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Lord’s – first county match May 31, 1915 |
It’s the Lord’s own view of our great cricket grounds
THAT languid left-hander David Gower once buzzed in a Tiger Moth biplane over his England colleagues as they played out a dirt-track warm-up match in Australia during the Ashes tour of 1991.
The former England captain paid dearly for his aerial view of that Queensland cricket field – a £1,000 fine, a touring ban, and a lasting reputation for frivolousness that belied his batting talents (and bothered him not at all): “The plane was there; it had to be done,” Gower said.
No accusations of cavalier nonchalance can be directed at the authors of Cricket Grounds from the Air
Hampstead barrister Daniel Lightman and West Hampstead writer Zaki Cooper commissioned former police helicopter pilot Ian Hay to photograph the main and subsidiary grounds of every first class cricket club in England and Wales, and have printed them all in the resulting book, introduced by an untypically sentimental Geoffrey Boycott.
If you have ever wondered how Scarborough might look from 1,000 feet, or envied a seagull’s eye view of Hove, this work is for you.
Alongside accounts from some the counties’ finest talents – Derek Underwood at Hampshire, Alan Knott on Kent’s ground at Maidstone, Clive Lloyd on Old Trafford – the pictures chart the place of the county grounds in the grain of the cities of middle England and the fields of the home counties.
They also summon something of the counties’ history: Fred Titmuss, who bowled Middlesex to victory against Surrey in 1982 having begun his career at Lords in 1949, sums it up: “Lord’s – the most fantastic cricket ground in the world, full of history, the home of cricket, set in leafy splendour in my home city of London.
Paul Keilthy
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