Essex vs New Zealand

On Monday, as it was a bank holiday and the first sunny public holiday in an age, my Kiwi buddy B and I took the train out from London to Chelmsford to see the last day of the Kiwi's warm up match against Essex. I've never been to Chelmsford before, it isn't a particularly lovely town but the cricket ground is very pleasant in the classic county cricket manner, i.e. slightly dilapidated and resolutely unchanging in the face of modern innovations like video score boards and so on. I took a few photos of the ground during the lunch interval - I think they give quite a good flavour of the place:

I think it's this last one which is my favourite. It completely sums what I love about county cricket, which is more of a lifestyle than a sport if we're honest. Here we have an elderly chap in his sun-hat in the middle of an empty stand (the turnout for county matches is seldom high), sat on a cheap plastic seat in the shade ignoring the beautiful sun which you can see peeking into the top left of the frame. That's it in a nutshell I think.

Finally here's one of B looking pleased with himself as the Kiwis finished off Essex to win the match just before tea:

After this we completely failed to find a nice pub to have a quiet pint in so we got the train back to the big smoke very contented with our day.