Daft, delightful and dramatic Blast finals day a joy to behold

Seven young men dressed as a netball team belt out Don’t Look Back in Anger as the Hampshire skipper instructs mid-off to move a couple of yards closer to the wicket.

A guy enduring the 30C temperatures in a full beekeeper’s costume suddenly gets up and starts chasing his three pals who are all dressed as bees, while the batsman at the striker’s end wanders down the pitch to prod at a piece of loose terrain.

Welcome to the mad and magnificent world of T20 Blast finals day, an unashamedly silly but brilliant occasion combining cricket, lager, fancy dress and singing, though not necessarily in that order of importance.

In terms of sporting relevance it was always miles down my list of events I was desperate to attend - indeed if you’d asked me to name past champions I would not have got beyond Kent last year.

But it had always looked like a right good laugh so when some pals who go every year asked me last autumn if I fancied going to the 2022 finals day I said yes without hesitation.

As last Saturday approached, however, my appetite waned.

It was going to be boiling hot, Surrey had somehow failed to qualify, some people had warned me the atmosphere at higher-profile T20 matches had developed a tinge of anger recently and, at my age, was I not far too old to be cavorting around in the Eric Hollies stand with thousands of hardcore drinkers?

In the end I came, I saw, I loved it. It was quite possibly the most fun I have ever had at a sporting event.

Finals day is a marathon - there are more than ten hours between the first semi-final starting and the final ending - but you would not have thought it given the passion for pints my fellow Eric Hollies occupants showed from an early stage.

But the crowd were canny as well as thirsty, spending long periods out of their seats and in the shade.

The first semi came and went with Lancashire chasing down Yorkshire’s 204. As well as fancy dress, replica football shirts were a popular choice and none more so than the white of Leeds, but there was no mass exodus after their team had been eliminated.

From then on the innings totals got progressively worse, and in the second semi Hampshire’s pinpoint bowling attack suppressed Somerset impressively as the beer flowed and the atmosphere cranked up.

Tension, a threat of simmering violence? Not a bit of it. Instead everyone just got a little more daft in the most harmless possible way.

The crowd would home in on anyone in costume making their way from the bar to their seat, leading to chants like “Have you ever seen a vicar drink a pint?” whereupon the chap dressed as a vicar would willingly neck his beer in one and put the empty glass on his head to raucous cheers.

A ludicrous conga comprising over a hundred people dressed in every kind of costume imaginable broke out, four men dressed as Beatles, complete with inflatable guitars, started a drunken rendition of Yellow Submarine, and all the while the cricket went on.

I may have missed something but there was no sign at all of the bad drunk who can’t handle his beer and wants to fight everyone, nor did the chanting veer into the obscene.

And by the time the final came to its crazy conclusion, with Hampshire having to bowl the last ball again having celebrated victory under a canopy of exploding fireworks because it was a no-ball, everyone was transfixed by the action in the middle.

What I’m trying to say here is if you ever fancied Blast finals day you should go. Edgbaston, a ground I associate with Asif Din, Geoff Humpage and the rest of the 1980s Warwickshire team going back to when I was obsessed with county cricket, is a superb ground and the stewards deserve huge praise for making the occasion what it is.

Those directing spectators did so politely and with a smile, and the task of keeping thousands of well-oiled blokes in fancy dress under control was done with a low-profile approach that ensured none of the unnecessary confrontations we see when, for example, stewards try to stop footballers celebrating goals with their fans.

My only gripe was an inexcusably poorly operated scoreboard, which failed miserably to convey the basic facts of how many runs Lancashire required from how many balls (for crying out loud, use the number of balls rather than say 3.2 overs).

Apart from that, it was a beautiful, happy day full of genuine, rather than forced, fun, and as I wandered away into the balmy evening it occurred to me just how brilliant T20 cricket is.

And how utterly pointless The Hundred is.

Rory McIlroy won't be haunted by Open near-miss

There are, of course, many strange and completely unfounded sayings in our language, but few cause me to shake my head more aggressively than the notion that “everything happens for a reason”.

It is the belief that all events can be logically explained that creates so many vehement but largely hopelessly wrong conclusions to pretty much anything that happens in the world of sport.

With depressing predictability, a Twitter search of ‘McIlroy bottler’ after the Open yielded a rich harvest of kneejerk claims that Rory McIlroy had failed to win because his courage failed him in the heat of battle.

As well as the Twitter verdict that he was an incurable coward, there was a widely-held view that he would never recover from this. I am confident both opinions are chronically incorrect.

McIlroy played a superbly controlled final round. He simply didn’t hole as many long putts as the Camerons - Smith and Young. Had neither of those two played such dazzling back nines the narrative would have been that this was a ruthless, measured victory by McIlroy.

It never does any harm, at times like this, to remember the wise words of my colleague Kevin Pullein: some things just happen.

And McIlroy will recover because all he did was not win a golf tournament. After he showed such composure on Sunday I am now more rather than less likely to back him to win a Major in 2023.

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