There was a cricket ground in Georgetown where the outfield sat lower than the sea, and the crowd sat higher than both. ?
Bourda opened in the eighteen eighties and for well over a century it was the home of Test cricket in Guyana, and the only Test ground anywhere in the world below sea level. The whole coast sits below the Atlantic, held back by the wall and the kokers, but at Bourda you could actually feel it. The field lay in a bowl. Rain did not run off it, it settled, and a shower that would cost twenty minutes at any other ground could take a session or swallow a day whole.
What people actually remember, though, is not the drainage. It is the noise. The Bourda crowd was famous right across the cricketing world, and those wooden stands were part of the instrument. People brought their own food, their own strong opinions and, in a few well documented cases, their own trumpet. Visiting players talked about that ground for the rest of their careers.
Test cricket moved out to Providence in 2007 and the old place went quiet. The stands are still standing. So is the grass, and so is the strange fact of a cricket field lying below the Atlantic Ocean with nothing but an earth wall in between. ?
Were you ever in the stands at Bourda, and who was batting?
Bourda opened in the eighteen eighties and for well over a century it was the home of Test cricket in Guyana, and the only Test ground anywhere in the world below sea level. The whole coast sits below the Atlantic, held back by the wall and the kokers, but at Bourda you could actually feel it. The field lay in a bowl. Rain did not run off it, it settled, and a shower that would cost twenty minutes at any other ground could take a session or swallow a day whole.
What people actually remember, though, is not the drainage. It is the noise. The Bourda crowd was famous right across the cricketing world, and those wooden stands were part of the instrument. People brought their own food, their own strong opinions and, in a few well documented cases, their own trumpet. Visiting players talked about that ground for the rest of their careers.
Test cricket moved out to Providence in 2007 and the old place went quiet. The stands are still standing. So is the grass, and so is the strange fact of a cricket field lying below the Atlantic Ocean with nothing but an earth wall in between. ?
Were you ever in the stands at Bourda, and who was batting?