LEE PAYNE

Category: Personal

  • Having a Blast: my trip to Old Trafford

    On Sunday I went to Old Trafford for the T20 Blast match between Lancashire and Durham.

    Me, my mum and her partner at Old Trafford

    A week on from England becoming world champions (I will never get tired of saying that), cricket is enjoying a boost in popularity. The Cricket Paper reports that counties have noticed an increase in ticket sales for the T20 Blast as people who maybe haven’t been to a match for a while, or indeed at all, seize the opportunity to see the game in the flesh.

    This includes – crucially – children. Most of the crowd in Manchester, which was huge for a domestic game, were families with youngsters. I’m not a big fan of kids – they are noisy, carry illnesses and can’t sit still for five minutes – but they are vitally important for the future of cricket. They all seemed to be having a great time, and that’s key. Children need to think of going to a cricket match as a normal thing to do, and something to look forward to. They will be the next generation of players and fans and will hopefully pass on their enthusiam to their own kids in years to come.

    The players warm up at Old Trafford, Manchester about an hour before the start of play

    I had been to Old Trafford before, for the Test match between England and India in 2014, and enjoyed the laid back atmosphere and friendly stewards. This makes it the ideal venue for 20 over cricket compared to, say, Lord’s which I find stuffy and inaccessible. The emphasis was on fun, with the Lancashire mascot Lanky the Giraffe dancing on the boundary before play began.

    As for the match itself, T20 is perfect for those who are unfamiliar with cricket. It’s short and sharp and you get to see plenty of big sixes and wickets. Lancashire batted first in their opening home game of the tournament and amassed 189-3, opener Steven Croft top scoring with an unbeaten 65 from 43 balls. The star of the show, however, was Australia international Glenn Maxwell. The world number one ranked all rounder in T20s hit 58 off 33 balls with four sixes. Each boundary was received with loud cheers and a burst of pop music. It was interesting to see how partisan the crowd was, a lot of the people there seemed to feel for the Lancashire cricket team the same way I feel for Norwich City Football Club. They weren’t just there to enjoy a day out, they were there to see the home side win.

    Australia international Glenn Maxwell bats for Lancashire in front of a huge crowd at Old Trafford

    Durham never looked like chasing the 190 they needed to win and were all out for 117 within 17 overs. Scott Steel had scored 58 from 46 balls but the next highest score for the visitors was 12. Lancashire won by 72 runs and a couple of run outs were enough to secure Maxwell the player of the match award.

    Maxwell played for Australia in the World Cup (having won it in 2015) so he was the main attraction for the kids. They gathered round to watch him be interviewed at the end of the match, taking photos and hoping for an autograph. The occasion was slightly lacking in big names. Both sides were packed with solid professionals and the standard was high but aside from Maxwell only D’Arcy Short, another Australian, would have been recognisable to most of the crowd. Short was not involved in the World Cup but has played for his country, as well as in T20 leagues around the world. Also on show was Keaton Jennings, who has scored a Test century for England but has otherwise struggled at the highest level and has been dropped from the most recent squad.

    Player of the match Maxwell is interviewed after Lancashire’s 72 run win

    The majority of the England players involved in the victorious World Cup campaign were getting a well deserved rest, with the seven week long tournament soon to be followed by a Test match against Ireland and the five match Ashes series against Australia. Part of me, though, wished that there could have been a way to get those stars involved in the first couple of rounds of T20 Blast fixtures to really capitalise on the current popularity of cricket in this country.

    Had those England players been available, the Lancashire side would have featured Jos Buttler and Durham’s side would have boasted Ben Stokes, who was player of the match in the World Cup final. Mark Wood is also a Durham player but is injured and out until September. It would have been fantastic for the crowd to have been able to see their new heroes, but I understand that with a packed schedule it was almost impossible. Wood and Stokes paraded the World Cup trophy around Durham’s home ground the Riverside on Saturday, as captain Eoin Morgan had done around Lord’s, where he plays for Middlesex, on Thursday. I had a faint hope that Buttler might have done the same around Old Trafford on Sunday but it was not to be.

    The T20 Blast is a fantastic product. Now in its 17th season, the crowds are big, the standard is high and overseas stars want to play in it. If some of it was on Free-to-air television instead of it all being on Sky Sports I have no doubt it would be a massive annual summer event.

    Walking away from Old Trafford, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why the authorities have felt the need to invent an entirely new format of the game to try to attract new fans. Next year will see the launch of The Hundred, a convoluted version of the game with the simplest part being one hundred balls per innings. Eight completely new teams, based around the major cities and with awful names like London Spirt and Leeds Superchargers, will take part. These teams will have to start from scratch, with none of the existing loyal following of the county sides. The only thing going for it is that some of it will be on BBC TV. It makes absolutely no sense and from what I can see it is doomed to fail.

    My visit to Manchester on Sunday was conclusive proof for me that the England and Wales Cricket Board already has everything it needs to make cricket the undisputed second sport of the nation again. I can only hope that their seemingly muddled thinking doesn’t mean they miss the opportunity.

  • England’s World Cup success can get the country into cricket again

    It was in early January 2003, just before school started again after Christmas, that I first got into cricket.

    I was 10 years old and would get up in the morning to find my dad in the living room watching the Ashes Test from Sydney on TV. On the screen, I could see Michael Vaughan batting for England and can remember thinking ‘this is great’.

    Vaughan’s strokeplay, especially his cover drive, were just so pleasing on the eye. I knew next to nothing about the sport at the time. I didn’t know England were 4-0 down in the five match series. I didn’t know the Australian team was one of the best there had ever been. But I was fascinated by this Englishman artfully approaching these little red missiles being fired at him and making several Australians chase after them. I didn’t want to stop watching.

    Watching Michael Vaughan bat got me into cricket

    I would say I love football and cricket equally. Thankfully, with the end of the football season signalling the start of the cricket season in this country I rarely have to choose between the two. If I had to pick just one, however, it would be cricket.

    So much can happen at any moment in a cricket match. Every ball is an event. There are so many ways for the batsman to score runs and so many ways for the bowler to get him out. Football tends to be mostly tedious until the last ten minutes of a game. And cricket is so aesthetically pleasing – it certainly takes the crown of ‘the beautiful game’ for me. Sorry, Pele.

    I also love how cricket is so incredibly difficult to be good at. You’ve got three disciplines to tackle and it’s hard to be proficient at any of them. The chances of being good at all three are next to zero. International cricketers seem almost superhuman compared to mere mortals like me. Just look (below) at this catch England’s Ben Stokes took in an Ashes Test in 2015.

    Cricket was the new cool in 2005 when England won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years, beating an immensely strong Australia 2-1 in what is unlikely ever to usurped as the best Test series of all time. The game was on the front and back pages of the newspapers and 7.4 million people tuned in to watch the end of the final Test live on Channel 4.

    Since then, the England cricket team has only been visible on live television to Sky Sports subscribers. Prohibitively expensive to many and not likely to be stumbled upon by the casual viewer, cricket dropped out of the national consciousness and the numbers of people playing and watching sank. The conclusion of the final Ashes Test in 2009, only on Sky Sports, was watched by less than two million.

    These are the reasons why this year’s World Cup has been so important for cricket in the UK. The world’s best players have been competing on our doorsteps for nearly seven weeks. Fan parks have opened the tournament up to thousands of newcomers. And to top it all, England came into it as favourites and have reached the final.

    England thrashed Australia in the semi-finals to reach the Cricket World Cup final for the first time since 1992

    It’s hard to put into words what England winning the World Cup would do for the game. How often can we say that England are world champions in any sport? With the match against New Zealand at Lord’s being the first time the England team can be seen live on terrestrial television for 14 years – it’s going to be live on Channel 4 – this is a massive opportunity for cricket to engage with the wider public once again.

    I’d love for a kid to catch sight of cricket on the TV for the first time on Sunday and be captured by it in the way I was sixteen years ago. For Jonny Bairstow or Joe Root to inspire in the way that Michael Vaughan did. After all, success makes you popular.

    • The Cricket World Cup final between England and New Zealand at Lord’s will be live on Channel 4 and Sky Sports on Sunday 14th July, with the first ball at 10.30am.

  • One year on: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino by Arctic Monkeys

    Arctic Monkeys
    Left to right: Jamie Cook (guitar), Nick O’Malley (bass), Alex Turner (lead singer), Matt Helders (drums)

    Arctic Monkeys are my all time favourite band. No one else has ever made music that has spoken to me in quite the way they have. I own all six of the albums they have released to date, I know every one of their songs and the brilliant lyrics of their frontman Alex Turner have accompanied me through my highest of highs and lowest of lows.

    On 11th May 2018, the Sheffield band released Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, their first new material for nearly five years. It was a completely different sound, led by the piano, which left some fans used to them thrashing on guitars upset. I loved it, however, and love it even more now as it reaches its first anniversary. I’ll tell you why.

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a collection of eleven songs loosely based around the idea that the human race has colonised the moon and opened a hotel and casino complex on it. Yet, the aesthetic feels like the 1970s. You need only to look at the video for the title track to see what I mean.

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is meant to feel like a place you can go and spend a while. Tranquility Base was the name given to the area of the moon that Apollo 11 landed on in July 1969.


    I liked the idea of naming [the album] after a place, because to me records that I’ve been in love with and continue to be in love with feel like they’re places that you can go for a while.

    Alex Turner, Arctic Monkeys

    For me, it absolutely achieves that aim. I have listened to the album hundreds of times, often when I’ve got into my car after a tedious day of pushing trolleys around a supermarket car park. Heading to Tranquility Base for 41 minutes is a great way to escape the mundanities of real life.

    In these days of cherry-picking individual songs on streaming services, it was a bold move to release a proper album – a collection of songs designed to be listened to as a whole, in a particular order. The end of One Point Perspective actually blends in to the beginning of American Sports to emphasise this.

    The album is full of quotable lines. You get the feeling Turner was enjoying himself writing it, relishing the freedom its other-worldly setting was affording him. The genre of science fiction is often used as a method of commenting on our own world, as if taking a step back and looking at it from a different perspective offers the opportunity to say things you might not feel comfortable with otherwise.

    Turner does this in the song Golden Trunks. He had always steered clear of politics in his lyrics, but with this album he felt able to have a little stab at it.


    The leader of the free world
    Reminds you of a wrestler wearing tight golden trunks

    Golden Trunks

    I don’t know about you, but I get a rather unpleasant image of Donald Trump in my head after hearing that.

    Music is saturated with love songs. Turner wanted to give them a swerve after several of them appeared on Everything You’ve Come To Expect, the 2016 album he made with his side project The Last Shadow Puppets. A couple made their way onto this album, though, with the closing track The Ultracheese being the most gushing. It is this song that contains my favourite line of the whole album.


    Oh, the dawn won’t stop weighing a tonne
    I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done
    But I haven’t stopped loving you once

    The last lines of the album’s closing track The Ultracheese

    Whenever I hear that, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s such a great observation about love – we mess up sometimes, but we never stop loving.

    In September last year, I saw Arctic Monkeys on their UK tour at the Sheffield Arena. It was a dream come true, seeing my heroes in the flesh in their hometown. The aesthetic they had created with the album carried on perfectly – the stage design, the clothes the band wore and even their hairstyles complemented Tranquility Base wonderfully.

    Wide shot of the stage at Sheffield Arena as Arctic Monkeys performed
    Seeing Arctic Monkeys live at Sheffield Arena in September 2018

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a brilliant, mature, visceral album that I will be listening to for years to come. I hope you give it a try.

    Track list (click on song to listen)

    1. Star Treatment
    2. One Point Perspective
    3. American Sports
    4. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
    5. Golden Trunks
    6. Four Out Of Five
    7. The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip
    8. Science Fiction
    9. She Looks Like Fun
    10. Batphone
    11. The Ultracheese

    Now watch Arctic Monkeys perform the opening track, Star Treatment, live at TRNSMT festival in Glasgow from July 2018.

  • ‘No one cares’ – the infuriating misogyny on the internet

    I know I shouldn’t.

    I know I shouldn’t rise to it. I know they are on the wind up. Looking for a reaction. Reeling me in.

    But I just can’t help it.

    I’m referring to people on Twitter who reply to any – and I mean any – post about women’s sport with the words ‘no one cares’.

    A blokey bloke claiming to speak for every man in Britain

    It’s incredibly irritating. It’s so fundamentally incorrect, so infuriatingly dismissive and so annoyingly pompous. Who are they to speak for everyone? They might not care themselves, fine, but they don’t speak for me.

    Personally, if I don’t care about something I don’t spend my time commenting on tweets about it making it clear to everyone that I am not interested. I like most sports but golf and Formula 1 leave me cold. I am well aware that millions of people love them, though, so I leave them to it. It’s the way these blokes – and it is always blokes – desperately need to tell everyone that they don’t care about women’s sport that gets to me.

    Another bloke

    It is most often ‘no one cares’. That’s the textbook blokey casually sexist reply. Sometimes it’s a snide comment on the size of the crowds at a women’s sporting event. Sometimes it’s more explicit, with suggestions that the players ‘should be in the kitchen’ or that there would be more interest if the players were in bikinis.

    Joking or not, comments like these are wrong. It’s 2019 now. Shouldn’t we have moved on from these tired cliches? Jokes require an element of humour, and there’s nothing funny about them.

    Women’s sport is in a fantastic place right now, and getting better all the time. As I write this, the England football team are on the verge of winning the SheBelieves Cup. The England cricket team are world champions, having beaten India in front of a crowd of around 25,000 at Lord’s in 2017. And who could forget the Great Britain hockey team’s thrilling gold medal at Rio 2016?

    England’s women’s cricket team won the World Cup in 2017

    When England’s women played the Netherlands in the semi-finals of Euro 2017, 4 million people watched it on Channel 4. This was the biggest UK audience for a women’s football match to date, and the match got double the average audience of that day’s episode of Celebrity Big Brother. This is solid proof that ‘no one cares’ is plainly wrong.

    This is not about wanting to fight a battle on behalf of women. This just really irritates me. When I’ve engaged with the people who make these comments, I’m usually met with denial. Nobody cares mate. These facts you’re telling me are made up. Sometimes I’m told that I’m in the ‘PC (politically correct) brigade’. I’m not. It’s not PC to not hate, or be frightened of, women. Because that’s what these men are. They will deny it until they are red in the face but they’re are afraid that these women playing sport threatens their masculinity.

    Once, I was given the bizarre response that I am only defending women’s sport because I think it would make women want to sleep with me. I mean, really? How shallow can you be? That one wasn’t even worthy of a reaction.

    This bloke can only imagine caring about women’s sport if it was in the pursuit of sex

    I felt like writing this because I am sick of calling out the ‘no one cares’ blokes on Twitter. I thought I’d write very clearly why they are wrong and link them to it in future.

    Women’s sport is on the rise and that should be celebrated. It doesn’t need some bloke on social media dismissing it. Let’s not let them.

  • Walking the line

    Three things I love are London, walking and disused railway lines. That makes this book seem like it was almost written with me in mind.

    2017-10-26 11.49.32

    The morning after the Arsenal v Norwich match I decided to do one of the walks in the book, starting at Finsbury Park.

    The park itself often hosts big name musicians. In 2014, my favourite band Arctic Monkeys played two gigs there and this week Liam Gallagher announced he would be playing Finsbury Park in June 2018.

    My walk followed the route of a planned extension to the Northern Line of the London Underground which was never completed.

    What I enjoy about disused railway lines is imagining what they once looked like, seeing how they have changed with the ghost of its past still evident. The first example of this was when I came across the building below.

    2017-10-25 09.44.00
    This used to be the station building of Stroud Green station

    Stroud Green station closed to passengers in 1954, but 63 years later its building is still intact. There’s no evidence of how the building links to the railway bridge above, so countless people must pass it every day without ever realising its former purpose.

    Further along where the track once was, there is a work of art inside one of the arches. When you’re walking alone, it’s quite creepy to be honest – even though I knew it was going to be there!

    2017-10-25 09.58.13
    Spriggan sculpture

    The most intact platforms on the walk are at Crouch End. As you can see from my photo, it’s obvious that trains used to stop here.

    2017-10-25 09.59.25
    Crouch End

    The thing I was most excited about seeing were the Highgate Tunnels. The imposing portals are now a sanctuary for bats. The ground in front of them was too muddy for me to walk across, so I had to zoom in from a distance, but you can still see them.

    2017-10-25 10.16.19
    The abandoned Highgate Tunnels

    To rejoin the walk, I had to go up to street level. I was now in Highgate, famous for its middle class mums (as seen in the @Highgatemums Twitter account and book). The next thing to glimpse was the abandoned Highgate High Level station.

    2017-10-25 10.26.30
    Overlooking the abandoned Highgate High Level station

    It was near impossible to get a good view of it, but the tunnels I saw earlier emerge here. In a BBC documentary made in 2013 to commemorate the Underground’s 150th anniversary, a Tube driver can be seen on the platforms.

    The Tube An Underground History YouTube.png
    Still from BBC documentary The Tube: An Underground History (2013) showing Highgate High Level station

    The walk ends at Alexandra Palace, where the World Darts Championships are held at Christmas every year. However, with a train home to catch I decided to stop after taking in this incredible view over London.

    2017-10-25 10.47.49
    Looking over London

    I plan on going back to finish off the walk in the future, but I had a great time doing the bits of it that I did.

  • The pain at the Arsenal

    I have just returned from a brilliant trip to London, where I went to my first Norwich City away match at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.

    The plan was to make an event of it, so instead of going straight there and straight back on the coach with other fans I went on the train on Tuesday morning, stayed in a hotel in Finsbury Park and came back on Wednesday lunchtime.

    I was aware that my hotel was within walking distance of the ground, but I didn’t expect to be able to see it from my window!

    2017-10-24 16.02.56
    The Emirates Stadium was visible from my hotel room

    2017-10-24 16.03.07
    Zoomed in

    I walked to the stadium well before kick off, to properly take in the atmosphere. I had been outside the Emirates once before, but that was during the day when there was no one around. It was a different sight all lit up with thousands of people there.

    2017-10-24 18.23.03
    Outside the Emirates

    2017-10-24 18.27.22
    Near where the away fans go in

    I made my way to the end where my fellow Norwich fans were going to be sitting, and immediately felt a warmth come over me seeing yellow shirts and hearing familiar songs – I was amongst my own people! With an hour to go before kick off, I went inside and found my seat, giving me my first sight of the pitch.

    2017-10-24 18.43.33
    The view from my seat

    Before long the Norwich players came out to warm up at our end, to great applause. There is a real feeling of togetherness about the club at the moment. The fans are right behind the players, the players are putting the effort in for the fans and they are buying into what the manager is trying to do. It’s lovely to see. There were particularly loud cheers for James Maddison, who scored the winner in the derby on Sunday.

     

    Norwich's goalkeepers Angus Gunn and Michael McGovern warm up
    Norwich’s goalkeepers Angus Gunn and Michael McGovern warm up
    The Norwich players preparing for the game
    The Norwich players preparing for the game

    Arsenal have a sort of TV show on the big screens inside the stadium for pre-match, half time and post-match. I don’t really think it works. I’ve seen it done at cricket grounds, and often it’s hard to hear the presenter and a lot of the time you don’t want to because they are really annoying. Arsenal’s presenter didn’t win any friends amongst the Norwich fans by introducing us as Ipswich! That’s pretty much the worst thing you can say about us.

    2017-10-24 19.14.54
    This bloke introduced us as Ipswich!

    Then it was the match itself. You probably know that the game went all the way to extra time, with the eventual score being Arsenal 2-1 Norwich. The Norwich players put in a very good performance, going in front in the first half when Josh Murphy finished nicely after running onto a great Maddison pass and defending excellently until the 86th minute when a young guy I’d never heard of called Eddie Nketiah tapped in from a corner 15 seconds after coming on as a substitute for Arsenal. He then scored the winner in the first half of extra time. Norwich had come agonisingly close to pulling off an upset – one they would have deserved – but it wasn’t to be.

    I was proud of the team, though, and very proud to be in the crowd. The nearly 9,000 Norwich fans that were there put the Arsenal fans to shame. Boxer and City fan Anthony Ogogo says he was racially abused by one of our number last night, which is totally unacceptable and that person is merely a sad individual who has nothing to do with this wonderful football club. I certainly didn’t hear anything untoward, and I think we represented the city brilliantly.

    2017-10-24 22.19.30
    The Norwich players in a huddle after the game

    2017-10-24 22.21.25
    The Canaries thank the fans for their great support

    My first experience of seeing Norwich play on another team’s turf was one I’ll never forget, and one I hope to repeat in the future. We may not have won, we may be out of the cup, but I got a real sense that the club is in good shape at the moment and that if we can carry on performing like we did on Tuesday night then we can achieve something in the league this season.

     

  • Going back ‘home’

    I am prone to spells where I feel out of control and as if I’m ‘going mad’.

    I’ll try not to bore you – this is about the benefits I believe there are to be had in going back to where you felt happiest and safest – but I need to give you some background information first.

    The vast majority of my childhood was spent in the Mile Cross area of Norwich. Those who know it will probably not speak highly of it. It’s not a nice place. But for me, it was home. From when I was a toddler until I had to move away in 2010, aged 17.

    Specifically, it was this house. The one you can see the side of here. That was my bedroom window for nearly 15 years.

    20civicgardens
    This is from Google Maps, as I didn’t want to feel awkward taking a photo of what is now someone else’s house.

    You may have seen my old cul-de-sac doing the rounds on the internet actually – as when viewed from above it does rather look like the Millennium Falcon.

    It’s now more than six years since I left, but I admit I just can’t get over it. I still wish I lived there. I still have dreams in which I am back on familiar ground. When I’m having one of my bad spells I think about it even more.

    Today I had a bit of free time so I got in my car and went back to where I still call home.

    Being back there, walking around the area, it was an odd feeling. It was as if my head was properly screwed on – I don’t remember even thinking about where I was going, my feet just took me on a circuit of the estate and right back to where I started.

    You are entitled to think ‘for god’s sake, get over it and move on’, but believe me if it was that easy I would have done it a long time ago.

    Not a great deal has changed. I only glanced at my old house as there was a car in the driveway and I’m not sure how I’d feel if I looked out of the window to see someone staring up at my home, but it was pretty much identical to how it looked when I was there. Although I don’t like their choice of curtains. Our old neighbours are also still there.

    I went down a passageway out of the cul-de-sac and walking round to Bowers Avenue saw the first change. A newly built block of flats.

    2016-01-21 12.38.21
    These flats weren’t there when I lived in this area.

    I carried on and came to the biggest buildings on the estate.2016-01-21 12.44.18

    These blocks of flats are unmistakably 1960s, and they are big enough to be seen from Mousehold Heath.

    I ended up going down the hill and taking a walk around Sloughbottom Park, the scene of countless kickabouts with my dad and where I used to train with and play for the Norman Wanderers Under 11s and Under 13s before I realised – some time after everyone else – that I was hopeless at football.

    Looking towards the changing rooms.
    Looking towards the changing rooms.
    Looking towards the main road.
    Looking towards the main road.
    The very same pitch I played on 10 years ago.
    The very same pitch I played on 10 years ago.

    The pitch was in a rather better state than it used to be when I played on it about a decade ago.

    If you’ve made it this far, thank you. You’ve put up with me being rather self-indulgent. But let me explain – I did this to attempt to reconnect with who I used to be. The happy, studious kid I was. For reasons I won’t share here, things went south for me when I stopped living here. So coming back enabled me to get those feelings of safety and security back, if only for an hour or so. Writing this up has helped me make it last that little bit longer.

    Everyone has a place like this. A place where they have memories, a place where they were happy. If you’re feeling down or a bit lost, why not go back to that place? I promise you, it will do you the world of good.