Sussex by the Sea

19th September 2024

In between the various commitments that I had on my visit to the South East of England last week, I had a free day on the Monday. The opportunity therefore presented itself for me to take in the first day of County Championship cricket that I had seen for over five years (a Yorkshire-Essex fixture at Headingley in June 2019).

From the options open to me, I selected the opening day of Sussex versus Glamorgan at the 1st Central County Ground in Hove. It turned out to be a good choice.

I had always wanted to see a match at Hove which, as a ground, cannot be called picturesque, but is certainly full of character, not least because of its slope down wicket towards the imposing Ashdown apartment buildings at the Sea End. At times, the playing conditions can also be affected by the incoming sea frets, though this did not occur on this occasion.

Sussex are having a good season. They began the match at the top of the Second Division challenging – principally with Middlesex and Yorkshire – for one of the two promotion places. (At the time of my visit, they had also reached the Finals Day of the T20 competition the following Saturday, though they were to be defeated by Gloucestershire in the semi-final at Edgbaston). By contrast, Glamorgan were in the lower half of the division having won only one Championship fixture out of the 11 they had played.

Sussex maintained their promotion push. The visitors, put into bat, lost their first wicket in the fourth over and limped to a total score of 186 at the tea interval with only Kiran Carlson registering a half-century. The Sussex openers Tom Haines and Daniel Hughes responded with a century opening stand and the reply had reached 121 for 1 by the close of play. I thought the most impressive Glamorgan bowler was the young off-spinner Ben Kellaway, who bowled 8 neat overs on the first evening and was rewarded with Haines’s wicket. (Highly unusually, he can also bowl slow left-arm). He was to bowl over 40 overs in the innings and take five wickets, though it was to no avail. Sussex duly completed a comfortable victory – by an innings and 87 runs – on the third day.

The Sussex captain was John Simpson, the former Middlesex wicket-keeper, whom I recall seeing when he played against Yorkshire at Scarborough in 2014. He had a good match. On this first day, he kept wicket neatly, taking 4 catches, and rotated his bowlers imaginatively with 5 of the 6 used contributing at least one wicket. The following day, batting at number 7, he made 117, sharing in a double-century partnership with Tom Clark, who made 112 not out.

Simpson’s opposite number was somewhat less successful on this occasion. I commented earlier this season (“Record Breakers”, April 24th) on the Glamorgan captain Sam Northeast achieving the record first-class score at Lord’s – 335 not out against Middlesex – and noted that he had previously (in 2022) made 410 not out in an innings against Leicestershire. In this match against Sussex, he made nine in the first innings and nought in the second. The vagaries of cricket.

My ticket to the ground – £25 at the senior rate – entitled me to entry to the pavilion, where my day began with a bacon sandwich and ended with a pint of beer. The upper tier provided an excellent view of the action from square-on to the play. At the lunchbreak, I took the opportunity to look at the neat presentation inside the pavilion of the club’s history, including its honours boards and the photographs and captions of its leading players – SR Ranjitsinhji, Maurice Tate, Ted Dexter, Tony Greig, John Snow et al. The pantheon included John Wisden, who played for the county between 1845 and 1863 and whose first Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack was published a year after he retired. The brief caption for Imran Khan noted that he had been Prime Minister of Pakistan between 2018 and 2022, though it omitted his incarceration by the current regime.

For part of the afternoon’s play, I wandered around the ground to the small East stand and then to the larger Sharks Stand at long off for the batsman facing the bowling from the Sea End. The former gave the most pronounced perspective of the slope, the advantage of which, on this occasion, was given to the England pace bowler Ollie Robinson. It was not difficult to imagine being the batsman facing the likes of Snow or Imran, charging in downhill towards me, and wondering exactly what my survival strategy might be.

In the present-day safety on the other side of the boundary rope, I was in my comfort zone, of course. The crowd dispersed around the ground – a few hundred of us, perhaps – was generally of my demographic: late middle-aged or retired. Most of us watched as single observers or in the groups of two or three whose occasional quiet conversations would be interrupted by the ritual of polite applause for a boundary or a maiden over. The attendants were uniformly friendly; the electronic scoreboard was instantaneously accurate; the MC was welcoming and informative; the traditional scorecard was free from the stack outside the club shop. It was County Championship cricket on the South Coast. Sussex by the Sea.

We lost the last couple of overs due to the fading light. When the play ended for the day, I had another quick look at the photographs inside the pavilion and then left the ground to take the short walk to the sea front. On reaching it, I turned to my left and started my long straight amble towards the distant Brighton Palace Pier. Behind me in the west, the sun was beginning its descent.