The Cricketer – The sadness of England’s empty grounds

This is a segment taken from an article written by Paul Edwards for The Cricketer. You can read their full article here.

My next choice is another school ground but like Downside it has staged one first-class fixture. However, while Stratton-on-the-Fosse has little hope of hosting more than the one Somerset v Glamorgan game it accommodated in 1934, Sedbergh School surely has a decent chance of adding to the match it hosted less than a year ago when Lancashire and Durham played in the shadow of the Howgill Fells.

I’ve never watched first-class cricket in a more spectacular setting in England and I doubt I could. Some compared Sedbergh to Arundel but that is like comparing the poetry of Ted Hughes to that of John Betjeman. (I like both writers very much, by the way.)

Two fells, Crook and Winder, loom over the field and photographs of the ground taken from their slopes featured in all the broadsheets late last June. The welcome we received was as warm as we get in Nottingham; the views over Baugh Fell as the sun set will stay with me as long as I can remember anything.

I suppose I will be accused of banging on about Sedbergh but that will be a small tariff indeed if I have encouraged a few more people to go there when our lives return to something like normal.