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shermaramaI had a remarkably good night out last night. We went to the 20/20 cricket over in Hove, which was notionally a work do for Chris's company but it's a small company and I've met a couple of them before (one of them is also in the dive club) so not nearly as awkward as that could have been.
I've never been to see proper cricket before. I'm told the day matches are much more about sitting around drinking, reading the newspaper, napping, getting a tan, and maybe bothering to look at the pitch now and then, but the 20/20 is a bit more urgent than that. There's still drinking, but not really time for a nap. And they play a little fanfare when the bowler changes, and a fragment of a song every time there's a 4 or a 6 or the end of an over. It must be said that apart from the last ten overs, when Sussex were chasing and having to try and keep up a pretty high run rate to try and win, most of the entertainment was provided not by the cricket but by chatting about stuff like the rugby league / union divide in Australia, considering the huge swooping seagulls and wondering if they ever interfere with the match (one end of the pitch is called the Sea End, after all) and watching the 'entertainment'.
I say 'entertainment' because there was six girls, three each at opposite corners of the pitch, with pompoms, and whenever one of these bits of music got played they were supposed to jump up on a little platform and dance. They were young, uninterested, uncoordinated and not apparently wild about the cricket itself. Every time the music started they were talking to the small crowd of lads that had gathered to try and chat them up, and would eventually pull themselves away, climb slowly on to the platform and wave pompoms boredly for a few seconds. That in itself was amusing, in the way it wasn't meant to be of course, and then there was a group of lads sat on the row behind us that were keeping up a running commentary on the dancers' uselessness and anything else that crossed their minds, which it was hard not to laugh out loud along with now and then. The mascot is a shark, presumably a student being paid in beer, but since it's the off season for football, the local football team's mascot, a seagull, was also hanging around. The lads behind us were speculating about what he was doing there, and whether he was trying to chat up the dancers. "Can you have a paedophile seagull?" one of them asked.
There was a good atmosphere generally, though, not as ferocious as at a rugby league match but that good live-sport camaraderie. One of the Gloucester fielders (Sussex were playing Gloucester, not that I even knew that more than ten minutes before getting there) dropped a sky-ball catch fairly early on in Sussex's innings. For the rest of the match, whenever the ball came his way, the nearby crowd did dramatic ooh-ing, and applauded loudly when he managed to do some basic ball-handling correctly, and every so often there were choruses of 'Who are ya?' which he responded to by pointing to his name and number on the back of his shirt, clearly unbothered. A group of boys kept jumping out of their seats and tearing wildly up and down every time there was a boundary, people waved 4 and 6 signs, a couple of people blew vuvuzelas and got shouted down for it, people ate doughnuts and chips and drank Old Speckled Hen. And for those last few overs, Sussex were trying to hoik the ball around for the boundaries and it wasn't working and the wickets were falling and the run rates were getting silly ("Eighteen off five balls? That's three sixes and two where they don't even have to do anything! No trouble!") and then Gloucester got a wicket on the second-to-last ball and a new man came out and took the last delivery and hit it right out of the ground and everyone cheered even though Sussex still lost by a handful of runs and then everyone buggered off to the pub. Nice.
I've never been to see proper cricket before. I'm told the day matches are much more about sitting around drinking, reading the newspaper, napping, getting a tan, and maybe bothering to look at the pitch now and then, but the 20/20 is a bit more urgent than that. There's still drinking, but not really time for a nap. And they play a little fanfare when the bowler changes, and a fragment of a song every time there's a 4 or a 6 or the end of an over. It must be said that apart from the last ten overs, when Sussex were chasing and having to try and keep up a pretty high run rate to try and win, most of the entertainment was provided not by the cricket but by chatting about stuff like the rugby league / union divide in Australia, considering the huge swooping seagulls and wondering if they ever interfere with the match (one end of the pitch is called the Sea End, after all) and watching the 'entertainment'.
I say 'entertainment' because there was six girls, three each at opposite corners of the pitch, with pompoms, and whenever one of these bits of music got played they were supposed to jump up on a little platform and dance. They were young, uninterested, uncoordinated and not apparently wild about the cricket itself. Every time the music started they were talking to the small crowd of lads that had gathered to try and chat them up, and would eventually pull themselves away, climb slowly on to the platform and wave pompoms boredly for a few seconds. That in itself was amusing, in the way it wasn't meant to be of course, and then there was a group of lads sat on the row behind us that were keeping up a running commentary on the dancers' uselessness and anything else that crossed their minds, which it was hard not to laugh out loud along with now and then. The mascot is a shark, presumably a student being paid in beer, but since it's the off season for football, the local football team's mascot, a seagull, was also hanging around. The lads behind us were speculating about what he was doing there, and whether he was trying to chat up the dancers. "Can you have a paedophile seagull?" one of them asked.
There was a good atmosphere generally, though, not as ferocious as at a rugby league match but that good live-sport camaraderie. One of the Gloucester fielders (Sussex were playing Gloucester, not that I even knew that more than ten minutes before getting there) dropped a sky-ball catch fairly early on in Sussex's innings. For the rest of the match, whenever the ball came his way, the nearby crowd did dramatic ooh-ing, and applauded loudly when he managed to do some basic ball-handling correctly, and every so often there were choruses of 'Who are ya?' which he responded to by pointing to his name and number on the back of his shirt, clearly unbothered. A group of boys kept jumping out of their seats and tearing wildly up and down every time there was a boundary, people waved 4 and 6 signs, a couple of people blew vuvuzelas and got shouted down for it, people ate doughnuts and chips and drank Old Speckled Hen. And for those last few overs, Sussex were trying to hoik the ball around for the boundaries and it wasn't working and the wickets were falling and the run rates were getting silly ("Eighteen off five balls? That's three sixes and two where they don't even have to do anything! No trouble!") and then Gloucester got a wicket on the second-to-last ball and a new man came out and took the last delivery and hit it right out of the ground and everyone cheered even though Sussex still lost by a handful of runs and then everyone buggered off to the pub. Nice.