From the Grauniad - brilliant piece
It snowed at Hove on the first day of the cricket season. There was also rain and sleet and a wind which felt like an iced scalpel. There was everything, in fact, apart from a small tent and the flag of Norway to inform us that Roald Amundsen, Scott's old adversary, had beaten us to it.
Even on sunny days the Eaton Road ground slopes sharply towards the sea, making it look a little like the deck of a doomed liner; on Friday it was very possible to imagine the iceberg that had done the damage.
This was John Kettley's big day out. There was an awful lot of weather, as the Irish say, and from that point of view Sussex County Cricket club's new ground sponsors, BrightonandHoveJobs.com, got full value for money. But there was no play between Sussex and Loughborough MCCU on what was the coldest cricket ground in the country on the first day of the first-class season.
There were no spectators either, apart from a preposterously cheerful couple. It felt like one of those bleak and frozen totalitarian states where gatherings were outlawed. The Sussex players, eager to play, looked frustrated. In the old days the county pro embraced bad weather and a break from the slog of playing 32 three-day games in a season. He would put his feet up with a cuppa and a fag and see if anyone had any intelligence concerning the 3.30 at Thirsk. In these more professional days playing is preferred to yet more practice in the indoor school or pumping iron in the gym. Besides, easy runs and wickets off the fresh-faced freshmen in early season swell the averages. and make you look better than you really are when form falters and injury and fatigue sets in later in the summer
"The good news is that we've had a good pre-season," said the county's multi-trophy winning coach, Mark Robinson, philosophically. "We have a really good arrangement to go to Dubai. Working in the warm means there is less chance of getting injured. And then we had two days against Hampshire in a friendly."
Against Hampshire recently players wore gloves and hats and snoods. The bad news for the players is that gloves are not allowed in first-class cricket, unless you are a wicketkeeper, so on Friday they would not have been allowed.
Outside the pavilion another snow shower gusted past. "It reminds me of the coldest day I ever played cricket," says the former player Neil Lenham. "It was against Derbyshire in the 90s and it was snowing but the umpire wouldn't let us come off because it wasn't snowing heavily enough."
The Hove groundsman, Andy Mackay, who is largely succeeding in his ambition to get rid of the low, slow pitches and bring back the pace and bounce of the 1980s,shook his head with dismay. "We are still suffering a loss of soil structure following last year's wet summer," he said. "This feels like trying to prepare a ground in January. The grass doesn't grow at these temperatures. It's a miasma out there."
It is not meant to be like this at Hove, where the sun has shone more often than at most grounds – and upon some of the game's most exotic players from the subcontinent, Ranjitsinhji, Duleepsinhji and Imran Khan as well as England's own CB Fry and Ted Dexter.
The late writer and poet Alan Ross, who was a regular here, associated the ground with "an odour of empire, of curry powder and whisky, retired colonels and actresses". On Friday, though, the odour was of Siberia and the best drink was brandy or steaming tea. A short time before more rain persuaded the umpires to mercy-kill the day, the committee room door opened and Jim Parks emerged.
It is difficult to count the ways Parks, 81, has served Sussex cricket: glorious batsman, leg-spinner, outstanding cover fieldsman, wicketkeeper, captain, the county's pride in 46 Test matches and its president when the championship was first won in 2003.
He has been appointed president once more, to mark the 50th anniversary of Sussex winning the inaugural Gillette Cup in 1963. He was the smiling cricketer with smiling strokes to match. And now his berry-brown face broke open once more as he shook the few hands he could find. And a little ray of sunshine finally fell upon the grey old pavilion.
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Topic: English First Class Season (Read 1003 times)