HITCHHiker’s Guide to the Cricket

Peter Lalor live in New York

Artwork by Fisher Classics

Dana and her friend can’t quite believe they’ve picked up a hitchhiker, I laugh and say “but I have a friendly face”. Just quietly, I can’t believe I’m hitching to the cricket _ or that they’ve picked me up.

What’s not to say that Dana and her mate aren’t some sort of serial killers?

The New York cops, who stop us at a security checkpoint and start unpacking the boxes of scotch in the rear of the van, laugh pretty hard when they explain how I ended up in the back seat.

“I’ve seen that movie,” one of them says.

Dana and co are setting up a hospitality site near the Nassau Cricket Stadium. Me? I am just riding the chaos. The cops are part of the tightest security I’ve ever encountered at the cricket and part of the reason we’re all out of our comfort zone.

It was going to cost USD$164.95 (plus tip) to get out there (I’m staying in Manhattan) in an Uber and the media were instructed to get there by car or pay the price. I ain’t got a job no more. That’s a lot of money.

There had to be a more difficult way and if there’s a more difficult way I’m always up for it.

You’re not having fun until you’re lost.

India was playing Ireland on Wednesday at 10.30am and I was keen to get out there. Pretty cool to have the two great immigrant communities playing it out in a pop up stadium. The Irish made Manhattan and surrounds what it is after coming here in the 1850s. There was at least a million of them escaping the famine. The Indians have arrived in mass of late, an army of engineers, IT works and the like come to help the new world keep up with the changing times. There were around 800,000 people of Indian decent in New York in 2020.

So, I’d set out from West 29^th and Broadway about 9am.

Grabbed coffee and roll at Daily Provisions and made the long walk up town to Grand Central station, wandered miles and miles in its belly before boarding the Long Island rail to Westbury around 10am.

It’s 40 minutes on a good day with a stop at Jamaica, but the guard tells me we’ve had a “passenger strike”, which is not, as I first think, some form of people’s uprising. We stop. We stop again. And again and again and again, before the Indian fans and I have enough and jump off at Garden City. Ireland are already six for fuck all.

A struck passenger is some serious shit.

If things are working, punters can get a shuttle bus to the pop up stadium from Westbury (which we didn’t get to today). I’d made the mistake of doing that for the Sri Lankan South African game a few days earlier only to discover that it ruled me out of accessing the accreditation booth (you needed accreditation to get to the accreditation booth) or the press box.

To be fair, the system works beaut if you are not media and there hasn’t been a passenger strike (most had made it there on earlier trains).

It is good to see the public getting looked after like this.

Hearing that Ben Horne and I were melting down in the stands at the first game, Mark Jones, America’s Mr Cricket on secondment to the ICC, finds us and sorts us out. Mark pretends to be appalled that I haven’t read emails, downloaded the app, scanned the bar code, had the injections, said the secret code and sworn allegiance to Narendra Modi as instructed, but I think he gets it.

Today, I’d read the instructions, downloaded the app and bowed before all the gods.

I got an Uber from Garden City where I’d abandoned the train and the driver dropped me off at the entrance of the car park _ which was a whole new mistake. Eisenhower Park, where the cricket is, is a bloody enormous place and the entrance is a long, long hike from the media entry.

So I hitched and those nice American girls stopped for me.

The security here is unbelievable. A helicopter sweeps the sky the whole game. NYPD and a dozen other branches of American law enforcement have thrown additional rings of security around the ICC’s usual high fence.There’s fuckers with machine guns, helmets and bullet proof vests.

Before I get into the stadium a police dog has to be summoned from the back of a car and encouraged to sniff my bag which is laid down on the grass like it may be a bomb.

The dog is hopeless. It wants to run away but eventually sniffs my bag, gags, and moves on. I must get some laundry done.

Ireland were nine wickets down by the time I climbed the temporary steps to the temporary press box at the temporary, but very impressive, ground.

Two things to be noted about cricket in New York.

One, it is not in New York City. It is an hours drive from Manhattan out on to Long Island. One hour and 40 minutes by train and shuttle bus.

Two, the pitch Damien Hough prepared in Miami under very difficult circumstance (no experience with climate, grass or soils) is perfect.

Perfectly New York that is. It’s chaos. It goes a million miles an hour. Ordinary Joe’s are left flat-footed and frightened. No place for hicks from the sticks (the next suburb is actually Hicksville).

It’s not making for the best cricket, but as you can tell from all the afore, the cricket’s almost an afterthought. The game has been swallowed by the inhuman scale of this very human place, and the pitch mirrors Manhattan. It’s a risk-your-life dash across an avenue. You got to think fast, move fast, talk fast to keep up here. Life is lived between the cracks where the light gets in (apologies to Leonard Cohen).

If you can hit a six here at Nassau you can hit one anywhere (fuck you Frank). Only a few are hit in the first two games and even fewer are not from top edges.

This prompts one of my favourite bits from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Things are slower over at the Grand Prairie Stadium in Dallas _ and more cricketerly. Over there they are posting decent scores.

Down in the Caribbean it is positively sleepy, man.

Here, the poor old Sri Lankans were subject to an awful examination by the South African quicks in the first game. Their tail-enders (one in particular) looked like a man cowering from baton blows.They posted 77 before being bowled out in the 20^th over.

The Irish have faced similar from Margaret Thatcher and her forbears over the years, but were decidedly uncomfortable on their way to an unimpressive 96 after being sent in by India today.

India’s openers, to be fair, looked equally unsettled by the bounce, but Rohit wobbled and wordled his way to a nice half century before being struck and retiring hurt.

Virat, alas, lasted five balls only.

There was something like 31,000 at the game and nobody cared too much that it wasn’t a great contest. It’s not about the cricket, it’s about the situation. The context. The vibe of it.

It was buzzing. My new best mate Mark Jones announced, humorously, it was a record for international cricket in New York.

Beat the 17.000 at the Sri Lanka South Africa game.

I reckon it took two hours to get there and an hour to get home. I got maybe an hour of cricket in before the winning runs were hit, but half the fun had been getting there and at least I’d got to see some more cricket in New York and catch up with the crew. Cricket is, after all, a social game.

Ponting was there. We chatted about the Swans, the IPL and his new limited edition Shinboner Shiraz (Ponting’s wines are better than you think, he doesn’t do things by half).

Long Island’s biggest cricket fan and AFL 360 fan, Michael Leboff, was there too, and there was something nice about catching up with all the Indian cricket journos so far from cricket’s rutted track. The Grade Cricketer boys are here and set to do a show on Broadway. Collo and Lemon are doing their bit too. Smudge is commentating and advising us all on the best bars and restaurants out the back of the box. Had lunch with Shastri a few days back at an Italian restaurant where the local mob were celebrating a christening. Ravi is a man whose presence is big enough for cricket in New York.

Sorry if you are expecting a match report: it’s T20, somebody hit the ball further and more often than somebody else and it was over.

I bore young journalists with the story of a train crash I covered one day for the Daily Telegraph back in the 1800s. It was better times and papers had money and we caught a helicopter to the scene of the tragedy in the Blue Mountains. When the work was done I was stuck. Trains cancelled and chopper gone.

So, I hitched into town with a nurse. That about summed up the chaos of life as a news reporter and why I liked it so much.

Today was the reverse.

The kindly Ms Neroli Meadows arranged for me to catch the commentators Suburban back into town and the best bit was Irish cricket legend Niall O’Brien and Ebony Rainford-Brent were in the car too.

I had to ask Niall if it was him or Kevin who’d done the infamous Australian radio interview after Ireland had beaten England thanks to his brother’s hundred in the 2011 World Cup.

It was him.

The radio stations (RSN) had caught the Irish boys at a party after the game and asked if he could get his brother on the phone. Niall had said it probably wasn’t a good time as he was upstairs giving his missus a seeing to, or words to that effect.

Sometimes it is about more than the cricket.

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