Are you going to Wimbledon or Lord's this Sunday?

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Are you going to Wimbledon or Lord's this Sunday?

Sunday, 14 July 2019 | PNS | London

This is, perhaps, the biggest Sunday of the English sporting summer with two major sports fighting for space — tennis and cricket. It is a fight which still has the winning points in the racquet of Roger Federer than in the bat of Eoin Morgan, which really is the story of English cricket.

It has long tumbled from public imagination and does not get even a half pager in British newspapers, though the Sunday final has brought some of that lost focus back on the game. Still, the royalty will not be coming to Lord’s. It will be in all its finery in the royal box at Wimbledon, applauding the exploits of two men who are far from British. The British actors, too, will be there as also cricket’s God Sachin Tendulkar who has not missed a Federer Final at Wimbledon for a long time. Another matter though that he may have been at Lord’s had India not tumbled to 45 minutes of bad cricket, a pretty long time for bad cricket at the international stage, one might say.

The tickets, too, for both the events show how Wimbledon soars over all else. While the black price of the Final ticket for the strawberries and cream event in essential whites is reportedly going for 33,000 pounds, the cricket ground it is said has soared to 10,000 pounds.

But the fact that it has reached a five-figure mark, spells a renaissance in English cricket which skipper Morgan calls exciting, iconic and awesome. The Piranhas have been spilling their music into the stadium at England matches to egg on the Roys and the Roots of their game. The English fans are, for the first time, having a field’s day with their team winning and the sea of light English blue in the stands has become louder and louder, going away from mere claps to sing inspirational songs much like the Indians had been doing till that awful semi-final of bad cricket!

Wimbledon, too, is up for making history with its Swiss poster boy Roger Federer attempting his next grand slam title here in an age when retirement has bored many other players. Bidding to stop him will be the smiling Serb assassin Novak Djokovic at Centre Court.

Morgan, too, is more Irish than English but that is the beauty and diversity of the England’s best ODI team ever where a cohesive unit comes out of many nationalities. While Adil Rashid and Moeen Ali are Asians of Pakistani descent, Ben Stokes was born and brought up in New Zealand.

 More people in England love Roger Federer than they do Morgan but this Sunday their hearts will be beating for him, and then Federer even though they may be queuing up for a wild card entry to Henman Hill than they would be for the fan zone at Trafalgar Square.

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