Lord's needs lessons in humility

Rudeness is neither a fundamental right nor a divine prerogative. As a qualification for employment at Lord’s though, it might come in very handy. You won't see it on their mission statement but Enron did not pledge accounting forgery either. I have been travelling around the world, covering cricket for 12 years now and I largely enjoy coming to England but Lord’s leaves me staggered. Rudeness, like a boa constrictor, has coiled itself around courtesy here, civility is gasping for breath.

You know what to expect at Lord’s. As a young reporter in 1990, I was once kept standing outside the Grace Gates for an hour when I had come with an appointment to pick up my media pass, but this time they outdid themselves. Like Sergei Bubka, they stand alone and tall in their field.

On the third day of the npower Test between England and India, having finished a studio show at half past nine in the evening, I was walking out with three colleagues from the North gate. I must have stepped out no more than a couple of feet when my mobile phone rang. A young kid in a studio in Mumbai had been waiting to record a radio piece and since there was still some traffic around, I popped in again to find a quiet corner.

Out came this steward, palpably drunk, with a bottle of beer in his hand. He walked very aggressively towards me and said "Now, where do you think you are going." That was the opening, and the most polite, line. When we tried to explain that we were accredited media personnel and that we had been working late, he demanded to see the media pass.

"E..S..P..N..." he sneered. It was no use telling him that the ECB had received very substantial rights money and that we had just broadcast for eight and a half hours to India.

When I asked for an apology for his behaviour and suggested he might be in trouble for the state he was in, he said there was nothing we could do to him, that he was off duty and that he would be around for much longer than us. "In your country, you would have been beaten with a stick," he said. By now, the other steward from inside the cabin had come out and between them, they were trying to physically push us out of the gate. They had no name tags and refused to give us their names.

At this point, my colleague and our reporter on the broadcast, Gautam Bhimani, tried to take a step forward to tell him something, and I must admit voices were fairly loud by now, when he grabbed his shirt by the collar and pushed him beyond the gate. While we turned to pick him up, the gate was slammed on us and I do not exaggerate a bit when I say that it stopped a few inches short of my nose.

The Head of Public Relations came the next morning to say he was sorry for what happened, that the stewards had a different story to tell, that we should understand that there were rules to be followed and that the closed circuit could not be accessed till Tuesday.

The Deputy Chief Executive was more polite but when we asked to hear the other point of view, he told me "this is not a kangaroo court and I cannot allow my stewards to tell you their side of the story."

It is a pity that the most unwelcoming of grounds should be the face of English cricket when almost every other ground is the exact opposite. It is my thesis that Lord’s needs cricket far more that cricket needs Lord’s and that if it is denied international cricket for a couple of years, it might push it towards that outstanding human quality it knows nothing of; humility.

Courtesy: www.espnstar.com