They have put something in the water at Lord’s. Marylebone Cricket Club, whose purpose may be found in the title, is being transformed into a laboratory of social reform. Why bother with runs and wickets when, with a huff and a puff, you can blow the house down?
Members who attended the opening match of this year’s county championship bore witness to the latest wheeze. On the top floor of the Victorian pavilion, one of London’s grandest buildings, there is an exhibition of paintings by Syrian and Palestinian refugees.
None were particularly good, but that wasn’t the point. This gallery of daubs, on display until the end of April, represents an unmissable opportunity to display the club’s public conscience, which some folk within the MCC hierarchy clearly take to be its primary responsibility.
“This is creativity,” members were informed – nay, instructed. “This is solidarity.” Which is why I put a letter on the noticeboard suggesting the pooh-bahs had misread the room. “This is meant to be a cricket club,” I said.
Solidarity, note; not sympathy. We may sympathise with the dispossessed but there is always a forum for expressing personal views. Solidarity evokes a world of marches and denunciations. It is a political term that has no application in a sporting context, and should never be uttered in a place like Lord’s.
Oh Lord’s, outsiders may scoff. What’s so special about that rest home for choleric fuddy-duddies? The only people who ask that question are those who have never set foot in the place, because “the home of cricket” is where the past greets the present on level ground.
This blessed plot in St John’s Wood is not set in aspic. The redevelopment since 1987, when the architect Michael Hopkins created a “tented village” out of the gloomy Mound Stand, should please the most earnest “progressive”.
Every part of the ground has been transformed, and when work on the Allen Stand is finished later this year the restoration will be almost complete.
It is a modern venue for a much-changed world, though there is always scope for improvement. The club’s well of chairmen and presidents has been replenished too often by people doing a favour for friends, which is not to doubt their love of the game. No matter what you may have read, cricket is full of good people.
It was a great day when Kumar Sangakkara, the Sri Lankan star, accepted an invitation to be the club’s first overseas president six years ago. He in turn nominated Clare Connor, who became the first lady prez. Good-o.
That will never satisfy the scoffers, who see racism, sexism and something called “classism” wherever they look, and the place they look most closely is Lord’s.
Yet tradition can be a sign of strength, not privilege. It was Harold Pinter, no conservative, who called the Long Room, through which the players walk on to the field, “the finest in the world”.
The first painting on display when you walk into the pavilion is Brendan Kelly’s portrait of Sir Vivian Richards, the most dominant cricketer of the past half century. This superb painting of “King Viv”, the master batsman from Antigua, is placed at the top of the stairs for a good reason, because it proclaims “this is the best of us” – “us” meaning the fellowship of cricket.
There, on a proper canvas, not some weekend daub, is a rebuke to the zealots in the committee room. The club’s overriding duty is to pass on the best of the past to those yet unborn. That is a definition of real tradition, which should never be a dirty word.
Many members of this great institution are growing weary of the club’s designs to make us model citizens. The public address announcer, for instance, reminds spectators umpteen times a day that Lord’s is a place “for everyone”. Who ever would have thought it?
Whether it is an exhibition of paintings by refugees (hooray), the wonders of a horrible one-day slog called The Hundred (hooray), or the shame of Eton continuing to play Harrow on the sacred square (boo), members are fed up of being told what to think.
It’s time for the MCC leadership to rise to the level of those fundamentally decent souls they are trying to coerce into obedience. After all, “when the day is done, and the ball has spun”, we bat for the same team.