Dampening down the demonstrators

We were promised demonstrations on the first day of the first Test against Zimbabwe at Lord's, but the only scowls on the way down to the ground from the tube station were on the faces of the touts, who must have caught a cold on a match where tickets were readily available at the normal price anyway.

The overcast weather put a dampener on the start, and the demos too. The objectors turned out to be encamped near the Grace Gate: a chilly-looking open-top bus went up and down St John's Wood Road, while on the pavement about 50 hardy placard-wavers were shepherded away from the entrances. A man dressed in whites daubed with tomato ketchup vied with Peter Tatchell as the focus of media attention.

One banner compared Tim Lamb, the ECB chief executive, with Lord Haw-Haw, the Second World War German mouthpiece. The others were less original, and you couldn't help thinking that the splintered nature of the various protest groups didn't exactly help their overall cohesion. But they made their point, peacefully too.

Inside the ground there was a more obvious security presence than normal, including some imposing military uniforms. They couldn't stop one well-dressed lady marching on to the pitch, brandishing a banner saying "Bowl Out Killer Mugabe". The Zimbabwean fielders examined their fingernails in studied fashion as she was politely escorted off.

After lunch another man strolled on, to be encircled by a phalanx of men in bibs. He came quietly too, and England's openers returned to the task of combatting the moving ball. There weren't too many black armbands to be seen in the crowd, especially not in the pavilion. There weren't too many arms to be seen there, actually, as the few members who had turned up resolutely kept their jackets on in the cold.

Elsewhere the crowd was smaller than usual, literally. Younger, too - a large number of school parties meant the applause was loud and shrill, bringing to mind those old women's hockey internationals at Wembley, when the noise was like a Beatles concert without the bonus of the music. One journalist, surveying the scene from the Lord's media gherkin, pronounced: "There are more children here than people." Well, we know what he meant.

With the demonstrations, like the morning, proving a bit of a damp squib, the press moved on to weightier matters. Well, wetter matters, anyway. Why was the pale-blue carpet in the media centre damp? It turned out that a recent shampoo hadn't quite set, and sudsy white stuff was seeping into many a scribe's shoe. Brian Johnston, whose famous co-respondent footwear was a feature of many a Lord's Test, wouldn't have been impressed.