The sound of the Day 5 crowd at Lords
Australia won the Second Ashes Test at Lords on the 5th day of the game, Sunday July 2nd.
I’ll post on Bazball and beards but one interesting issue was the sound of the Day 5 crowd at Lords. It certainly a fair bit of commentary on Test Match Special.
The crowd on Day 5 of a Test, particularly a Sunday, is unlikely to be corporates and more broadly democratic in so far as that can ever be said of a Lords crowd.
The crowd was brought to life by the dismissal of Bairstow, stumped. It was certainly out and Bairstow was careless but some thought the Australians should not have appealed.
Perhaps. This set off a considerable amount of booing of Australian players. Ordinarily the Lords crowd manages little more than polite claps(and snores after lunch). Was it the booing of a reactionary mob or a celebratory crowd hoping for an England win? Or a mixture of both.
According to former England captain Andrew Strauss the booing came from people ‘who don’t normally come to Lords’, with some tickets reportedly at £25(normally well over £100). Strauss briefed a meeting of Sunak’s Tory Cabinet at an awayday held at a Windsor hotel at the end of February 2023 on how cricket strategy could help the Tories win.
The mob of MCC members who barracked and jostled Australian players in the Long Room at lunch were certainly that
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