Back to the Future

GH at Lord's

It turns out that Wednesday, the first day of the World Test Championship Final, will be forty years to the day since I first watched a match at Lord’s. It was the last day of this. I had just returned to England for the first time since leaving it as an infant; cricket at the game’s most storied ground was the first thing I wanted to see. I sat in the Mound Stand and, accustomed to the dense population and comparative vastness of Australian grounds, was astonished by the sparseness of the crowd and my seeming proximity to the action. With the chocolate box perfection of the scene and pitch at the extreme of the square, it felt almost like Derbyshire were batting in the next net. My first Test followed - an Australian victory, in which the professorial Bob Holland achieved something the unscholastic Shane Warne never did, by getting his name stencilled on the away dressing room honour board with five for 68.