Eight ideas for President Brearley
Some suggestions for the keepers of Lord's
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MCC's biggest weakness is its exclusivity. Clubs are entitled to be exclusive, but major sporting institutions are not. And MCC's exclusivity is written all over the face it turns to the outside world. Its walls are drab, lifeless, and have nothing to say about cricket. There is a captive audience trundling past, on the bus to school or in the 4x4s taking kids to the (equally exclusive) private schools of NW3. They should be able to see the score, and pictures of the players, and posters advertising upcoming matches. At the moment all they get is the odd poster, apparently designed and written in 1957, listing all the things they can't do in the unlikely event that they set foot in the grounds. Apologies if you've heard me say this before; I first made the point in 2003, and may have to make it a few more times before something gets done.
This year I took my nine-year-old daughter to a Test match. I wanted to give her a taste of it and see it through her eyes, as I was writing a guide to cricket for children. It was teatime, and her ticket cost £20. A full day would have been too much for her, yet the pricing blithely asumed that kids would put in a full day. MCC should be making it easier to take kids in for a short time for less money: £10 a session, say. They could call the scheme Test Match Taster, and market it.
The museum has some great things in it, from the sparrow killed by a ball to the copy of Wisden that survived the Japanese Prisoner of War camps, but it's cramped, fusty and confusing. It needs to be re-housed in three times as much space, with clear, sparky, engaging signposting. This isn't asking very much: certain temporary exhibitions in the museum, like the one last year of Patrick Eagar's photos, were very well presented.
Players talk about the Lord's honours board - which they can reach with a hundred or five-for - more and more. But it's in the dressing room. There is a copy in the tiny cinema at the back of the museum, but there needs to be one in full public view, and the public need to be able to see the engraver at work as soon as these great feats are achieved.
The can't-do attitude that glares out of the outside walls of Lord's also flourishes in the breasts of some of the stewards, who treat paying customers with something between suspicion and contempt | |||
The can't-do attitude that glares out of the outside walls of Lord's also flourishes in the breasts of some of the stewards, who treat paying customers with something between suspicion and contempt. MCC's energetic new chief executive, Keith Bradshaw, should be giving them a pep talk on major match days and stressing the need to be helpful, to apply common sense, and to be flexible. It's not a crime if a punter from one stand wants to go and sit in another to chat to a mate for half an hour. Let him. It's a long day: it needs to be organised with humanity.
Because people are living longer, and MCC has a daunting waiting list, the 18,000-strong membership has grown old. The last time we heard about their average age, it was 57. Sometimes as you walk past the pavilion, it seems even higher. In an ageist world it's good to see older people getting a warm welcome, but the balance has tipped too far in that direction. And quite a few of the members are old gents who make it to the ground once a year, if that. One way of refreshing the membership would be to encourage them to make a sort of living bequest, handing on their membership to the person of their choice who is already on the waiting list - son, nephew, even daughter or niece. As a thank-you, they could retain a sort of emeritus-member status, with the right to drop by for one match day a year.
There's a lot of space at the Nursery End, and a lot of time before, during and after a day's play; plus, at any time, several of the players are twiddling their thumbs (literally, if they have their PlayStations with them) in the dressing room. Let's make use of these assets. If England are batting and Alastair Cook has been out, he should do a lunchtime autograph session. And not just when he puts his name to the inevitable ghosted autobiography.
For such an elegant ground, Lord's has a clunky logo, in which the downstroke of the L turns into a set of stumps. If the place is going to have a logo, it should be a stylish one.
Tim de Lisle is the author of Young Wisden (reviewed here) and a former editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly. His website is here