I took the train to Tunbridge Wells yesterday from Charing Cross - a snip at £10 - to watch Kent play Leicestershire in the LV County Championship Division Two league. Leicestershire languish at next-to-bottom with 50 points from six games whilst their opponents Kent are actually at the bottom of the league with 43 points also from six matches.
It's not that I am a Kent supporter but having lived there for the past 13 years (as an MP for Sittingbourne & Sheppey) I have become attached to it but Essex is always the county side I look for in the morning (actually hardly anyone covers the County championship any more and it is easier to tune into Apps and online bloggers).
I was joined at Tunbridge by Roger Truelove, my dear friend from Sittingbourne - indeed it had been his idea that we should freeze to death (it was a two-sweater day) watching county cricket whilst chewing over Barcelona, Charlton and the Labour party.
Kent had a surprisingly good day finishing with 376-3 though two of their cricketers will have destroyed the changing rooms in the process. First to do so would have been captain Key who was out to a lame caught and bowled when 96 and then Northeast who was looking elsewhere when trapped LBW at 99. The day belonged to Denly, tipped by Botham and Truelove as a possible England player when Kent were a better side, who scored 143 before falling to the menacing (well only menacing for 4 overs at a time) Matthew Hoggard.
Like professional rugby union, where I watch a litany of players strung across the pitch and endless boring melees, I know longer understand what professional cricket in England is for. At Tunbridge, a ground owned by the county council, less than a thousand people turned up - this on a bank-holiday weekend. Will the bubble burst for 20:20 and 50:50 - who knows but as my Dad would have said to me "it's not cricket son".