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A visit to the Utilita Bowl (formerly known as the Ages Bowl or The Rose Bowl) is becoming a family tradition. This was the third year running we’ve been down and this year, Southern Brave were taking on Trent Rockets. Our fingers were crossed we would get to see legends Jofra Archer and Joe Root in action.
It took us about an hour to get down to Southampton and Jon had booked car parking on site so the queues built up the close we were getting to the stadium.
This year’s car park was right next to the stadium … Just a two minute walk to join the queues. The last two years, we’ve been a 20 mins walk away, somewhere on the golf course!!
A shorter queue to get in than in previous years and we quickly found our seats and watched the remainder of the Women’s match. Alas Southern Brave Ladies has not had a good season and today didn’t buck the trend.
In between matches, we dived out to find something to eat. Plenty of street food stalls just around the corner of our stand. After much deliberating, in the end, we chose the eastern van … Callum and I had Teriyaki Chicken with rice and Jon the Katsu Prawn Curry with noodles. Jon didn’t realise the prawns still had heads on … And choosing noodles was a rookie error. Eating noodles standing up with just a fork could have got a little messy!!
Back to our seats and next up were the Men. Trent Rockets up first and they set a reasonable target. Joe Root wasn’t in for long!! The cameramen were lurking in our stand … Trying to catch excited fans enjoying the cricket. Think we managed to avoid being caught on film … Everyone around us was trying to get on screen!
Southern Brave up next and started strongly then seemed to stall part way through and it looked as though Trent Rockets would secure a valuable win.
Southern Brave fans started to leave but up stepped the hero of the day, Darren Pollard. He hit 5 sixes in a row to bring the game within reach for Southern Brave.
It went pretty much to the wire and Southern Brave secured a win to keep their bid to reach the knock out stages on track.
Bit of a nightmare at the end with all the toilets in our stand being out of action … they were all closed just after the start of the Men’s match. We were expecting queues to get home so we needed to avail ourselves of the facilities before we left. We headed via the main pavilion as it was in the direction of where we’d park the car and spotted a reasonably short queue for the loos.
We got there just before things started to get messy – they had run out of loo roll and little soap left in the dispensers – and the queues heading out of the pavilion.
We queued for 30 mins or so to get out of the grounds across the golf course and then it was slow going on the local roads to reach the M27. Once on the motorway, we flew home and were back by 7.30pm.
A great day out at the cricket .. no doubt we’ll be back next year.
