"Brett Lee's a hermaphrodite" ... and other traditonal English welcomes for our Australian cousins
Ah, cricket. The satisfying clack of leather on willow; the ripple of applause in appreciation of an exquisite cover drive and, of course, the structural splendour of a swaying tower of plastic pint pots.
It had been some time since I'd attended a big cricket match and it is clear the sedate image of the game continues to sink faster than a four pack in the hooves of a pantomime horse (I spotted one in the ground, there may have been more).
For about two hours of the England versus Australia one-day international at The Riverside we harked back to a golden era of cricket. Glorious sunshine baking a pristine wicket and a full house of agreeable souls set for an intriguing clash between England and its greatest cricket rival.
As the day progressed and the beer flowed, the veneer of respectability began to collapse in the best tradition of an England middle order.
I thought there may have been a hard-line on fancy dress by security when I was stopped at the gates and searched. When one guard spotted I was wearing a mask on the back of my head he asked me to remove it. The mask in question was a plain white expressionless face mask dished out to me by my brother.
"We're all wearing them," Our Kid told me. "No one wanted to go in fancy dress."
The "we" were a bunch of 10 lads travelling from Carlisle who would be meeting us in the ground.
The security man barring my way shouted to a colleague: "Are we allowing these masks?"
Another security officer arrived and, after looking at both sides of the blank mask, said she would check with her boss.
All this was taking place while my brother who had been allowed in the ground wearing an identical mask on his head looked on.
After much deliberation I was eventually waved through.
The first person I saw through the gates was a man wearing a horse's head. He was talking to Fred Flintstone.
So why all the fuss about my white mask?
Maybe they have me on their files.
In the early nineties I attended a Headingley test match dressed as Postman Pat, complete with giant foam Postman Pat head.
It's one of my cricketing claims to fame that I was brought to the attention of the test match commentary team.
As I conducted a section of the crowd in a chorus of Postman Pat and his Black and White Cat, the cameras beamed the sight to the TV viewing public while commentator Tony Lewis uttered the line: "… and here's the first delivery of the day."
When the Aussies came out to field at Durham on Sunday, the game had reached the half-way point, but the majority around me were well past the half-cut stage.
Australian Brett Lee was given a warm reception when he took his position on the boundary rope – a rousing chorus of "Brett Lee's a hermaphrodite." Welcome to England.
He took it all in good spirit.
After that a new game took over. Snakes and Daggers.
Discarded plastic pint pots were piled on top of each other and passed round from supporter to supporter, who in turn added another pint pot.
This stack of pint pots, reaching into the sky became the snake. The daggers were the looks from the security guards.
A chase ensued. The snake was growing higher and higher and more precarious with each added pot while security pursued it through the crowd.
The chant erupted: "Feed the snake. Feed the snake" and a man dressed as a sheep was ejected by security for refusing to hand over his tower of pint pots.
Things were getting surreal. No sooner had one snake collapsed in a shower of beer, than another would spring up with a security guard in hot pursuit. Soon there were snakes springing up all around us.
The chant had changed to "Free the sheep" by the time the Mexican wave started and those Aussies in the crowd who dared to put their heads up were greeted with a chant of "Where's your Ashes gone?" sung to the tune of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.
I understand in the background a cricket match had taken place.
When bowled early on in an innings, the legendary cricketer WG Grace famously replaced the bails on the stumps and handed the ball back to the bowler with the words "they've come to watch me bat, not you bowl."
These days you get more value watching the crowd.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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