LONDON: During the third Test between England and India last week, Jasprit Bumrah’s bowling shoes and KL Rahul’s shirt were placed in a distinct corner of the iconic Lord’s museum, home to memorabilia which traces the evolution of the game.“It’s history in action,” says Neil Robinson, head of heritage of collections at the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), of the bowling boots that got Bumrah his five-wicket haul and the shirt Rahul wore for his second century here. Then there was the ball that Joe Root caught to break the world record for most number of catches.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Robinson has been here for 19 years. He claims only Australian players take active interest in the museum. They bring their families and friends for an engaging tour a day or two before a Test match. “I don’t have a great sense of it, but maybe there’s a bit of lack of education about cricket history. People don’t necessarily read cricket books as avidly,” says Robinson. “But when they come in and see the history on display, it changes people. It gives them a sense of the importance of the long history of the game and of their own individual part in it. That’s why you see people donating after performances here.”
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Lord’s has an aura. You are almost compelled to ensure you are not upsetting the formal tradition of the venue. Yet, winds of change are blowing at the venue which is branded the ‘home of cricket’. Recently, British conservative politician Norman Tebbit — he of the infamous ‘Tebbit test’, or ‘cricket test’, designed to highlight the perception that South Asian and Caribbean immigrants and their children didn’t necessarily support the England cricket team — passed away.
“I don’t think MCC really took a position on that. This happened in the late 1980s, early 1990s. MCC was no longer in control of the world game and English cricket. At the time, the main diversity and inclusion issue on MCC’s desk was probably the issue of women’s membership,” Robinson says while mentioning how MCC had to change its vision from English-only and be sensitive towards changing demographies. Inclusivity had to top the priority list. “For a long time, our focus has been on collecting items relating to English cricket. In the last 20 years, the demographics of visitors to London have changed dramatically. Obviously, the demographics of the UK population have changed dramatically as well over the last 50, 60 years. So we’ve had to react to that,” Robinson said.“People from all over the world think of us as the home of cricket. We want everyone who comes to Lord’s — wherever they’re coming from — to feel that their cricketing culture, their cricketing history, is celebrated as much as anybody else’s. That’s why the long room has portraits of Kapil Dev, Bishan Bedi, Muttiah Muralitharan and Brian Lara,” he added. This is why it now celebrates Sourav Ganguly’s shirtless stunt on the Lord’s balcony in 2002, in the form of a mannequin preserved in the workroom.
“If you speak to the pavilion manager, he’d probably tell you that it’s not something he’d want to see happen again. But as a museum curator, it’s a great story. It’s usually on a mannequin in the workroom. Tourists are immediately drawn to it because it’s an iconic moment,” Robinson mentions. Robinson refers to the infamous Bodyline series to justify the call to go against the grain. “There are a lot of things that happen in sport that you might say shouldn’t have happened, but they did. It’s part of the history of the game. A classic example would be ‘Bodyline’, which ended up in a political rift between two nations. It wasn’t a great thing from a geopolitical point of view. Now, it’s an important reference point in the history of the game,” Robinson says.Lord’s has changed a lot. It’s now all modern architecture with modern technology and facilities. At the same time, the MCC is trying hard to retain as much of its earliest traditions as possible, like maintaining the pavilion and its old-world charm. Lord’s is still trying hard to stay true to being the ‘home of cricket’.
