The shuttle bus was a squeeze, with more passengers than seats, and now someone needed to get up for the elderly couple who were the last ones on board. Two Dutch fans were the first up, and they got talking to the two newcomers in the way people do when they’re on their way to a game. Yes, it was their first time in the city, and yes, they had come all this way to watch the Netherlands play South Africa, one of their clubmates was playing in it, and he had fixed the tickets for them. The older man, sitting down now, hadn’t come so far. He and his wife lived 10 minutes up the road.
Golf was his sport, he said, but they had shut his local course for the fortnight because of the tournament, and he had decided to come and see why. It was going to be their first game of cricket, but he had been trying to follow it on TV. “Big upset last night, Afghanistan beating New Zealand,” he said, in a thick Long Island accent. The Dutchmen agreed with him. “I got a question,” he said, “the, whaddya call him, the battah, does he have to run every time he hits it?” By the time we pulled into the stadium, they were into the intricacies of swing bowling, climatic conditions and laminar flow. “So when it’s humid there’s more curve on the ball?”
