SPECTATOR SPORT
Down and out in St John's Wood
Simon Barnes
In St John's Wood did Thomas Lord A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where deep the sacred tube-line roared Through caverns desolate and broad By name the Jubilee..
I'LL spare you the rest, but Lord's is an absolutely deadly place these days: quite lethal to the hopes of any Englishman who sets foot on its famously sloping sward with a lion or three upon his chest.
England have just been beaten by New Zealand in a Test match at Lord's. Phrases such as 'plumbed new depths' have been used. These depths have the deep and dreadful familiarity of a mild nightmare: running hopelessly through treacle for a departing aeroplane knowing all the time that your passport is elsewhere. People also talk about the Lord's jinx. England have won only six Tests out of 30 played there in the last 20 years. I see nothing so simple as a curse: I see instead a colossal and com- plex form of national embarrassment.
The Empire Games became the Com- monwealth Games, but the real Empire Game has always been cricket. It is a game drooping under the weight of a complex political and social history, and Lord's crick- et ground is the focal point of that history. The new and especially uncomfortable media centre at the Nursery End is supposed to show cricket at its most modern and sexy but, like everything else at Lord's, it really stands for the serial embarrassments of his- tory: political, social, moral and sporting.
It is hard to play sport at the cutting edge in a place where the admission of women is still regarded as daring; hard to know how an Englishman should feel about playing cricket for his country in such a place. Eng- land no longer rules cricket by Heaven's command. Indeed, it was in cricketing con- tact with Australia that England had the first inkling that their time of unquestioned superiority was at an end. Lord's is bliss for its visitors: subject- nation chippiness can be most esculently added to new-nation aggression. The New Zealanders sledged the English rotten played with nothing less than inspiration. Lord's made the middle-rankers of New Zealand play like world-beaters; it made the middle-rankers of England play like fools.
Furtive, ashamed, embarrassed, humiliat- ed, the England players looked like the cowed figures in religious paintings of Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise: you almost expected to see them leave the pitch at the close followed by a stern, admonitory angel bearing a flaming sword.
The English are embarrassed about the imperial past and more embarrassed still that there is no empire to be embarrassed about. They are embarrassed about patrio- tism, turning it into the Last-Night-of-the- Proms burlesque of Henmania at Wimble- don, or the sinister war cries of Goths and Vandals when the football gets out of hand.
It is easy to play the part of a New Zealan- der at Lord's: tough, defiant, swaggering, curling your lip at complacent tradition. But how do you play the part of a cool young Englishman at the height of your powers? The England players moved with the suspi- ciousness of a member of the audience picked out by a stage hypnotist. You simply cannot be a self-confident Englishman at Lord's. You have two choices: an outdated and instantly prickable arrogance, or the one England have gone for. At Lord's, England suffers from a richesse of embarras.
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