The second evening at Lord’s, and the day has begun to sag a little. The cricket begins to lose its grip on you, a day of breezy sunshine has made you sleepy, and so you decide to stretch your legs and take a stroll. You stop for a cup of tea, which costs £3.10. Tap. Bleep. The tea merely draws attention to your empty stomach and so you join the ragged queue for a portion of fish and chips at £12.50. Tap. Bleep.
You walk a little longer, past the pasty stall, past the gin concession, past the souvenir shop and Great British Fudge emporium. A little way beyond there’s a charity collector shaking a tin. An invitation to book a tour of the ground. Tap. Bleep. It’s all so easy and frictionless, a sunlit orchard of card readers all arching their boughs towards you and promising you a little pleasure.
“Lord’s is a cashless ground,” announces a message on the big screen as you enter, a statement that is true only until the moment your bank statement drops. But then this has always been the genius of Lord’s: a place that works the senses so thoroughly that you barely notice the efficiency with which it is simultaneously working your wallet. They don’t really obsess about anything as vulgar as money here, largely because for centuries it has been run by the sort of people with so much of it that it hardly matters.
We got a taste of this earlier in the week, when the MCC was fleetingly blindsided by a sudden controversy over ticket prices for the first Test. Stuart Broad and Ben Stokes both spoke out. Pundits and journalists fumed at the audacity of charging £160 to watch one-fifth of a cricket match.
Eventually, confronted with a deluge of sour headlines, the club was forced to issue an extra tranche of £20 junior tickets for the fourth day and a promise to review their prices for the 2023 season. The cricket began.
Everyone moved on.
In one sense the whole affair was vaguely overblown. Ticket prices at Lord’s smashed through the £100 barrier some years ago and hardly anybody batted an eyelid. And as for empty seats – well, have you ever been to Lord’s? Even at its sold-out capacity, Lord’s always has empty seats.
People drift away and drift back. People arrive late and go home early.
There are punters who barely use their seat at all, for whom a day at Lord’s is primarily a chance to catch up with old friends and have a mosey about the place. All this is fine. But in another sense the MCC’s evident discomfort was quietly revealing.
After all, one of the unspoken maxims of Lord’s is that pecuniary matters are the sort of thing the little people like to worry about. An Englishman’s bank account is his castle and all that. And besides, this is a place that likes to think itself above the vulgarity of pounds and pence.
It’s an experience, a confraternity, a guild. If you need to ask the price of the suit, old boy, then you can’t afford it.
Of course, behind the scenes the terrain has been shifting for a while. For most of the last decade the club has been embroiled in a civil war between its traditionalists and the speculators. The pandemic cost the MCC around £30m in lost revenue.
The controversial redevelopment of the Compton and Edrich Stands cost £52m. Two years ago the club voted through – against stiff internal opposition – plans to allow the super-rich to purchase express membership, thus jumping the famously epochal waiting list. The home secretary, Priti Patel, was one of the first to sign up, paying £45,000.
And if you visit Lord’s today what strikes you above all is the whiff of money, the way it swirls through the corridors and concourses like limited-edition aftershave, the sensation of being sold a premium experience. The City boys in shirts and aviator sunglasses. The City girls in designer dresses and uncomfortable-looking shoes. Not much more than a decade ago, as a scruffy and impoverished student, I used to be able to sit in the Compton Lower for £35. But Lord’s doesn’t want people like us any more.
Perhaps this feels like a charmingly parochial thing to get annoyed about.
But in a way the entire sport is being rebuilt along similar lines. At tea the ICC chair, Greg Barclay, was interviewed on Test Match Special and mentioned revenue or money 10 times in the first six or seven minutes.
Barclay baldly stated that with Twenty20 franchise leagues and ICC tournaments in the ascendant, bilateral Test cricket would inevitably be cut in future. “There will be some unfortunate consequences – from a revenue generation perspective – for some of those countries who won’t get the amount of cricket they will hope to have,” he said.
So often the debate on the future of Test cricket gets reduced to absurd abstractions like attention spans and over rates. Similarly, administrators chatter away happily about diversity and representation, set up task forces and working groups, without ever coming close to addressing the elephant in the room.
There is not a problem in world cricket that can be solved without addressing its toxic relationship with money. But it’s awkward, and besides Lord’s isn’t really the place to discuss these things.
So instead you go for another drink, tap your card on the reader, wait for the bleep.
