At 2pm the Harris Garden was empty, and the Nursery deserted. Apart from the idle bar and catering staff, the cleaners sweeping up the tumbling plastic cups, the outer grounds were uninhabited. Everyone was inside, in utter tumult. In the Edrich Stand they were chanting “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” and over in the Compton it was “Same old Aussies! Always cheating!”
They have been playing Test cricket here for 140 years, the atmosphere at the ground has been loud enough before now, excitable, tense, and on edge, too, but it’s never felt, or sounded, quite like it did this Sunday lunchtime.
In the back row of the Compton, there was a man with an empty bottle at one foot, and a full glass at the other, laying into Cameron Green, who was fielding just in front of him. “Wanker! Wanker! Wanker!” he cried, and “Aussie scum! Aussie scum!” No one complained, and no stewards came. The people around him either stared forward and ignored him, joined in, or fell about laughing.
It all started at the end of the 52nd over. England were 193 for six, Ben Stokes was at one end, Jonny Bairstow was batting at the other. The sixth ball of the over flew through to the wicketkeeper Alex Carey. Bairstow glanced down to check his feet were in his ground, and then set off walking towards the middle of the pitch ready for the change of ends. Before he had even taken a step forwards, Carey had launched an underarm throw towards the stumps. It hit them when Bairstow was a yard out of his crease. Australia appealed, and since the umpire hadn’t called the ball dead yet, he was out.
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It was a sharp bit of play, a sloppy mistake, and a sorry bit of cricket. Stokes came down the pitch to talk to the Australians, presumably to ask them if they really wanted to appeal for the dismissal, while Bairstow walked off, furious. Stuart Broad came in to replace him. And then all hell broke loose. Broad started remonstrating with the fielders, and repeatedly teased them by making an exaggerated display of grounding his bat and checking with the umpire whether or not the ball was dead yet before he left his ground. And Stokes, well, he just started to thrash the living daylights out of the bowling.
He battered 46 off his next 21 balls, 24 of them in one over off Green which included three consecutive sixes over mid-wicket, the last of which brought up his century. He was so lost in the moment he hardly even noticed he had reached it. It was utterly incandescent batting, all wrath and fury. At one point he threw a pull shot so hard that the bat slipped from his hands and flew to fine leg. He set the place on fire.
It wasn’t just the cheap seats (Lord’s had sold the fifth day tickets for £25 each). Even the members in the pavilion lost the run of themselves. They were up on their feet, roaring the fours and sixes, and shouting and barracking along with everyone else, so that when Australia walked off for lunch their players ended up being drawn into a series of confrontations with the crowd gathered in the Long Room.
The cameras caught a couple of MCC members squaring off with two of the players, David Warner and Usman Khawaja, who had to be hustled away towards the changing room by one of the stewards. By the standards of behaviour around here, it was tantamount to a riot. The Australian team put out a statement complaining that their players had been abused and jostled, MCC swiftly offered an “unreserved apology” and explained that “emotions were running high”. They promised to “deal with any member who has not maintained the standard we expect”. Expect at least a couple of them to be defenestrated.
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The boos lasted all through the afternoon. They were still sounding around the ground long after stumps, when Brendon McCullum said, in his post-match interview, that he couldn’t imagine the two teams would “have a beer together any time soon”. He has been there himself. When he gave the MCC Spirit of Cricket lecture in 2016, in which he spoke about the time he ran out Muttiah Muralitharan as he stepped out of his ground to congratulate his batting partner on reaching a hundred. New Zealand won that match. But McCullum came to regret the way they did it.
“If I could turn back time, I would,” he said then. “We were within the laws of the game but not the spirit and there is a very important difference which is glaringly obvious to me years later.” That case was a little different, and so was the instance when England did a similar thing to Colin de Grandhomme in a Test here last year, since De Grandhomme was starting on a run, and dismissed turning back to make his ground. In the end, everyone who plays the game has to make up their own minds about what they believe is, and isn’t, in the spirit of it. Stokes was unequivocal: “would I want to win a game in that manner? The answer is no.”
The Ashes are alight, there are three games to play, and England are burning.
