I’m a bit of a sports tragic.  I love to watch and talk about football, golf, rugby, cricket and hockey.  Obviously I play golf but I still turn out regularly to play both cricket and hockey.  My first sporting love (no matter how much I love golf) is cricket.  As a young boy I would get the bus to meet up with mates to play a make-up game in the park.  As a teenager I would walk a couple of hours to get the tube to St John’s Wood to watch Middlesex play at Lords.  I would stay awake in the small hours to listen to England play cricket abroad in the winter.

There’s nothing in cricket as meaningful as the Ashes.  The oldest and still most meaningful rivalry in the game. There are moments in Ashes history that are etched in my mind.  In all sports there are iconic grounds.  Australian cricket has several.  As I write, the (soon to be replaced) WACA is seeing South Africa gain the upperhand in the first test of a series.  The Melbourne Cricket Ground and its Boxing Day Test is another, and the Sydney Cricket Ground, or SCG is yet another.

At the end of this trip I will spend a day or two watching Australia play South Africa in a day/night test at the Adelaide Oval, another iconic ground.  Yesterday, however, I took the opportunity to spend a couple of hours watching New South Wales play Western Australia in the Sheffield Shield at the SCG.  The SCG is a big ground.  It has a capacity of 48,000, provided mostly in huge, modern stands.  In one corner, however, there remains the old pavillion:

A wonderful old building, dwarfed but not dominated by the surrounding stands.  It was in that corner that I spent watching NSW gain a first innings lead over Western Australia.  Test hopeful Nic Maddinson made a very accomplished hundred on a turning wicket, with Western Australian Ashton Agar, who famously made 98 against England on his test debut, the most threatening bowler (he ended the innings with 6 wickets).

Whatever the stae of the game, however, this was about the experience of watching first class but not test cricket.  If there were 100 people in the ground I’d be surprised, Maddinson’s hundred was celebrated wildly by his team mates and mildly applauded by the “crowd” and most attendees drifted between watching the game and talking to mates.  Which is not to say that this was not a great way to spend a couple of hours.  The cricket was on, I read the Sydney Morning Herald, reminding me of happy days spent reading The Guardian at Lord’s, and was entertained when I did focus on the cricket. A soothing and wonderful way to pass the afternoon.

Maddinson, by the way, looks a talent.  A far better prospect than Moises Henriques, who I also saw bat and who is regularly suggested as a potential Australian test cricketer and ikt’s difficult to see how he couldn’t be a step up from Mitch Marsh, the current Aussie No 6.

 

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