The Lawrence & Lovatt Broadsheet
Episode 3: June 9th 2026
The Lord’s Test Match
This year’s first test match at Lord’s started a little later than previous years. It is usually May and more often than not, is a day for the tweed rather than the linen! May though brought a heatwave with temperatures in the mid-thirties. Amateur cricketers went from wearing three sweaters for the first couple of league games of the season, to resembling Allan Donald in the 1990s, covered in zinc and sun block. We did expect though the wicket at Lord’s, after all this wonderful weather, to be an absolute belter!
The wicket was not a belter! To be fair, the heatwave subsided and early June provided a deluge of rain which would certainly have impacted the surface and preparation. And as a spectator and England fan, the pitch provided some wonderful entertainment. You could not leave your seat. There were no flat periods where the game drifted, it was electric throughout. But it was very hard to bat, as the ball seamed prodigiously with very unpredictable bounce. Four different bowlers took 5-fers.
For those that had tickets for days one and two, there will have been no complaints. For those with tickets on days 3, 4 or 5, they will have felt short-changed. Day 3 was pretty much a washout – nobody’s fault. However, had it not been, it is unlikely that there would have been much play beyond lunch.
The short test matches in Australia were a result of indifferent, nay poor, cricket: this was the result of a poor pitch. Baz McCullum refers to these short matches as ‘shoot-outs’. England seem pretty good at them. In Melbourne over Christmas, we prevailed. And now here. They are exciting, definitely, but as a showpiece for proper test match cricket, a fair contest between bat and ball, the ebbs and flows, the highs and lows, and the way this game can reveal and test every facet of an individual’s character, two day test matches need to be avoided. Furthermore, there’s the economics. The revenue from 2.5 days as opposed to 5 days. Treasurers from all sorts of organisations, from the ECB to the Spicey Wrap seller in the food village, will have been furious.
This was the 150th time a test match has been played at Lord’s. It will be remembered but a Ben Stokes or Jacob Bethell century etched into our memory banks would have been that much sweeter.