Lancashire v Middlesex in the County Championship – match report

3 minute read

Ged writes:

It was the last day of the cricket season and I was working that day – mostly from home. I got urgent stuff out of the way first thing, with a view to going to the gym mid to late morning, ahead of my one meeting of the day. I was hoping to catch some of the match at the gym while I toiled.

My plans to follow the match at the gym were confounded two-fold. Firstly, the seemingly endless gym refurbishment had moved on to the corner where the Sky equipment is kept, so there was no Sky Sports on the screens.

“No matter,” I thought. “I can still hear the game on the Freeview radio channel.”

I switched to channel 706. The screen said, “Cricket – Lancashire v Middlesex,” but the sound was golf commentary. I tried some channel hopping and stuff but to no avail – golf on two BBC bloke channels and cricket on none – what was going on? It took about 10 minutes for someone to announce that they were broadcasting the golf in the cricket slot because there was rain and early lunch at Old Trafford.

My exercise completed, I went on to my one meeting of the day, which was lunch with Jessica – a journalist friend and neighbour of mine. We met through comedy writing “back in the day”. She wanted to pick my brains about economics and finance, as she has been commissioned to give a talk to a bunch of German bankers, in German, on “whither finance?” or some such topic.

Jessica had offered to cook me lunch for this small slice of my brain, which seemed like a decent deal given the lack of inconvenience involved – I walk past her place on the way to and from the gym.

I informed her that nobody has any idea where the world of economics and finance is going, but some people are deluded enough to think that they do know what is going on. I also suggested that she relentlessly bash French bankers when talking to German bankers in London, much as I would advise her to bash German bankers if she were giving the talk to French bankers in London. This limited but sage advice was apparently plenty to justify a rather splendid home cooked lunch, centred around a very tasty chicken pie.

Rather than venture straight home, I checked the score and thought I had better get some grub in for after-theatre supper this evening, so I looped around via Big Al DeLarge’s place to get some posh nosh – Daisy should expect nothing less. I tried to banter with Big Al about the cricket match, but he was unaware of it. Once I explained the context and current match position, he said that he would follow the match on the radio for the rest of the day. Still, he seemed more pre-occupied with the impending fate of his beloved Burnley FC and suggested, surprisingly cheerily, that relegation battles had become the story of his sporting life.

Home via the dry cleaners to collect my clean clobber from Irma la Douce. I don’t think Irma is into cricket and today didn’t seem the right day to broach the subject for the first time. Through my front door and on with the TV, but with so much to do and so little time left in the afternoon in which to do it, I thought I had better go straight up to the office and get work stuff done now, before the denouement of the match possibly became unavoidably thrilling.

It was hard to concentrate on work during this part of the day but I did my best, keeping half an eye on the Cricinfo score ticker. By the time I was ready for another break and went down for a cuppa, Charles Colvile was waffling on about some minor details of match post mortem, as the game had ended.

Daisy and I had been very much looking forward to theatre and after-theatre supper all week – indeed both proved to be excellent. But, as I said to Daisy when she arrived at the flat before the play, I’d probably had enough drama for one day already.

Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. If it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. If it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.