Clark on the coffee run

Leeds is just as rainy as Birmingham and would feel exactly the same if I hadn’t used the city as a second home during three years in England. Arriving here is very calming because last night I was out for dinner and for half a minute actually didn’t know where I was. Before you start emailing WADA, it happens to me once every tour, it was early in the night and I was on my second drink. Still, as I looked at the restaurant wall I wasn’t sure whether I was in Brisbane, Barbados or Budapest.

Then someone started shouting “You all live in a convict colony” and I couldn’t be anywhere else but Birmingham. That song tops the West Midlands charts this week. It’s so hypnotic the city has been on theft watch every time someone in a yellow shirt goes near a loaf of bread. Anyway, my favourite lost moment occurred to a work mate who was so disoriented on a flight he had to ask the steward where the plane was going. So mine wasn’t bad at all.

Today our train went straight to Leeds, which is comfortable and familiar, grimier in some parts and unfamiliar in others. There’s Elland Road, which once staged Champions League matches, and over there is Majestyk nightclub, where the Leeds United players would sometimes find trouble.

Eight years ago I watched the hundreds of Ricky Ponting and Damien Martyn at Headingley before escaping back to London to work on the final day, which was made famous by Mark Butcher. In between those centuries I’d debuted for a small club in West Yorkshire, doing nothing on the field, but enough off it to be invited back three or four times a year for more afternoons of fielding on molehills.

Before leaving Birmingham I spotted poor Stuart Clark, who can’t escape carrying drinks on this tour. Just before the team bus left Edgbaston he was on a coffee run. The only difference this time was his partner wasn’t Andrew McDonald or Brett Lee or Phillip Hughes, but Ponting. Surely someone will be running Clark drinks when the third Test starts on Friday.