It's time to go... England, plus a tale of two SCGs

For a few minutes I actually felt a bit sorry for England last night when they were failing against Bangladesh. I know, who’s that girl? What was she thinking? I have a terrible bleeding heart, but England? I put it down to the fact that I think of people like Buttler who’ve played in the Big Bash, and Broad for that matter, as a bit less English than the rest. I would have said the same of Morgan once upon a time, but he has so thoroughly assumed the mantle (= smelly old dressing gown) of the Glum English Captain I can no longer distinguish him from the rest. Plus I think Jordan’s run-out call was pretty rough. I snapped out of it before the end and normal prejudice resumed (thank you, Kathy Lette, I’ll have my keyboard back now). And prejudice aside, England have just been terrible, end of story, there is no bad luck or injustice in them not making the finals. Au contraire. Bangladesh, you guys rock and your cuddle mosh was an ode to joy. Thy enchantments bind together indeed.

I watched the game against Sri Lanka on Sunday and I’m a bit appalled at how little I remember about it, even though I thought it was a good game at the time. Something something MAXWELL GOES OFF something something SANGA TAKES US ON something something something we won. Some fitness stuff on both sides. In that regard, I have to say I don’t see Michael Clarke on this team even if fitness wasn’t an issue. It’s purely a 'vibe' call – what, you want me to look at performance? – but he seems out of place among all of the T20 natives. The question might be moot in any case.

I enjoyed seeing Xavier Doherty, mainly because a 10-year-old friend got a lovely photo with him at an ODI in the tri-series so he gets the ‘I know him, he’s nice to kids’ tick of approval. That’s one of the perks of being in the Members' Reserve and that’s my segue to that story.

By the end of the first week of 2015 I had written three letters of complaint. In return I received a) a full refund, b) three tickets in the Members' Reserve as guests of the SCG trust for the first ODI in the Tri-Series against England and c) a personal email from Adam Spencer. Never mind the reasons for the complaints. I had my reasons.

I have sometimes thought that a drawback of sitting in the old members' stands at the SCG is not being able to see the old members' stands at the SCG. When you can see the sunset and skyline behind them at an evening game, it’s really an iconic Sydney moment. In terms of advantages, well, yes, I can see that it would also be pleasant to sit IN the nice heritage buildings during a game, as I’ve done myself not during a game. Apart from that I’ve mainly seen the upsides in terms of position, position, position and full-strength beer. Those were more innocent times.

The experience started at home with close scrutiny of the SCG dress code. I even rang them to clear up an ambiguity in their specifications regarding sandals (yes for women, absolutely not for men (“if we see toes, the answer is no”)). I cannot tell you how much comfort and guidance I found in the Members’ Look Book, settling on a combination of the practicality of page 3 with the attitude of page 7.

You go through the gates and there is the actual World Cup with which you can have your picture taken. Taking your seats in the Ladies Stand, you see it has not only olde worlde charm but the mod con of large flat screen TVs showing the full Channel 9 coverage. You receive little ‘reserved’ stickers to attach to your seats so you don’t lose them when you go to get some full-strength beer. The players are warming up in front of you.

It goes on. While I was surprised to find the same old junk at the food counter inside the stand, with mark up of about $1, you serve yourself from a sort of heated display stand. I stood before rows of buckets of hot chips I could reach out and touch and looked uncertainly at the girl behind the counter, “Can I... I... help myself?”, I asked with cautious wonder, like a Victorian waif brought in from the cold who doesn’t dare believe her luck. “Help yourself and meet me at the cash register” she said, a little flirtatiously. She’s smiling, relaxed, she asks me how my day has been, not the first or last to do so.

During the innings break, we took a wander. The SCG museum was open, a great collection, something for all ages and just the right size for the length of the intermission. We went into the new stand and saw a counter where you could help yourself to free sunscreen from big pump packs. There were flasher catering options there – craft beer and we saw more than one person walk by with fresh prawns. As we left and strolled among gardens and statues, children gambolling on the tennis courts, it hit me: this is a utopia, a vision of a perfect society. Space, time, amenity. Luxe, calme, volupté. No unsightly men’s toes. As if to underline the point, in the charming pink 50s bathroom I entered a stall with a single line of graffiti on the back of the door: “Make love and listen to the music”. In another stall, another lone exhortation: “Eat more pussy.”

It was a bit like one of those episodes of Star Trek where they land on a planet with green lawns and free love and blissful people in togas, but there’s a secret catch like the death penalty for walking on the grass. Here it’s more of a toe thing – seriously, as we came in we walked past a man who’d been stopped and who was testily insisting his shoes were indeed “enclosed” despite the side vents; you knew it would not end well – but really it’s the uncomfortable awareness that the utopia depends on exclusion and is priced to that end. And what other criteria for exclusion could you use, a personality test? This is how clubs work. And it’s not like the people in the members’ stands were all awful old boys or in Look Book outfits. Most people seemed ordinary and nice, just like you and me! The most bothering thing was the access members’ kiddies get to the players. There are a couple of ‘family’ bays next to the members' stands which I now realise are placed there for this reason, so that some pleb kids at least can be included in the players’ walk around the fence to sign autographs and have photos taken after the game. But how do the parents on the other side of the ground explain why the players don’t come over?

There’s an irony in the fact that as compensation for a shabby experience on the Other Side of the ground, I was offered an experience that highlighted just how shabby the other side is. I looked over to the stand I’d been in for the New Year’s Test and thought of the bunker-like food areas around the back, the concrete, the queues, the sweaty shuffling and jostling like some Eastern Bloc propaganda film. Could I bear to go back there? I could of course, the very next week for a BBL game and there was no undue suffering. But I did look at the sun setting over the members stand in a different light, like a shimmering Shangri-La, and I didn’t feel sorry for the people there who couldn’t see it.