There weren’t a great number of Ireland fans at Lord’s yesterday, but those that were there made themselves visible. The green shirts picked each other out in the crowd, nodded, waved and offered mutual support. A couple of them, puffing their way to the top of the Warner Stand before play, spotted a man in a splendid shamrock-print suit and altered course to share a rueful word with him. “We thought we’d better come today because it might be all over tomorrow.”
Not quite, but it was a day of unremitting flagellation. Throughout the first session, the Ireland bowlers had nothing to keep them going but the memory of a single, day-old wicket. At least their supporters in the stands had Guinness.
The man in the splendid suit, complete with matching tie, was Shay Livingstone. A keen pair of eyes could easily make him out from the opposite end of the ground. He is one half of a pair of superfans who can be seen at almost every one of Ireland’s matches. “It’s cost me hundreds of thousands,” he said, shaking his head. “But it’s just fun, jeez.”
Obsessed with cricket since he was a schoolboy, Livingstone now makes his living as a sports agent in Cork, mostly representing rugby players (there are, as yet, no Irish cricketers earning enough for him to feel comfortable taking 10%). He was in Kingston, Jamaica for the 2007 World Cup game that “woke the country up to cricket”, when a team made up of postmen, electricians and carpet salesmen unexpectedly beat Pakistan – and had to phone their employers to beg an extra few weeks to compete in the Super 8s. The fact that team weren’t “your quintessential English silver-spoon” brigade helped those back home warm to the game.
For a brief spell on Friday – roughly between 12.15pm and 12.30pm – Ireland’s bowlers managed to keep England’s scoring rate below a run a ball. Curtis Campher and Andy McBrine, a pairing that sounds like a detective-and-sergeant duo in a Margery Allingham murder mystery novel, starved England of a boundary for nearly four overs, and Fionn Hand managed his team’s sole maiden of the day.
Livingstone texted updates from the ground to his friend Adrian, an Irish Australian who would usually attend games with him dressed in the guise of Larry the Leprechaun but who was stuck in Sydney, following the game through the night. Livingstone wished there were more Irish fans in the ground on Friday, and suspected there would have been thousands more if the game had started on a Friday.
“I was a bit disappointed with a Thursday start,” he says. “Cricket’s not a wealthy sport in Ireland, the grassroots are played in the countryside. A T20 or one-day game is more accessible for fans to get off work, but if we’d started nearer the weekend there might have been 10 or 12 thousand guys living in London who would make room for it.”
Instead, the atmosphere throughout most of the England innings was that of a gentle village match at which no one has quite been paying attention to the score. Nothing could have been further from the chest-thump of an Ashes Test. Cricket need not be insecure about accommodating both.
For one Belfast-born woman, sitting in the cheapish seats in the Compton stand’s nether regions, this was the perfect first-visit-to-Lord’s. Katie had been at the same school as Mark Adair. Now she got to watch him worked over by Ben Duckett and Ollie Pope. The inevitability of the result wasn’t going to dampen her enthusiasm. She had already joined a local club and begun to learn to play.
In the MCC museum, a newly opened exhibition called No Foreign Field was taking a revisionist look at cricket (and the club’s) colonial past. Ireland’s historic relationship with the sport wasn’t covered, although cricket was Ireland’s most popular sport until 1880 and the motion to add it to the Gaelic Athletic Association’s ban on foreign sports in 1905 was only narrowly passed. There has even been a (rather contentious) claim that cricket is derived from an ancient Gaelic game called Katty. If that were true, a Lord’s Test would not be a novel evolution as much as a welcome home.
On a bench in front of the pavilion, Jason McCullough sat and watched as England’s bowlers returned to torment Ireland’s top order. If you include all the under-17 and under-19 games he has seen, McCullough has watched his national team around 80 times. His MCC membership came through in 2019, just two days before their first Test at this ground four years ago. He wasn’t expecting it so soon, and it was too late for him to arrange travel from Northern Ireland, where he lives. He missed Tim Murtagh’s famous five-fer.
It was a two-day journey from Newtownards to get to this game. “Sure, I wouldn’t sit on a seven-hour overnight bus from Carlisle, the whole way to London, if I didn’t love my cricket,” says McCullough. He hoped the game would go into three days. He had made his travel plans for four.
Yesterday, trying to palliate his fomo, Adrian tweeted, Facebooked and WhatsApped his way through until morning. He wasn’t enjoying the shellacking, he says, but the sight of Harry Tector getting runs late in the day gave him hope for the future. Which, for a cricket fan, is all you really need.
