No Lord's Ashes tickets for me this summer. Nor for Tim (Dino team-mate, County cricket nut and gentleman) or Lee (ex-boss, uber cricket tourist and pessimist)
which is leaving options rather slim for your correspondent. This is ok -
I usually make it to the Lord's Test, but this year Lee and I have tickets for the
Riverside, Old Trafford and the Oval all ready, so can do without.
The Lord's ballot is a gently farcical process
which, bless them, they've tried to improve without much success.
A couple of years ago when you applied you would select
the day(s) you were interested in and the stand and give them your credit card
details. Then you would hear nothing for months and be none the wiser about the
success of your application until you failed to make rent one month and
realised they'd abused your bank account to the tune of several hundred quid.
Then, still having heard nothing, you would wait a
few more months for your tickets to arrive at which point you would note the
seat numbers. At your next attendance at the ground to watch Northants grinding
out a draw on a gloomy May afternoon, you could bring a sense of adventure and
excitement to the day by visiting your Test match seats and either grumble
about being too side on, or gleefully text your Test companions to say 'we're
right behind the bowler's arm!' This may sound a bit sad, but things can get
desperate when Andrew Hall has his determined face on.
The way the ballot operates seems fitting for a
rich, ancient and successful organisation that used to run the global cricket
operation. It reminds me of those stately homes you see on the telly, where the
ancestral family still lives in and has had to open to tourists to keep the
place afloat. Lord Skids charges around organising a ramshackle and
gleefully health-and-safety-less shoot, while his wife tries to work out how to
cook an egg and what on earth jam is made from. The children, who invited in the
cameras in a desperate attempt to cling onto their birthright, exude a Basil
Fawlty-like dual sense of fawning subservience and innate superiority as they
try to get to grips with customer service.
The MCC should have had time to come to terms with
the communication age by now, but it really hasn't. It's sort of charming. The
new, improved ballot process comes with, of all things, an email to let you
know if you've got tickets or not. Modern technology is a wonder.
But even this doesn't really work. My email was
quite clear. It said I wasn't welcome for the Ashes, but I did have the chance
to buy half price tickets to the CB40 final, which I think is a pretty decent
consolation prize.
For my friends however, who had applied for the New
Zealand Tests as well as the Ashes, they each got an email just saying they had
tickets for New Zealand (quelle surprise). Cue mild frenzy of correspondence
between us along the lines of:
Tim: 'Have you got Ashes tickets?'
Lee: 'i don't know. i got kiwi tickets. i don't
remember applying for them. anyone want one?'
Tim: 'So have I, what about the Ashes?'
James: 'I've not got Ashes tickets, but does anyone
want to do this half price Lord's final offer?'
Tim: 'What, they told you you don't have Ashes
tickets? They didn't tell me.'
Lee: 'paul is having the kiwi ticket. what half price offer'
etc
This is all a bit shambolic, but it actually serves
to make the process quite good fun. Lord's is a special ground and trades very
much on the sense of privilege spectators feel when they attend. To have a
ticketing system founded on mystery, confusion and rumour fits happily with
this tradition. I suspect that the year they finally get it right and everyone
knows exactly what they've bought, where they are sitting and how much they are
paying, there will be a sense of anticlimax and something lost.
Having said
that, cricket is nothing if not nostalgic and if it doesn’t have ‘something
lost’ to worry about at least every year it doesn’t know what to do with
itself. Let the digital pioneers at the MCC march on.
*Apologies to Samuel Beckett. As a cricket lover I hope he wouldn't mind.
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