WEATHER: Mild and 20C with a few micro showers
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Speaking to my God-daughter Zoe to wish her a happy birthday
BUMMER OF THE DAY: No Bernstar jumps again today L
BUYS OF THE DAY: My pink ‘Lords-The Home of Cricket’ t-shirt I bought
WORD OF THE DAY: Sporting venues
No talk of visa’s today. I am playing tourist. I wanted to make the 10am Lord’s Cricket Ground Tour. You don’t have to pre-book for this, so I left home at 8.30am, to make sure I had enough time to get there and I had 40 minutes to spare. If I didn’t make that one the next one wasn’t until 12 noon and it would have thrown the rest of my day out as I had booked in for my Wimbledon tour at 3pm.
I am not a massive cricket fan, I like the 20/20 matches and I also don’t mind the one day-ers. Mention Test Cricket and my eyes glaze over, I can think of nothing worse than watching men in white for 5 days randomly hitting a ball every 10 minutes. BUT whether you are a die-hard cricket fan or a novice like myself the tour of Lord’s Cricket Ground was pretty amazing. The tour started in the museum, where we got a chance to walk around and have a look at the memorabilia, photos, original rule books and then moving into the modern game and portraits of the better known players and of course we got to see the original ‘Ashes’ Urn that gets its own room, the replica Waterford Crystal Urn that goes to the Ashes winner, which wasn’t Australia this time, and also the 20/20 World Cup trophy that was also in the cabinet! The downside was that we were not permitted to take photos at all on any of the interior of the tour, which was a bit of a bugger.
The series is named after a satirical obituary published in a British newspaper, The Sporting Times, in 1882 after a match at The Oval in which Australia beat England on an English ground for the first time. The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. The English media dubbed the next English tour to Australia in 1882–83, as the quest to regain The Ashes. During that tour a small terracotta urn was presented to England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of Melbourne women. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of a cricket bail. The urn is believed by some to be the trophy of the Ashes series, but it has never been formally adopted as such and Bligh always considered it to be a personal gift. Replicas of the urn are often held aloft by victorious teams as a symbol of their victory in an Ashes series, but the actual urn has never been presented or displayed as a trophy in this way. Whichever side holds the Ashes, the urn normally remains in the Marylebone Cricket Club Museum at Lord's since being presented to the MCC by Bligh's widow upon his death.
We got to see the Long Room; at this point there was no mention about photos so I had snapped off 3 of them before our guide said he forgot to mention no photos at all inside. Whoops, but I got to keep my 3 photos, so I have shot of the members Long Room. We got to sit in the Committee Room, where every single decision made on the game of cricket is done in this room, and it is also where the Queen watches the matches when she chooses to come. She is the Patron of Lord’s and Prince Phillip has been the President twice of the club over the years. Next was the 2 dressing rooms, the English and the ‘visitors’ rooms. They both look identical, and still no photos though and it was killing me. I did snap off one of the view of the ground from the balcony of the visitor’s dressing room, which we were allowed, so no, I didn’t break any rules. In each of the two main dressing rooms are honors boards which commemorate all the centuries scored in Test matches on the Lord’s ground and all instances of a bowler's taking five wickets in a Test innings and ten wickets in a Test match.
Up until 1998 ladies were not allowed into Lord’s at all – incredible right AND women were the first ones to start to bowl over arm due to their skirts getting in the way. They couldn’t bowl under arm like their gentleman counterparts, so we had a BIG part in the early development of the game. From here we moved outside and finally the cameras were allowed out to play! The ground looks smaller in real life than on the TV, but to think this ground has been played on for nearly 200 years is pretty mind blowing, and that’s not taking into account the other 2 previous sites that Lords was located before moving to its current site. The earliest known match played on the current Lord's Cricket Ground was Marylebone Cricket Club v Hertfordshire on 22 June 1814, and the oldest cricket fixture at Lord’s, which continues to this day is the annual Eton v Harrow match, which was first played on the Old Ground in 1805, and on the present Lord's Cricket Ground in July 1818. So we walked through the Grand Stand on our way to the Media Centre, where we got to sit and see where the commentators get their view from. It was a hive of activity around the place, as in 2 week’s time; India is playing England in a 5 day test match. Sachin Tendulkar has never got 100 at Lords and this test match if he gets it will make 100 runs in 100 matches, so the pressure is really on him, to get his first 100 at Lords and to get 100, 100’s!!! Good-luck!!!! It was a great tour. The guide who showed us around has been doing it for 10 years and he is a cricket nut through and through. He started a club like 1000 years ago, he has played, umpired and coached and when he retired from his day job, he got the guiding gig a day later and has been doing it ever since. There are approx. 48,000 people doing the tour each year and 10 years ago it was only 24,000! If you’ve been to London before and after something a little different to do, the tour is well worth it.
I then had to catch the tube out to Wimbledon, with 2 station changes, I knew I would have time to spare, but figured I could squeeze lunch in while I waited for 3pm to rock around. Nothing beats fish and chips eaten out of a paper bag at a shop not far from the tube station. I did ask if they had gravy for the chips and he said he had something better , curry gravy, so I said slip me some of that and it was delicious!!!!! As it worked out I had a spare hour by the time I walked the 15 minutes to Wimbledon which was okay as they have a museum on site, which was included in my ticket price, so I spent my hour in there and the museum is awesome. It is an interactive one, lots of TV’s, screens lights, match highlights, lots of bio history on the players etc…. you could easily have spent longer than an hour in there, but I did get to see everything.
The tour started at 3pm and we had 42 people in our group. This was the first day that the tours were operating again after 4 weeks, which is when they cease to get the grounds ready for the most famous tennis tournament in the world – WIMBLEDON! Our guide Caroline was AMAZING as she took us around for the 90 minutes. She had a lot of facts and figures, and knew a lot of stuff, that in the end I had to start writing it all down, and I felt like a roving reporter with my note pad and pen in hand and re-checking the earlier stats to make sure I had them right!
So first of all how do you get tickets? There are 3 main ways.
For the show courts it is done by public ballot. The ballot opens in August and closes in December, so you have 5 months to get your request in and if you are successful you are notified by mail in February.
You can join The Queue for tickets. There are 6,500 tickets sold on the day, 1000 of those are for the show courts. If you are after show court tickets then it is advisable to join The Queue and camp the night before the day required. If you are just happy enough just to get in the grounds, and sit in unreserved seats, basically whatever is available on the outside courts you only need to queue for the Ground passes a few hours before the Grounds open at 9.30am. It is also possible to join The Queue for late entry to The Championships, after 5pm. On your arrival, at The Queue you will be issued with a Queue Card. This card is dated and numbered to show your position in The Queue. It must be retained and will be checked on entry to the Grounds. At approximately 7:30am Stewards will issue wristbands to those towards the front of The Queue who are queuing for tickets for the Show Courts. The number of wristbands issued exactly matches the quantity of tickets available for each court on that day. It is an amazing system and has worked for the last 100 years, who can argue with that!?
There are approximately 500,000 people that attend the tournament in the 2 weeks. They also go through 200,000 half pint glasses of Pimms, 30,000kg of strawberries, 32,000 portions of fish and chips 20,000 bottles of champagne and 54,000 balls are used during the 165 matches that are played. The balls are only used for 9 games before they are replaced, so the old balls are sold in the grounds and all the money raised from the sales goes to local charities.
Wimbledon prides itself on tradition. It is why it is the only tournament that enforces the whites only dress code, has no advertising banners on any of its courts (they don’t need the money) and it’s club members total 500. It is very hard, actually impossible to become a club member of Wimbledon. You have to be nominated by 4 current members, it goes to the board for approval and then you go onto a waiting list, AND then you have to wait for someone in the club to pass away before you become a ‘temporary’ member for 6 years, if you use the club regularly, don’t go to jail or become bankrupt then you will become a full member after this time! To give you an idea there are currently 1700 people ‘on the list’ and there are approx. 8 deaths per year, and the membership dies with you, so it can’t and doesn’t get transferred to family members. So you basically would have a better chance of winning Wimbledon and getting a membership that way (all winners get an honorary membership) than going through the above process!!! It is said that the actual membership fee is minimal; once again it isn’t about the money but the prestige.
So how does the club make its money? After all the bills have been paid, prize money and staff etc… the tournament makes 25-30 million each year! This money does not belong to the club, they charge a fee for the use of the venue, but the money goes to the British Tennis Association (can’t remember the exact name) and then it is pumped back into schools and coaching etc…. So this is not their main source of revenue. It is by way of a system called Debentures. What happens here is that every 5 years, 5000 debentures are sold to the public, which guarantees them 1 ticket for a show court every day of the tournament. The cost of each debenture is 27,500GBP for Centre Court and 15,000GBP for Court 1! Apparently once they go on sale they are snapped up with no crumbs left over they are that popular! So times that over 5 years, that gives the club 65 million GBP, not a bad way to make some money I spose. They have been offered multiple times for advertising and pretty much with open cheque books by companies and corporations and they are just not interested, they just don’t need to dollars!!
There are 56 courts in total on the 13 hectares. The grass is kept at exactly 8mm during the tournament and it takes 14 grounds men to keep the courts up to scratch all year round and during the tournament this is bumped to 28. During winter the grass is allowed to grow to a wild 17mm and then when they are ready to cut it, they will only do it at 1mm at a time, so the grass won’t go into shock! The grass is replaced every year after the tournament; they take off the whole top layer, and germinate the courts for the next summer season. The Olympics are going to be held at Wimbledon 3 weeks after the tournament finishes, in which time they will need to replace the grass, so they will used partially germinated grass in this instance to get the courts up to scratch in time for the Games.
So what do the players get paid? Since 1997 the men and women have been paid the same. 1st round losers get 11,550GBP, 2nd round losers get 20,000GBP, 3rd round losers get 34,000, 4th round losers get 68,000GBP, quarter finalists get 137,000GBP, semi-finalists get 275,000GBP the finals loser gets 550,000GBP and the winner gets 1.1 million GBP!!!! Not a bad 2 weeks work – get your children playing tennis people – the dividends will pay off! In total 14.7 million GBP is given in prize money!
There was so much more information that out guide gave us, but I will stop it there. I would like to point out one more fact and that is for the longest professional tennis match ever played, was at Wimbledon last year. In terms of both time and total games, was the match between Nicolas Mahut and John Isner after 11 hours, 5 minutes of play over three days, with a final score of 6–4, 3–6, 6–7(7–9), 7–6(7–3), 70–68 for a total of 183 games!!!! Both players broke numerous Wimbledon and tennis records, including each serving over 100 aces. Immediately after the match, both players and the umpire were presented with a crystal bowl and champagne flutes by Tim Henman and Ann Haydon-Jones on behalf of the All England Club, as special recognition of the game. This all took place on court 18, which is an outside court with no reserved seating, so if you left to go to the toilet for example your seat was gone, snapped up by some-one else who was waiting outside! An amazing feat!!!!
So I had a very sporty day and it is surreal to have had the opportunity to visit both these prestigious sporting venues which were definitely worth the effort to get to, especially Wimbledon, as it took me just over an hour to get home, but I had a great day. I haven’t worked out what is on the program tomorrow but I have my list, so I will be getting 2 more things crossed off tomorrow.
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