By 
Lord’s cricket ground is a special place. Unironic striped blazers abound. Grown men walk around holding satsumas between thumb and forefingers as if ready to bowl, their citrus fruit presented with its imagined seam bolt upright.
Everywhere you look, there’s a sense of deep time: portraits of stern types in stiff collars, white wrought ironwork, a list of names on the changing room honours board spanning from JE Root (115 not out vs New Zealand, 2022) to AG Steel (148 vs Australia, 1884).
Time is the most precious and terrifying variable in cricket, and it makes sense that Oris, makers of extremely handsome Swiss watches since 1904, are the new sponsors of the timekeeping at Lord’s.
It makes less sense that I’m now at Lord’s to play cricket with them. It’s a perfect day in St John’s Wood. Everything feels oversaturated: neon green grass; electric blue sky; white painted wrought iron against the pavilion’s pink terracotta.
To be clear: being invited to play on the Lord’s pitch is like being invited to add your tag to the Sistine Chapel. I am going to use the home changing rooms, walk down the pavilion steps, run in to bowl in front of the grandstand. This is fully mad.
A dozen teams play three six-a-side group games of six overs for each side, the vast pitch of Lord’s split into two and a third pitch on the practice ground. Oris’ team includes two big cricketers, one four-games-a-summer guy (me), two guys who know many of the elements of cricket but last played at school 15 years ago, and two very nice men who’ve literally never seen a stump before. We feel quietly confident.
Everyone gets a retired professional to add a little stardust. At breakfast in the Long Room – the holy of holies in English cricket – Ian Bell chats to Devon Malcolm. Mal Loye and Ali Brown, England’s white ball revolutionaries of the Noughties, pass the marmalade to Owais Shah. Mark Ramprakash looks for the brown sauce.
After a net session, we walk out from the pavilion onto the pitch closest to the grandstand. It’s a deeply mad experience. Of the world’s most famous cricket grounds, Lord’s 31,000 seat capacity makes it one of the more boutique. But – not to put too fine a point on it – it is absolutely huge. Even silent and empty apart from the few in the pavilion, it’s terrifying and surreal, like walking into a high Victorian goldfish bowl.
We try to strategise. Two enthusiasts open the batting, then a guy who I’m not sure has ever played before but is quite tall is at three. Our pro, Charlotte Edwards – that’s Charlotte Edwards CBE, 220 games as England captain, 10,273 international career runs, current holder of a T20 competition trophy which is named after her – bats at four. It’s possible we’ve overstrategised.
We cobble together 60-odd – Charlotte, obviously, gets 24 of them – before the opposition biff, thwack and clonk their way toward it with a confidence and technical skill which feels quite unsporting. My 50mph full-tosses do not unsettle Mal Loye. It’s fine. Thank you Mal Loye, I think, as a third four in a row skips toward the boundary rope. This has been an absolute honour.
The next game, on the Nursery Ground practice pitches, is a must-win. We keep the opposition to 60-something and I take a wicket. (I don’t think she’d ever played before, but you don’t get extra points for skittling someone decent.)
We have come to our senses: Charlotte opens. I’m sent out with her. She gives me quite a lot of instructions, but they basically come down to her hitting lots of boundaries and me running twos to keep her on strike. It goes well until she chips one back to the bowler on 21 with a soft “Oh no!”
Batting partners come and go. Eventually it’s just me and the lovely guy who’s never played before and has done everything in his power to avoid anything that looks even vaguely like a game of cricket. He arrives and takes his guard, before the umpire gently tells him he’s at the wrong end.
Simon Jones, one of the most ludicrously talented fast bowlers of the last 20 years, is wicket-keeping. A very tall bowler is windmilling through his warm-up at the other end. “This guy nearly knocked Ali Brown’s head off first ball,” Jones chirps. Gulp.
I scrap to 15 not out and nobody is concussed, but we fall short. We’re out. It is, at least, time for gin and tonics and cakes. (Even in the shortest possible version of cricket, there is a lot of time for sitting down and eating.) Up on the roof of the pavilion later, the shadows grow longer across the manicured grass. Lord’s waits, counting down the hours until it’s back at the centre of the universe again.
