County cricket: not for the feint hearted... pigeons.
The Spin headed for The Oval last week in anticipation of watching Mark
Ramprakash score his 100th hundred, but ended up instead watching a
vignette which ought to silence once and for all those who deny the
county game is a vicious world of dog-eat-dog. Or perhaps
pigeon-eat-pigeon. As Surrey's Matt Nicholson carved his way towards a
fourth first-class hundred, a ferocious cut shot headed towards a flock
of pigeons, minding their own business in the third-man region.
But one of the flying rats got unlucky: as her colleagues took flight in
the nick of time, she was hit by the ball, sending a flurry of feathers
into the air - a moment that was captured in its gory glory by the
photographer Graham Morris. But her ordeal had only just begun.As the wounded bird lay rooted to the spot, a male colleague wandered
over, appraised the situation, and promptly took advantage of her
immobility in the most heinous manner imaginable. As the press box
erupted to cries of "they're animals!" another pigeon waddled over to
assess her mate's plight. Alas, she was to prove anything but the
cavalry: far from providing a rescue act, she began pecking at the
unfortunate creature's head, and it needed swift action from Rana Naved,
Yorkshire's Pakistan seamer, to wander over from fine leg and shoo away
the miscreants.By this stage, the pigeon was on her back, feet in the air and looking
like she'd seen better days. Naved picked her up and carefully laid her
to rest beyond the boundary. Back in 1936, a sparrow was killed at
Lord's in a mid-air collision with a ball delivered by Jehangir Khan
during a game between MCC and Cambridge University. It was subsequently
stuffed and mounted on the ball that killed it, and still has pride of
place in the Lord's museum. Without wishing to make hackneyed
comparisons between life north and south of the river, the Spin suspects
the dead pigeon will not exactly get a state funeral along the
Harleyford Road.
Thanks, Andy.
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