Sounds of summer at The Parks

Giles Smith on a rare rain-free start to the new cricket season

A major shock on the first day of the 1995 cricket season: rain didn't stop play. In fact, as a baffled crowd formed mid-morning in Oxford University's The Parks, the weather was performing an uncannily accurate impression of a summer's day.

The sun shone. Small, white, distinctly unthreatening clouds came together and dispersed on a background of pure blue.

Occasionally a swallow dived for low flying insects. Even approaching the ground before the game began, you could hear that most evocative of summer sounds - the gentle clop of frisbee in dog's mouth.

The only umbrellas in evidence were two of the large, fringed yellow variety poised over the garden furniture outside the beer tent. It was almost possible to overlook the arctic wind which intermittently razored the pitch from east to west.

On the steps up to the pavilion, blazered club members shook their heads in disbelief and declared the conditions "phenomenal''.

The umpires walked out at 11.28 to a smattering of applause followed shortly by the Oxford side, desperately trying to get their hands warm.

At 11.30 precisely, Durham's Mike Roseberry and Mark Saxelby opened the batting. More significantly, 10 minutes earlier in the beer tent, four students had opened the drinking with a round of bitters in plastic glasses. This was the clearest sign that the new season was underway.

The first appeal of the season went up at 11.45, the entire Oxford side joining in fruity unison, impressing the crowd if not the umpire.

The first wicket (Saxelby) fell at midday. And the first mad man in the crowd to remove his shirt did so shortly after two. Back from its winter break, the crowd had no difficulty remembering how to be a cricket crowd.

In the pavilion seating sat the serious observers , their shopping holdalls brimming with flasks, sandwich boxes and cricketing tomes - Wisden, Playfair, Who's Who etc.

On the benches and the grass beyond the boundary rope a crowd of some 200 sat or sprawled, some quite flagrantly, tempting fate by wearing sunhats though, in truth, when the wind blew, a bobble hat would have been more appropriate .

This may be Oxford but there aren't too many dreaming spheres visible from the cricket pitch.

In fact, the park is fringed on one side by some rather prominent aspiring tower blocks. On the opposite side, though, park land rolls away to the river through a plain of daffodils and various groves echoing with birdsong an English idyll.

Just occasionally the real world, or something like it, intruded. A man in shellsuit trousers and a cricket jumper jerked out of his deckchair and set off into the trees shouting into a cellular phone about an unpaid bill and some unanswered letters.

More widely in the crowd, stress levels were low. Some watched, some didn't. A girl sat on a bench reading Gide in French. Two students lay on a blanket sifting through course work. Cricket attracts both those who wish to watch the game, and those who want only to enjoy their proximity to it, while completely ignoring it. There must be few other sporting occasions on which you will find spectators face down asleep - outside Endsleigh League football, that is.

Only the scoreboard showed some signs of early season rust. When the teams walked out it read mysteriously Last Man: one. At the end of the first over the man inside was on the phone to the pavilion, shouting: "Who's the bowlers?" But shortly after the scoreboard settled down and enjoyed a magnificently undefeated spell right through to tea.

By then Roseberry had advanced to 84 and looked set to bat on through what remained of the day and then through the rest of the season. In these surroundings there were many who would have happily stayed to watch him all the way.

Match reports, scoreboard, page 35