationals forced players to flee the field early, and a beer can hit Michael Bevan in the face after Australia won the Lord’s final, the daft and dangerous official response was to give stewards flimsy fencing that they were supposed to raise around the boundary towards the end of the match. At least no-one was crushed or burned to death, as at English football grounds. Sports grounds generally became more professional in their safety and security. The 2005 Lord’s Test began on July 21, the day of failed terrorist bombs in London, two weeks after the 7-7 Tube and bus suicide-bombs. On the Saturday of the match, three telephone calls came saying there was a bomb in the ground. Instead of clearing the stands, as in 1973, and searching, police satisfied themselves that the call had to be a hoax, because the hired private security company had searched the ground beforehand with sniffer-dogs. Otherwise, police would have had to clear the ground. Given how nervous the country was – let alone the Australian visitors – it is doubtful if the match would have gone on. Who knows how different the 2005 series would have been? Nor were grounds any freer from crime than elsewhere, though again the game liked to think it was. In 1952 Somerset passed a bylaw, besides banning dogs from the Taunton ground, that ‘members may reserve a seat by placing an article on it as soon as admitted to the pavilion, but must be occupied by the first hour’. That assumed that no-one would pinch your jacket or bag. The same went for dressing rooms; I recall with horror that as a lad around 1980 I visited Repton School to watch a charity match, and out of curiosity, without permission, went into an empty changing room to try on the helmet worn by the local farmer and television personality Ted Moult. The trusting players could have had their wallets stolen as Reg Simpson of Nottinghamshire and others did in 1948, when playing for Old Nottinghamians against Nottingham High School one June Wednesday evening. Empty pavilions, too, have always had their windows broken, as Lichfield’s To The Present and Beyond