Lord's is a must-see, but just behave yourself
10-May-2013
In the New Zealand Herald, David Leggat writes about the Lord's experience, its slope and stuffiness, and its tradition and its rigidity.
The Middlesex county club are based at Lord's, home of the MCC. When the game's most famous club allowed Middlesex members - as distinct from their own, 18,000-strong body - to bring guests into its pavilion, which houses the holy of holies, the Long Room, for T20 games last year, it produced what might be termed an unsurprising reaction from the faithful.
To quote John "Fingers" Fingleton, an MCC stalwart: "I cannot ever recall experiencing the pavilion ... so crammed with such predominantly repulsive, ill-behaved, apologies-for-members-of-the-human-race, what I would regard as The Great Unwashed.
"I have never recognised so few of my fellow members in the pavilion at any previous match. The Long Bar was jammed to capacity with mobs of ill-dressed, screaming yobbos - and that was just the men."'