Lunch at Sussex
Yesterday I returned for the second day of Sussex v Kent and lunch at which Martin Corry spoke for the Wooden Spoon charity. Any notion of a dodgy wicket was dispelled by Kent amassing 496 in which virtually all the lower order contributed. Sussex closed at 42-2 trailing Kent by 274 runs. The game may well be over by tea today. At least young Tom Haines’ debut was not marred by a pair as he scored 11 and Chris Nash is still at the crease. In the absence of Ed Joyce ,Matt Machen and Luke Wright the batting line up looks brittle.
There was a lunch in the hospitality area for the Wooden Spoon a rugby based charity to help under-privileged children. It was sold out and nearly £7000 was raised. It seems churlish to say but I do find these lunches too long. By 3-15 we still had an auction and desert course ahead of us. Martin Corry was an entertaining speaker. Martin Bayfield, another tall and burly forward of that era, has already carved out a media career and this Martin, who played in the outstanding Leicester side of Martin Johnson and Dean Richards. has the humour and delivery to do the same. We live in a world where much is abbreviated, where attention span is deemed to be shorter, so it’s surprising the these formulaic lengthy lunches of the game of Heads and Tails, speech and auction – you can also have a q & a and comedian – still survives and a more truncated format has not developed. In this case there was a 20 minute delay after the main course was eaten during which Martin Corry might have spoken earlier. Still good money was raised ….
Though fundamentally a football and cricket man, I do follow rugby and so I invited Derek Williams to the lunch. I do not know him well but had the feeling the reason for his polite decline was that he is not intuitively an enthusiast fueled by alcohol. “Win or lose, on the booze” remarked Marin Corry and I wondered if any teetotaler rugby player would find that an insurmountable barrier to acceptance by the dressing room.
