Quick single to mid-off

It may seem unlikely to you but this Panto Princess is rather a fan of the quintessential English summer game - Cricket.

Yes, I have spent many a happy afternoon listening to the thwack of leather on willow and the polite applause that drifts along on the breeze. I've also spent many more happy afternoons at Trent Bridge watching the William Clark stand become increasingly more boisterous as the afternoon wears on - directly correlating to the number of pints consumed - and then seeing the rise (and usually fall, as the stewards intervene) of the infamous beer snake. For those of you who do not know what a beer snake is, it involves stacking up all the empty plastic pint glasses that the stand can muster and then passing the resulting 'snake' around until it either breaks (generally showering people with the remnants of the beer left at the bottom of the glasses) or gets confiscated by fluorescent yellow clad stewards. As a member however (oh yes, the plot thickens even further, - a Panto Princess, the member of a cricket club??) I am conditioned to sneer at such behaviour, but must admit it does add a certain jollity to the day and often proves more entertaining than what's happening on the pitch...sorry, was that a wicket?

Anyway, what has spurred me to write this post today is the arrival of my Twenty20 World Cup Semi Finals tickets which were bought an extraordinarily long time ago, in the heyday of the lazy days of last summer. Actually I paint that as such a nice picture - I'm sure it was probably freezing cold and raining as I ordered them - for that is my overriding last memory of last summer! To be honest I had only half remembered I had even bought them! In fact getting them delivered to me hasn't by any means been an easy task. In a top-secret ICC-to-take-over-the-world kind of way they have all been sent out by recorded delivery. Fair enough. However, they seem to have used the most obscure secure mail delivery company on the planet. Not Royal Mail. Not TNT. Not anyone I had heard of and at first I thought it was a scam when I found the little yellow card pushed through my letter box saying I had missed the delivery - mainly because I know there had been someone in all day. However, I dutifully rearranged the delivery to my work address in a vague hope that it would get to me - and lo and behold it did!

I have to say though it has only managed to bring back my slight level of annoyance that Trent Bridge have missed out on an Ashes Test Match this summer - we got the World Cup as a sort of consolation prize. I have great memories of sitting on the edge of my seat, fingers pressed into my mouth on the final day of 2005 as England set about the seemingly simple task of gaining 129 runs to win - only to run in to the might of some incredible bowling by Brett Lee and Shane Warne, which left everyone wondering who was going to come out on top. Thankfully, in the end we did, but my, my it was close!

So who has the privilege of hosting this mighty spectacular instead of us...Cardiff - where did we go wrong?!