A day at Lord's

Mon July 27

Next stop on the London stadium tour is the home of cricket – the hallowed Lord’s cricket ground and the Marylebone Cricket Club.

Of all the venues on my tour, this is the only one I have been to on a previous visit, having watched the first day of the 2005 Lord’s Test and also played in the MCC v MCC match that followed it (not very well, mind you!)

So, given that Marylebone CC is also one of our reciprocal clubs, I was more aware of what was to come.

What I was interested in, though, was the makeup and structure of the ground/museum tour, the intricacies of the media facilities and some in-depth discussion with their communications people. I had already met with the Lord’s website manager last week.

Unfortunately, one or two of the key people withdrew on the day due to personal matters, so the bulk of my visit was the tour and then lunch and meeting with Clare Skinner, MCC media manager. It was a very productive session and another important contact created for later benefit.

The Lord’s tour

Our tour guide Joslyn was certainly very English, with that deep, slow, distinguished and proper manner about him. We had nearly 35 people on the tour and almost all of them were Aussies.

The tour starts in the MCC Museum, which is not too dissimilar in feel to our own MCC Museum, although with items of far greater vintage and an obvious sole focus on cricket.

Being a cricket nerd, I didn’t gain a lot of new information from the guide as we stopped to admire the real Ashes Urn (thanks to David Studham, any other versions of the Ashes origins I hear now are simply myth!), nor the Sheffield Shield, which I thought was supposed to be in our National Sports Museum, so must check that when I get home…

There wasn’t a lot of time allocated to browsing around the museum, which is a shame because there is so much great material. However, we were told we could come back at the end of the tour and stay as long as we like.

It was then into the pavilion, where we were told in no uncertain terms that, like in the museum, photography was not permitted. Interesting to compare it to the MCG Tour on that point.

We ventured into the famous Long Room (love the portraits of Bradman, Miller, Grace, Warner, Lord Harris, Thomas Lord and so on), then the Committee Room (not a patch on ours in terms of the view and size) where a portrait of the great John Wisden adorns the walls, then the President Honourboard and across to the Long Room Bar, where there are three great portraits of England teams painted by renowned artist Andrew Festing.

We then entered the player changerooms (both teams), allowing a view from the players’ balcony out to the ground that you see so often on television. We then watched a Real Tennis match in progress – the first time I’d actually seen it, after two or three years of writing about it back home.

(Did you know…that archery will be held on the Lord’s arena at the 2012 Olympics?)

We then went around the stadium and eventually to the infamous media centre “spaceship” which, while it might look a bit radical and “un-Lord’s”, is actually a wonderful facility for the media that puts the MCG in the shade.

I bumped into our turf tradesman Adam Thorne while on the tour, which was a nice bonus. He’s over here on a six-month exchange and working pretty hard by the sounds of it.

Facts:

1. The ground slopes 6ft 6in (8ft according to Adam…)
2. There are 18,000 MCC members
3. You can’t be nominated for membership until you’re 18 and then it’s about a 15-20 year wait, before you do an interview and get ratified by a committee member. Much harsher than at home!

The tour then took us out to the Nursery and then finished in the merchandise shop. I went back to the museum to catch up on what I had missed earlier!

They had a very interesting interactive guide to the museum collection, which I wonder whether we could do at home…