Make your way to Lord’s from the Edgware Road, a quarter of a mile perhaps, and you might cut along Aberdeen Place, a neat street with the ornate Grade 2-listed Crocker’s Folly pub on a corner. There are some striking mid-Victorian terraces too, and on the wall of number 32 is a blue plaque. It was here, it says, that lived Guy Gibson VC, the leader of the Dambusters raid on the dams of the Ruhr valley in May 1943.
So there was something apposite at lunchtime when the massed band of Christ’s Hospital school – the Blue Coats – dressed in their frock coats and yellow stockings (happily not cross-gartered Malvolio-like) marched in a formation that evoked a silhouetted image of a Lancaster perhaps, and played Eric Coates’s stirring theme music to the 1955 film The Dam Busters.
Apposite, too, as a metaphor for England’s bowling fortunes over the second afternoon and the third morning. On Friday, under an azure sky, Alastair Cook’s bowlers flogged away for the single success, having conceded a century opening partnership. There was nothing in the pitch, no movement in the air for the seamers, and nothing for Moeen Ali’s spin. Field placings had regressed from the ring of slip-fielding vultures of the first two Tests to men placed in front of the bat. Kaushal Silva was on course for a hundred to join eight compatriots on the honours board. He had played beautifully, with panache.
The morning brought better bowling conditions, though. The flags on the pavilion and round the ground hung limp on their masts. But there is an old trick that is to be learned playing at Lord’s when it comes to judging the weather. Look south, over the clock tower and the Father Time weathervane, just creaking idly, to the sky over central London. On the first two days, with the wind from the east, there were no planes on the flight path into Heathrow. Now, though, here they were lining up; the wind had changed to the prevailing west, better conditions for bowling. Cloud hung over the ground, the sort of thing to bring a spring to the step of the England bowlers.
And suddenly, from hammering away at the Sri Lankan batting, a breach was made first of all, and then the dam burst. It began with Chris Woakes, the pick of the England seamers on the second day, who, rather than Jimmy Anderson, the senior bowler, was given the Pavilion End to open proceedings with Stuart Broad. Woakes clearly has a knack for making an impact from the off. Jonny Bairstow had dropped that clanger off his first ball of the match, and now, with his opening delivery of the day, he had Kusal Mendis bang to rights lbw (Woakes was to finish the innings with the first ball of another spell too; it is a considerable ability to possess).
For an hour, Sri Lanka scarcely made progress as Woakes and Broad tightened the screw. In five overs, Silva had not been able to add to his overnight 79 and finally edged Broad to Bairstow. Three overs later, Woakes squared up Angelo Mathews, with Joe Root taking the catch at second slip. Suddenly bowling looked a breeze and batting a challenge. Now Steven Finn replaced Woakes, which was perhaps pandering to the Middlesex man, while at the same time giving a slap in the face to Anderson, who for some reason dislikes a Nursery End that should suit him down to the ground. Finn is still out of sorts, his pace down, but he nonetheless collected a couple of heartening wickets. Anderson, meanwhile, clearly disgruntled, had been frustratingly wicketless. It was more than a year since he took the wicket of the New Zealander Martin Guptill, and from then on he was to send down more than 68 fruitless overs at Lord’s before Kusal Perera swung lustily from down the pitch and edged to Bairstow. Anderson chuntered on; he always was a Möhne.
Meanwhile, at lunchtime, with the Sri Lanka innings in tatters now, the band had played on in front of the pavilion, spread out in a line. It is 44 years since the school’s most famous sportsman bowled Australia out here, with 5 for 57. But then John Snow is one of our greatest fast bowlers. Three years later at Lord’s, for Sussex against Middlesex, he took his career-best figures of 8 for 87, largely bowling slow lobs from over the Nursery sightscreen (another story).
Had the band got him in mind when they played the theme music to Game of Thrones? And how many MCC members, even had they been familiar with the fantasy tale of intrigue, mutilation, death, rape and incest, would have understood the subtle play on words even if they had? It was nicely done. Is Jon Snow really dead, though? Don’t spoil it, please, I haven’t got that far.
