About

Quite a number of years ago, I was sat on a train stuck at Peterborough station. We were held up on our journey because of the hordes of Sheffield Wednesday fans thronging the platform, singing and chanting together as they changed trains on their way to whatever mid-sized English town their team would be playing that afternoon. A woman opposite me looked up from her book and asked, in a tone dripping with contempt, ‘Do you think men need ritual?

 

At the time, I think I just smiled and rolled my eyes as if to say, ‘Aren’t they so juvenile? Shouldn’t they have better things to do?’

But the question stayed with me.

 

It brought me back to the earliest reasons I was drawn to watching sport, which were very much rooted in ritual. Growing up, my maternal grandfather and uncle were avid cricket fans. Since they arrived in Essex in the late 1970s, they had been religiously attending the county team’s fixtures throughout each summer. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen on Sunday mornings as my grandmother lovingly packed a mouthwatering array of fine foods for uncle James and grandpa Jimmy to take with them on their trips to Chelmsford. Proving the adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, I wanted in on these lunches and I was willing to watch cricket to make that happen.

 

I don’t remember the exact date, I’m not even entirely sure of the year, and I certainly can’t remember who the opposition were when I went to my first day of County Championship cricket at Chelmsford. But I can tell you what I ate. We arrived a little late, because my grandfather refused to drive above 45mph regardless of the tailback he’d built up behind him on the A12, and started with homemade fruitcake and coffee from the Thermos. My grandfather read the Times and my uncle attempted to teach me how to fill in a scorecard. Some time later, proceedings stopped for lunch and things got interesting. Cheese and ham sandwiches, gala pie, a prodigious amount of crisps, Scotch eggs, and all manner of delicious things emerged from the cool-box my uncle had carried to our seats with a degree of reverence and circumstance usually afforded to a reliquary. They were carefully unwrapped, shared out amongst the three of us, and enjoyed together.  Play resumed, and I lapsed into a postprandial stupor alleviated only when we broke for tea, where French onion soup and more coffee were on hand to give me the fortitude to make it through to the close of play. I hadn’t paid much attention to the cricket, but I had dined well and that was enough for me to keep coming back throughout that summer.

 

From a love of lunch, a passion for cricket grew. I fell head over heels for the idiosyncratic rhythms of the cricketing summer, from the long, torpid afternoons watching bowlers toil and batsmen dig in despite the unrelenting heat, to the rain delays spent sheltering under the grandstand as those who had travelled in from east London gathered around portable radios to listen to the West Ham game. It brought me closer to my grandfather, a usually silent, stoic type, by allowing us to share in the highs and lows each summer brought. The scorecards my uncle and I would complete are a kind of shared history, a record of days well spent that we can still reminisce over now. Though my grandparents are gone now, the trips my uncle and I still make to matches each summer, though there are fewer of them than either of us would like, allow us to reconnect with them through ritual. He still brings an enormous packed lunch in an oversized bag. We still fill in our scorecards.​