From Arundel to York: grounds for gratitude covering the great game of cricket - Chris Waters

It was my first visit too and it got me thinking - I wondered how many grounds I had covered county matches at as I near the end of my 25th season writing about cricket (four spent covering Notts for the Nottingham Evening Post from 2000-2003, then 21 following Yorkshire for The Yorkshire Post).

The answer, once I had dusted off my old Wisdens and consulted the excellent website Cricket Archive, was 46 (see adjoining panel) - an insignificant number in itself but, it then occurred, exactly halfway towards The 92 Club in football, the society whose members must have visited each current Premier League and Football League venue, an endlessly changing, evolving list.

The comparison, of course, is by no means equivalent and, broadening the scope in terms of this exercise, I have included among the 46 cricket grounds reported at five at which I have covered county matches outside of England - two in Wales, plus one each in Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland.

All grounds visited were either for County Championship, T20 or ListA/one-day assignments - be they inter-county matches, county versus minor county, or county versus country.

Most of the grounds have, over the course of 25 seasons, been visited numerous times (there are only 18 first-class counties, after all, as opposed to the 92 clubs in football).

I have covered well over 50 matches just at Scarborough, for example, still as magical to me as when I first reported there in 2001, when Nottinghamshire were on the wrong end of Darren Lehmann’s incredible 191 in the Norwich Union League, along with several hundred fixtures at Headingley – only slightly less magical, perhaps.

Trips to Trent Bridge, too, must run well into three figures, my second favourite venue behind Scarborough’s North Marine Road.

Familiarity breeds contempt, or so they say, and it is striking that I have covered games at only four new grounds in the last decade - two in the past few weeks, oddly (Rugby and Sookholme), plus Radlett last year and York from 2019, when Yorkshire’s capital city rejoined the fixture list after a 129-year absence.

It can be difficult to get up for yet another flaming trip down the M1 to Northampton on a Friday afternoon, with motorway closures on the way back guaranteed, and it’s a sign of how the Championship, in particular, has reduced over the years, with so many outgrounds dropping out like participants in a game of musical chairs - not least in Yorkshire, where the likes of Bradford, Harrogate, Sheffield, Middlesbrough, Hull, etc, were once staples on the scene.

By way of comparison, I also took the exercise back 50 years to see how many grounds I would have visited had I covered Notts from 1950-1953 inclusive, then Yorkshire from 1954 to 1974, the exact equivalent, and the answer was 69 to my 46 (precisely one-third more, in other words, 43 of which I hadn’t visited, and almost all of which are no longer in use/around anyway).

As those figures would suggest, there were a number of grounds at which I have covered games that wouldn’t have been on the list for me between 1950-1974, so it does work both ways.

There has also been the odd time when I have missed the opportunity to visit a new ground - May’s Bounty in Basingstoke, for instance, where Yorkshire played a Championship match against Hampshire in 2009, when I was covering that summer’s Ashes.

In the pandemic-plagued year of 2020, opportunity to go to the wonderfully named Spytty Park in Newport was also denied when that fixture - along with much of the campaign - was called off, while hope of ever going to St Helen’s in Swansea, scene of Sobers’s six sixes, appears to have vanished amid recent reports that the venue - for cricket purposes at least - is set to go the way of the do-do.

As an aside, and on the subject of Wales, for years I could never seem to get down to Sophia Gardens in Cardiff to cover a Championship match as Glamorgan invariably took Yorkshire to Colwyn Bay instead.

Recently, that trend has reversed and it would be nice to go back to Colwyn Bay for a change of scene, the definition of having one’s cake and eating it, I suppose.

Invariably, contemplation of a venue - especially one rarely, or perhaps only once visited - brings some stab of instant recollection.

Tunbridge Wells, for example, where the mind’s eye immediately brings to mind banks of rhododendrons in the appropriately named “Garden of England”.

Or Whitgift School in Croydon, with its remarkable collection of peacocks and flamingos, a ground where I covered a Championship game between Surrey and Notts in 2003 that sticks out because, on a brutally hot day, with the players practically on their knees in the enervating heat, the ball was hit into the press tent and, in an effort to return it to the sadly-missed Graham Thorpe, fielding closest to the boundary, it completely slipped out of my hand and flew some 30 yards to his right, prompting the most deserved double-teapot ever seen on a sports field and confirmation that I was better off trying to write about cricket than play it.

Or Mote Park in Maidstone, where I accidentally left the lights on in the pool car that I’d driven down in which unsurprisingly refused to start when I returned to it several hours later, necessitating an unscheduled hotel stopover and a hefty garage bill.

What a pleasure it has been, however, and a tremendous privilege to visit all of these grounds over the years​​​​​​​​​​​​​ – tailbacks, motorway closures, unfathomable diversion signs, rubbish food at service stations and speeding fines notwithstanding.

​GROUNDS AT WHICH I HAVE COVERED COUNTY GAMES IN THE UK AND IRELAND

​Arundel Castle, Arundel

Stormont, Belfast

Edgbaston, Birmingham

Dean Park, Bournemouth

County Ground, Bristol

Fenner’s, Cambridge

St Lawrence Ground, Canterbury

Sophia Gardens, Cardiff

County Ground, Chelmsford

College Ground, Cheltenham

Queen’s Park, Chesterfield

Riverside Ground, Chester-le-Street

Sports Ground, Cleethorpes

Penrhyn Avenue, Colwyn Bay

Whitgift School, Croydon

County Ground, Derby

Clontarf, Dublin

Raeburn Place, Edinburgh

The Maer Ground, Exmouth

Woodbridge Road, Guildford

The Oval, Kennington

Cricket Field Road, Horsham

County Ground, Hove

Chester Road North, Kidderminster

Grace Road, Leicester

Headingley, Leeds

Lindum Sports Club, Lincoln

Aigburth, Liverpool

Mote Park, Maidstone

Old Trafford, Manchester

Sookholme, Mansfield

Wamil Way, Mildenhall

County Ground, Northampton

Trent Bridge, Nottingham

Doncaster Close, Oakham School

Brunton Memorial Ground, Radlett

Old Deer Park, Richmond

Rugby School Ground, Rugby

North Marine Road, Scarborough

The Ageas Bowl, Southampton

John Walker’s Ground, Southgate

Lord’s, St John’s Wood

County Ground, Taunton

The Nevil Ground, Tunbridge Wells

New Road, Worcester

Clifton Park, York