I should have come yesterday.
I’d had a feeling on Thursday that Friday might be a special day at Cricket Central. Tasmania had made 245 in their first innings against New South Wales, and something about the way the Sheffield Shield match was developing made me think it would be worth watching.
I hadn’t expected Ollie Davies to score 253.
Davies is one of my favourite New South Wales and Sydney Sixers players, and I’d missed an extraordinary innings. Jack Edwards had made a century too. Instead, I was arriving on Saturday morning, having left home in the rain and hoping there would be some cricket to watch.
The weather had begun clearing on the train, with blue sky appearing from the west. Play started only fifteen minutes late, and I bought a coffee and sat in the courtyard, watching the groundsmen and players finish their preparations.
Cricket Central is an unusual place to watch first-class cricket. It sits beside the busy Silverwater Road, surrounded by the administration and training buildings of New South Wales cricket. There’s no traditional grandstand, just grass, benches, a courtyard and a few small aluminium stands.
It’s a high-performance centre with a rather pleasant cricket ground in the middle of it.
After coffee I moved to a bench beside the boundary fence and got talking to an older cricket supporter. We discussed Australia’s bewildering performance against South Africa the previous night, then turned our attention to the match in front of us.
New South Wales added a few runs and declared at exactly 500.
My companion went his way, and I went looking for another coffee and something to eat. There was a sausage sizzle operating, so I bought a sausage sandwich and moved to one of the small aluminium stands to watch Tasmania begin their second innings.
The seats were still wet from the morning rain. Before long, so was I.
It didn’t matter much. The clouds were disappearing, the sun was becoming surprisingly strong, and it was warm enough to sit there without worrying about a wet backside.
Tasmania weren’t scoring quickly, but Sean Abbott was bowling beautifully. His first eight overs cost just five runs, with several convincing appeals for caught behind and LBW. The batters were surviving rather than scoring, and Abbott kept finding enough movement to make each delivery worth watching.
The crowd watching the match was small, but plenty of young cricketers were arriving with their equipment for training in the nets. Around the boundary were people who appeared to be family and friends of the players, occasionally receiving a wave or thumbs-up from the field. There were young families spending the morning together, and then people like me, willing to turn up wherever there’s a good game of cricket being played.
The Sheffield Shield match was taking place alongside the normal activity of Cricket Central, with some people watching professional cricket while others were busy practising their own.
The sound of the ball coming off the bat carried clearly around the ground, sometimes with a slight echo from the surrounding buildings. Silverwater Road provided a constant background of traffic, but never quite overwhelmed it. It wasn’t exactly quiet, just quiet enough.
By the first break I’d left the aluminium seats behind and found a patch of grass under the trees. I lay down, did a few stretches and rested for a while. The morning that had started wet and grey had turned into a warm, sunny afternoon.
This was my first live cricket of the new season, back at the ground where I think I’d finished the last one.
I couldn’t stay much longer. I had Monster Jam at Sydney Olympic Park, including the Pit Party, and a bus to catch. I wouldn’t be back tomorrow either, so the rest of the match would have to be followed on the Cricket Australia app.
Tasmania were still batting, and the young cricketers were coming and going from the nets.
I gathered my things and headed towards the bus stop for Sydney Olympic Park.
