Lord's take-away turf proves a bargain buy

Later this week I have an important appointment at Lord's. An admirable fellow who works for the Marylebone Cricket Club has very kindly saved me a foot-square slab of the outfield – which, as you may have read, is being relaid this winter with turf that drains more quickly. MCC members are covering most of the estimated £1m cost through increased subscriptions, but a small part of the outlay is being recouped by flogging off bits of outfield for a tenner each – which includes a certificate of authenticity – to silly romantics like me.

And some silly romantics have not stopped at a tenner's worth. One bloke, his mission to lay an entire lawn with the hallowed turf, shelled out £1,260. At least it is the kind of memorabilia that can also serve a useful purpose, unlike that wodge of chewing-gum expelled by the Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Luis Gonzalez, for which a baseball nut paid $10,000 (£6,400) in April (surely the nuttiest transaction ever recorded in the name of sports fandom).

Some of the Lord's turf was pre-ordered, but, last Thursday and Friday, MCC made the remaining squares available to anyone who dropped in brandishing the right money, and I'm told there was a steady stream of punters as daft as me, who exited through the Grace Gates into St John's Wood Road clutching pizza delivery-style boxes full of turf. It was not the moment for a hungry mugger to strike, expecting a thin-crust Quattro Formaggio.

Anyway, as I live in Herefordshire and couldn't quite justify the five-hour round trip to collect a boxful of turf, albeit hallowed, my MCC friend generously agreed to hold some back for me.

My unwillingness to make the journey rather shows me up as a lukewarm cricket devotee – I understand that one guy travelled from New Zealand for his portion of outfield. But I'm still pathetically excited to be getting my own bit of Lord's. Of course, I don't know for sure that my slab of turf once bore the heavy footstep of W G Grace, but then I don't know for sure that it didn't.

Perhaps a ball passed over it propelled by the bat of Donald Bradman during the epic second Ashes Test of 1930; there's a fair chance that it did, as in Australia's first innings of 729 for 6 declared, the great man scored 254.

Whatever, those blades of grass are decidedly historic. For much of the outfield dates from 1787, when MCC established its first ground in Dorset Fields, now Dorset Square. The turf was then dug up and relaid in St John's Wood in 1814. And, with due regard for history, MCC last week gave some of the Lord's outfield to the Dorset Square Trust. Indeed, I'm assured that it has now actually been planted in the square, returning to its roots after 188 years.

What I will do with my own venerable piece of turf, I'm not yet sure.

I might transplant it to the bit of our lawn where my children and I play cricket, in the hope that it will have a Billy's Boots-style effect on our standard of play.

(Billy's Boots, for the benefit of younger readers, was a story in an exceptionally fine comic called Scorcher, to which I was devoted between the ages of about seven and 11, about a boy who was embarrassingly bad at football until he wore the tatty old boots once sported by a legendary centre-forward, whereupon he was possessed by genius... on which subject I sometimes wonder whether Billy's boots have been passed on to Emile Heskey, who more often than not forgets to wear them; it would explain a lot).

Or should we have a little picket fence around the slab of Lord's outfield, with a sign explaining its significance? Either way, I must be careful when my father-in-law visits (a man who wields a rake and a pair of secateurs as thrillingly as any knight of old wielded a lance and a sword), not to let misunderstandings develop when I usher people out to take a look at the old sod in the garden.

Actually, now that the unique sale is over, I rather wish that I had bought more of it. A tenner per square foot seems pretty bargainous, especially when you consider the £20,000 paid two years ago for a similarly-sized slab of Wembley turf, although admittedly that was the very spot upon which the ball bounced when Geoff Hurst scored his disputed goal in the 1966 World Cup final, and admittedly the buyer was Ken Bates, a man not averse to paying good money for a useless sod (Robert Fleck comes to mind).

But I think that might be enough sod jokes for now. Besides, I have a train to Paddington to catch, and a pizza delivery box to collect.

b.viner@independent.co.uk