Tucked quietly behind the Lord’s museum is the far less interesting Lord’s car park. It’s a postage-stamp space that can accommodate more bikes than it can cars. It’s certainly not large enough for a team coach – you might get one in, but how would you get it back out? – so the players are disgorged on to the pavement outside. Their morning walk through the dark green shutters takes them past Mick, the gate steward, and the ticket office.
By the time they sauntered past on this Sunday morning, Mick already knew how many tickets had been sold for the day – 7,446. He wasn’t the only person at the ground with that figure in the front of his mind. The upper tier of the Tavern stand was taken out of use and the lower tier was barely less empty. When Dimuth Karunaratne was dropped by Joe Root in the slips on 25 in the first half-hour of the morning, there were enough voices to raise a ghostly “Ooh” around the ground. But the grandstand, its banks bereft of bodies, gleamed wide and white as the cosmetic grin of a reality show contestant.
