the times | Wednesday February 16 2022 2GM 3
News
The games have been fixtures of the
upper classes’ summer social calendar
for two centuries but from next season
the tradition of Eton playing Harrow
and Oxford playing Cambridge at
Lord’s will be no more.
Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) is
looking to widen the number of people
who get a chance to play on the
hallowed turf.
Eton and Harrow is the longest-run-
ning regular fixture at Lord’s, dating
back to 1805 when Lord Byron — club
foot and all — played in the first match.
Oxford have been taking on Cambridge
at the ground since 1827.
Now the MCC has decided it wants to
stage more finals of competitions at all
levels of the game at Lord’s, as well as
finding space for the shortened
versions such as The Hundred and
Middlesex’s Twenty20 fixtures. “These
decisions were not taken lightly,” a
spokesman said. “We want to extend
playing opportunities, broadening the
scope for cricketers to realise their
ambition of playing at Lord’s.”
The MCC has apparently taken heed
of a demonstration by women outside
the Grace Gates before the Varsity
match at Lord’s last year. A group called
Stump Out Sexism called on the MCC
to cancel the annual Varsity match
between Oxford and Cambridge on the
main ground until the universities
agreed to play a women’s match there
Varsity match, said: “I would prefer the
club continued with history, as that is
what makes Lord’s so special. Nobody
spoke to me about it at all.”
John Barclay, a former captain of
Eton and former MCC president, said:
“This is a disappointment but not a
surprise and understandable. When I
captained Eton in 1970, we did in fact
play at Harrow owing to problems over
the planned South Africa tour.”
The club’s cricket committee is now
chaired by Claire Taylor, the former
England player, who did not go into bat
for the retention of Eton v Harrow,
which still attracts a reasonable crowd
and good box-office takings.
The quality of cricket in the Varsity
match has declined in recent decades
and the Lord’s version of the match was
cut from three days to one in 2001, with
a four-day game between the universi-
ties alternating between Fenner’s in
Cambridge and the Parks in Oxford.
The rebuilding of the Compton and
Edrich stands has meant that the
Nursery Ground is too small to stage
these two fixtures, which suggests they
are likely to be played on school and
university grounds in future. Another
possibility is that the Varsity match
could be played at Arundel.
In 1805 Byron contributed scores of
seven and two for the losing Harrow
side. His captain, JA Lloyd, wrote:
“Byron played in the match and very
badly, too. He should never have been
in the XI.”PJ O’Rourke, the American
satirist, has died from complications
relating to lung cancer.
O’Rourke, who was 74, was
the author of many books
and a long-time panellist on a
popular comedy show on
National Public Radio,
where he played the part of
a conservative curmud-
geon to a largely liberal
audience.
does not devalue these tra-
ditions. As chairman of laws,
I tried to ensure the commit-
tee took this into account.
Maybe the committee
should reconsider the game’s
historic roots.” Griffiths
added: “Diversification does
not mean you abandon the
traditions of cricket.”
Charles Fry, a former
chairman of the MCC, who
played for Oxford against
Blofeld’s Cambridge in theBehind the story
Old boys are
stumped by
loss of Lord’s
too. This summer there will be Oxford
v Cambridge Twenty20 matches for
both men and women on the same day
in June. “The universities will contest a
double-header, with both the men’s and
women’s matches taking place on the
main ground for the first time,” the
spokesman said.
The decision to stop the games at
Lord’s from next year has left some of
the MCC’s 18,500 members, who were
not consulted, upset by further erosion
of tradition at the home of cricket.
Henry Blofeld, the cricket commen-
tator who has played in both fixtures,
said: “I suppose the ‘antis’ will be cheer-
ing and old farts like me will be sad. It is
inevitable with the way that society has
moved.”
Robert Griffiths QC, who was edu-
cated at Oxford and who was a commit-
tee member for nearly 20
years, said: “I am surprised
and somewhat saddened
by this decision.
“When I was on the
committee, the consensus
was that these two fixtures
were emblematic and
symbolic in reflecting the
traditions of the game and
the spirit in which it
should be played.
“A part of the ‘Spirit of
Cricket’, which the club
promotes, is to reflect the
traditions. I hope the
dropping of these fixturesIvo Tennant
Pupils from Eton and Harrow have been coming to see their sides play at Lord’s since 1805 — but won’t be able to next yeard
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BALAMY; HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGEScompared with
Harrow’s 54. Notable
alumni of the fixture
include the former
Conservative prime
minister Sir Alec
Douglas-Home, who
scored 66 runs and
took four wickets for
37 for Eton in 1922.
The event has
always been popular,
making national
headlines in the 19th
century. The 2008
game attracted more
spectators than
usually seen at
Middlesex countygames. The varsity
match, which was
founded by Charles
Wordsworth, a
nephew of the poet
William, has been
where some of the
world’s best players
honed their craft.
Michael Atherton,
the former England
captain, twice played
for Cambridge.
Twelve years earlier
Imran Khan, the
Pakistan all-rounder,
and now the country’s
prime minister, played
for Oxford.A
fter Covid
meant
crowds
were
banned
from the home of
cricket for more than
a year, the first
opportunity to return
was not a Middlesex
county game or an
England Test but a
match between the
public schools
(Laurence Sleator
writes).
Eton, the holders,
lead the standings
with 60 winsPJ O’Rourke, globetrotting master of the one-liner, dies aged 74
“I’m afraid it’s true,” his colleague
Peter Sagal, host of Wait, Wait, Don’t
Tell Me said on Twitter, describing
him as a “dear friend”.
“Most well-known people
try to be nicer in public
than they are in private
life,” Sagal said. “PJ was
the only man I knew to be
the opposite. He was a
deeply kind and gener-
ous man who pretended
to be a curmudgeon for
public consumption.”
O’Rourke will be
remembered for his one-lin-
ers. During the Balkan wars,he wrote “I watched as Serbian Chetnik
nationalists tried to take the village of
Golubic from Bosnian-Herzegovinian
Muslims. The unspellables were shoot-
ing the unpronounceables.”
On reluctantly backing Hillary Clin-
ton against Donald Trump in 2016, he
said: “She’s wrong about absolutely
everything, but she’s wrong within nor-
mal parameters.”
He was equally dismissive about his
own profession: “One of the problems
with being a writer is that all of your idi-
ocies are still in print somewhere. I
strongly support paper recycling.”
Born in Ohio, O’Rourke would
describe a childhood spent shootingsquirrels with slingshots and torment-
ing elderly neighbours, in his book, The
Baby Boom: How it Got That Way... And
It Wasn’t My Fault.
But it was also a difficult childhood.
His father died when PJ was nine and
his mother “remarried not wisely”, he
told this newspaper in 2014. He began
his adventures in journalism with the
satirical magazine Harry. Later he
became a Rolling Stone foreign corre-
spondent, pitching up in war zones and
rebellions — trips he recalled in his
2000 travelogue Holidays in Hell.
He was married briefly to Amy
Lumet, the daughter of the film-maker
Sidney Lumet. He met his second wife,Tina, at a bar in Washington DC. The
arrival of three children did not soften
his political views but made him “less
strident”, he said.
He lived in a sprawling house deep in
the New Hampshire countryside, on a
hilltop overlooking Mount Monadon-
ock. There he wrote in a large office
above a garage, with a large sitting
room, like that of a hunting lodge, in
which he entertained visitors.
Sagal said he had “devoted himself”
to friends and family “in a way that
would have totally ruined his shtick had
anyone ever found out”. Sagal added:
“His work was wonderful. His heart was
even better. I will miss him terribly.”Will Pavia New York
PJ O’Rourke leaves behind
a wife and three children