The first time I did it I felt like a hero: I picked my sons up from primary school and took them to Lord’s for the final afternoon of a test match. The sun was out, the tickets were, I think, a fiver, and England won.
It’s become a longstanding tradition, rarely observed. Too many factors have to be in alignment: there has to be some cricket left to play on the Monday; I have to be at a loose end; my children must be available; it has to not rain. Even then you risk the prospect of bad light stopping play, or a long afternoon of insult being heaped upon injury. Most of the time it’s something we talk about while watching TV on Saturday, but we’ve usually abandoned the idea by Sunday night.
But when my oldest son walked into the kitchen late on Monday morning and said, “Do you want to go to the Oval?” I made all the old calculations. Could I readily abandon an afternoon’s work? Yes. Was the sun shining? Yes. How many wickets were left? Four. “Let’s go,” I said.
A seventh wicket taken just as we were putting shoes on gave us pause, but we decide to press ahead. Our journey to the Oval, although complicated, was quick. By the time we took our seats in the sun we had high hopes of an afternoon’s cricket ending in and England victory. This might be the best Monday ever, I thought.
A cheer went up. You probably know what it was – Moeen Ali closing out the match with a historic hat-trick, the first ever in 100 Tests at the Oval. I looked at my watch, and realised that each of our 20 minutes of cricket had cost us a quid.
As an American, I’ve never felt that Norman Tebbit’s 1990 cricket test – wherein he notoriously aligned the patriotism of cricket-loving immigrants with their sporting loyalties – really applied to me. But by the end, I wasn’t sure who I was rooting for in this historic contest between England and my money’s worth.
Pumping irons
A new study from the University of Edinburgh suggests golf fans are among the healthiest of all sporting spectators. Apparently it is not uncommon for people watching a tournament to exceed 11,000 steps in a day, making golf perhaps the only sport whose spectators are in better shape than players. I’ll bet Donald Trump never breaks 500 steps over 18 holes.
But I don’t think golf fans can quite compete with the cricket spectator regime I’ve just devised: run to catch three trains, dash from tube station to ticket window, sit for 20 minutes, repeat in reverse. I’m not sure how the price compares with a ticket for the Ryder Cup, but it’s cheaper than a personal trainer.
Syntax fraud
From time to time I receive unsolicited text messages that might be filed under the heading “poor syntax leads to phishing scam failure”. Online scams may be proliferating, but there remains a marked gap between the average fraudster’s ability to mock-up a passable version of an online bank’s login page, and his understanding of how to use an apostrophe.
I’ve always thought there was an easy, profitable career for me in this sector. Scammers could send me their proposed phishing texts for a quick once over, and I would write back saying, “nice font, but never put a space before a comma” or “convincing logo, but stop capitalising random nouns.” Someone once told me that phishing emails are syntactically and graphically wayward on purpose, because the scammers are only interested in attracting cast-iron morons, but I still think they should try it my way.