Travelling tittle-tattle, tall tales and shameless name-dropping by Jon ‘Don’t Call Me’ Norman

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London, United Kingdom

Monday 27 November 2006

Fun times with the fun police

Well that didn't go exactly to plan.  After all the traveling, Ashes DVD Box Set watching and 2-hour national television program participation it all went a bit tits up.  As you will all know by now we lost the first Test by a mammoth 277,000 runs.  But as disappointed as I am, I'm still feeling a lot better about things than I did after Saturdays play.

I have honestly never seen a worse day's cricket in my entire life.  When Ricky Ponting decided not to enforce the follow on and bring an end to the agony he indirectly caused a mini-riot.  Because so boring was that final session, for Aussies and Brits alike, all anyone had to do to keep themselves amused was drink.

A few months before this Test started the organizers announced that they were going to stop the sale of the top strength beer within the ground.  It led to widespread protests.  In its place they sell this piss water that's about 2%.  How anyone gets drunk on this stuff is anyone's guess, although the Aussies seem to manage it.

It's precautions like this, plus the banning of musical instruments, backpacks, alcohol from outside the ground and the decision not to let the English fans sit together en masse that were brought in to stop the crowd getting too vocal in their support of the English.  There were roughly 7,000 Brits in the stadium but apart from our section they were mainly dispersed around the ground. 

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The low point was on Friday when they ejected Billy The Trumpet from the ground.  He's one of the mainstays of the Barmy army support and the decision provoked an angry response from both sets of fans.

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Now, if the cricket on show had at any stage on that Saturday been any good it wouldn't really have mattered.  As it was it stunk real bad.  Nobody was the slightest bit interested in watching Australia pile on another 200 pointless runs.  So they tried to do what all normal people do when they're bored and have fun.

Now I should let you know something about the Aussie security at these grounds.  They are nicknamed the 'Fun Police'.  All these little Hitlers do is retrieve blow up balls being knocked around the crowd and stick a knife through them.  They prevent people wearing water melons on their heads (it's an Aussie thing) from entering the ground as the fruit casing is deemed an 'offensive weapon'.  Or they chuck people out for the temerity of having a good time.  All the while they turn a blind eye to racist chants outside the ground.

It's no exaggeration that I must have seen roughly 100 people ejected from the ground in the evening session on Saturday.  Mostly Aussies, they were kicked out for the heinous crimes of standing up, taking exception to the heavy handed approach of the fun police and, oh yeah, the best of the lot.  One bloke was kicked out for trying to start a Mexican wave.

I'm not the biggest fan of the Mexican wave but to throw a 19 year old out of the ground because he's trying to spark a bit of life into proceedings struck me as pretty odd.  I also heard a story that a 6-year old Aussie kid was admonished by two burly officers for throwing a blow up ball in the air.  The sign that we read on leaving the ground today 'No ball games permitted inside the stadium' pretty much summed it up.  I'm surprised these fun police didn't chuck the English and Aussie cricketers out the ground.  Although thinking about it, it might not have been such a bad thing if they did.

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