Ground Report: Edgbaston

As and when the opportunity arises this season, we’d like to bring you a flavour of the spectator experience at first-class cricket grounds across the country – starting today with fortress Edgbaston.

They’ll be snapshots of the atmosphere, facilities, value for money, and the general enjoyability – or otherwise – of each particular venue.

We’d like to make this as interactive as possible, so your own stories and views are integral. Do please get in touch about your own trips and experiences. Imagine something a bit like Trip Advisor, but about English cricket.

Last Wednesday I was at Edgbaston for the fifth ODI v Sri Lanka. I’m not a very regular live spectator for 50-over cricket, nor I am feeling very fervently patriotic at the moment, but the tickets were bought for me as a present in December – when the world seemed a very different place – and it seemed churlish to waste them.

I’d not been to Edgbaston since 2002. Since when, during 2010-11, Warwickshire CCC have almost completely rebuilt the pavilion end of the ground. In place of the original pavilion, parts of which dated back to the 1890s, and the Leslie Deakins, RV Ryder and William Ansell stands, are a new complex which includes the rather prosaically named South and West stands, which is where our seats were.

You can see our view in the photo above. The tickets were £60 each, which feels a bit on the steepish side – but they were probably among the best seats in the ground.

In a way I miss the original pavilion and southern stands. They gave the ground an important layer of character, and a sense of its history, as well as Warwickshire’s as a club. By comparison, the new edifice is rather anonymous and functional, and could belong to any sports ground, anywhere.

It has more than a touch of modern football stadium to it, with its vaguely brutal internal passageways, like tunnels, which you traverse to access the bars, loos, and club shop (no King of Spain mugs to be seen, alas). On the other hand, everything feels spacious, robust, and well-organised.

Getting in to Edgbaston was a mercifully swift and unobjectionable experience. That might sound a trivial thing to highlight, but too often cricket grounds have so few stewards and bag-checkers that you spend the first ten overs of a match stuck in the queue. And at Lord’s, the gatemen are miserable buggers who give you a hard time for no obvious reason. At Edgbaston, the stewards were friendly and efficient.

At the bar, lager and bitter were both £4 a pint – not too bad. Spirits with a mixer were a good value £4.60, and hot drinks about £2. As the ground was little more than half full – of which, more later – it was hard to tell how the bar would have coped with heavy traffic. As it was, I ordered and paid for my drinks within seconds of arriving at the counter – no queue at all.

I now have to concede a major failing on my part, as I neglected to investigate either the quantity or price of the food on sale. My companion had prepared for us both an enormous picnic, which rather took my eye off the ball, and this was a shame, because the in-ground food is a crucial variable in the cricket spectator experience. The staple fare is provided by itinerant take-away stalls and invariably over-priced and too insubstantial to mop up the beer for more than an hour or so. But there are exceptions – and we’d like to hear about them.

The biggest negative of the day was probably not the fault of the hosts. The ground was only three-fifths full – an attendance of 15,000, as against a maximum capacity of 25,000 – and would have been emptier still without the hundreds of pupils from local schools, who’d received tickets through a (highly commendable) Warwickshire community programme.

The relative sparseness of the crowd greatly diluted the atmosphere. Cricket seems less exciting when you’re all spread out.

Although they have one of the India ODIs later in the summer, Edgbaston is not hosting a test match this season. Wednesday’s match represented one of only two days’ international cricket available to the population of Birmingham and the Midlands in 2014. Why did so few people show up?

Was it the ticket prices? Edgbaston’s weren’t cheap, but by no means England’s worst offenders. Was it public disaffection with the England team and the ECB? A lack of interest in Sri Lanka as an opposition to watch? ODI overkill? Too early in the season? Probably, it was all of those factors combined. But it’s a reminder to the powers that be not to take the spectating public for granted. Will they take any notice? Fat chance.

Much of what you witness at a day of international cricket is the work of the ECB, not the host club. At Edgbaston, I saw at at first hand two new gimmicks which you don’t notice on TV. The first was a Waitrose advert, played at irritating frequency, in we were continually exhorted to cheer on the team by that well known cricketing figure, Heston Blumenthal. It ends with him yelling “come on England!”, in a rather desperate fashion, as if that had never occurred to us before.

The second innovation is that drinks breaks are now sponsored. Sorry, did I say drinks breaks? I meant Harrogate Spring Hydration Breaks, as they are of course officially known these days. As indivisible from sponsorship as sport now is, they could at least try to use normal English. Hydration is something you need after six hours fielding in forty degree temperatures at Galle, not after ten overs on a cold and grey day in Birmingham.

Warwickshire can’t be blamed for this nonsense, and overall I feel inclined to give Edgbaston a positive review. It’s a good place to watch cricket.

And now I’d like to ask you for your own stories. Where did you last watch a cricket match? What was the experience like? How were the atmosphere, the beer, the food, and the value for money? Do get in touch, at maxie@thefulltoss.com . Many thanks.

Maxie Allen

7 comments

  • What an excellent idea – trip advisor for cricket grounds. I’ll try and do one for Hove. Must raise the bee in my bonnet: are there yet any grounds that give enough of a damn about the spectators to provide shelter from the elements? I know members and corporate customers are protected but what about the common people? Hey, maybe that’s who Clarke was referring to as outsiders!

    I remember being at the Ageas Bowl watching a storm approaching from a distance and it was a bit like facing a firing squad – you know it’s coming, you know where it’s coming from, you know it’s going to be unpleasant and you know you can’t avoid it. OK in this case we got up and went home.

  • I think this is a good idea indeed, if you examine and report on grounds from the perspective of Giles Clark’s ‘outsiders’. And emphasis on prices and conveniences for spectators is essential if cricket wishes to get the hoi polloi for these matches.

  • Thanks – and yes, would be great to have one for Hove. Personally, I actually prefer uncovered stands – they’re much nicer when the weather’s good, and when it’s bad – well, that’s cricket. At Lord’s, the covered sections of the Compton-Edrich stands are very gloomy and Stygian.

    • Yes, uncovered in good weather is nicer but I’m being very selfish here. I was treated for melanoma (successfully) a while ago, so I avoid the sun now. Careful is cool!

  • You know the crowd are bored when they start doing Mexican waves.

    This always confuses me. Stewards are like the SS when it comes to rooting out beer snakes, but when a bunch of drunken idiots start trying to instigate the far more intrusive, distracting and annoying mexican wave, they just sit there placidly.

    Edgbaston is pretty decent, but Trent Bridge is the best cricket ground in England, although I’m still annoyed they didn’t replace the Parr Stand with something similar in design.

    • At last. Someone else who can’t stand bloody, bloody, bloody Mexican waves! I thought I was the only one. I refuse to participate in them. Mainly because it’s far too much effort to keep standing up every few seconds :-)

      • The entire point of going to watch live sport instead of just staying at home and watching it on the telly is that being surrounded by several thousand other people who are emotionally involved in the outcome of each delivery makes the entire experience more exciting and compelling.

        A crowd doing a mexican wave is basically sending a message to the players and other spectators “we’re bored now, we’re not even paying attention, we literally don’t care what is happening on the pitch”. Any atmosphere or tension for those interested in the game is immediately destroyed, and any point of actually being at the ground has gone.

        You don’t see mexican waves at any sporting event where the crowd care about the game for that very reason. Anyone who tried to start one at a big football or rugby match would get ignored at best, beaten up at worst.

        It should be stamped out of cricket, anyone trying to start one during play should be thrown out immediately. Its a major factor in the comparable lack of atmosphere at cricket grounds and the reluctance of people to attend.

        Sit down and watch the damn cricket with the rest of us that are actually interested. If you don’t want to watch it, then bugger off.

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