In David Hare’s play, ‘Teeth ‘n’ Smiles’, a rock band plays a game in which each member has to name the most boring fact that they can think of. One reveals that Sussex have never won cricket’s County Championship. All agree that this is, indeed, incredibly boring. When Sussex did win, in 2003, Hare wrote, ‘The play is now hopelessly dated and can never be revived.’ In 2006 Sussex repeated their triumph, and last Wednesday, watched by as many seagulls as spectators, they began their title defence at the County ground, beating Kent by eight wickets in just over three days. Lancashire, this year’s favourites, were the opponents in the match recalled in the Alan Ross poem which ends,

Only, occasionally, we escape, we return where we were:
Watching cricket at Brighton, Cornford bowling through sea-scented air.’

Ross lived at Clayton; his friend, Cyril Connolly, in Firle and, later, Eastbourne. In his autobiography Ross writes, ‘Occasionally Cyril and I would lunch halfway at the White Hart in Lewes.’ Connolly’s ‘interest in any form of sport was minimal’, but he made valiant efforts to accommodate Ross’s enthusiasm for cricket, delighting in making incongruous remarks such as, “Tom Graveney must have hooked well yesterday.”
An incongruity surpassed, perhaps, by an incident in the film, ‘Becoming Jane’. Observing the travails of her brothers’ cricket team, Jane Austen takes up a bat, strides to the wicket and secures a famous victory by dispatching Tom Lefroy’s bowling into Chawton High Street.