Cognoscenti

Approximately twenty-five miles separate Wentworth Golf Club and Walton Heath Golf Club but the distance between the former in late May and the latter in mid October requires greater measurement than that of a chronological or linear nature. Gauging such a difference depends on one’s personal judgement but regular attendees at the PGA Championship and...

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Another Elegy for the Season

Does the conclusion of a season in any other sport provoke the same sense of mourning as that of the cricket season? Undoubtedly all sports fans experience a sense of melancholy at the end of a particular season but the end of the cricket season seems to incite a greater depth of disappointment and regret...

Denouement

So this is it. Nearly five months of charging around, changing plans, checking weather forecasts and match situations and attempting to squeeze in as much frantic spectating as possible whilst simultaneously trying to hold down a secular job and maintain a balanced home life arrive via a rather circuitous, yet enjoyable, route to the final...

Home Birds Reprised

I love Arundel. Unashamedly so. I appreciate that such a view is probably something of a hackneyed cricketing cliché and that gushing words aplenty have been written about the West Sussex venue but I cannot help but concur with all those gushing words. Too often in this modern world, and ever more in cricket itself,...

The Forgotten Counties: Six and Out?

Reality can be a cruel business. One can often drift along in a particular bubble, expecting everything to remain the same until the simple realities of life burst said bubble and highlight the brutal truth. As the latest Minor Counties season slowly unfolded across the summer months one was lulled into thinking how the structure...

Pied-de-Terre

Middlesex County Cricket Club’s occasional enforced sojourn away from their official residence at Lord’s has witnessed a handful of venues utilised by the former county over the decades; the hinterlands of north-west London and neighbouring Hertfordshire playing host to first-class and List A matches on an annual basis. Thus, venues such as the John Walker...

The Forgotten Counties: the Forgotten Ground

One cannot help feel rather sad and melancholy about Wormsley Cricket Ground. Such a vision of beauty amongst a fold in the Chiltern Hills, offering the most bucolic of settings and the most perfect cricket ground at which to both play and spectate. Cocooned in the eponymous estate and surrounded by bounteous trees and sweeping...

The Forgotten Counties: Cricket by the Sea

The smell of a cricket match: the fresh air of late spring or the sultry air of a hot summer’s day, fresh cut grass, a whiff of the countryside if one is in rural climes, the pleasant scent of trees and surrounding flora. Could the nasal and ocular experience be improved? How about the aroma...

In the Shadows Part Two

Mention the name Stansted and almost every person that one is conversing with will assume that said mention is referring to the airport situated near the eponymous village some forty odd miles northeast of central London. For a few the name conjures much different connotations though. Add the word ‘Park’ onto Stansted and the reference...