This sporting afterlife

Earlier this year, the famous international Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) in Sydney, Australia, took to Facebook and the press to announce a haunting centring upon its Ladies’ Pavilion. This section of the ground opened in 1896 and is monitored 24 hours a day. Despite these precautions, patrolling guards have become uneasy at lights switching on spontaneously and doors mysteriously opening and closing by themselves. A security dog refuses to enter the area on certain nights. The ghost of an old woman in a veil is reputed to appear at dusk. The story goes that she was a widow whose cricket-loving son was killed during World War II. Until the end of her life she obsessively attended the SCG, being reminded of him by the young men playing out on the field. After her death, her ghost is said to have lingered in the Ladies’ Pavilion, forever watching for her son to appear. (Sources: Facebook TG20 posting, Mar 2020; Daily Telegraph, 28 Oct 2016).

Since then, the SCG, along with countless thousands of other stadia, pitches, ballparks, playing fields and games halls across the world, have fallen silent. Innumerable sporting matches, games, tournaments and trophy contests, public and private, amateur and professional up to the Olympic Games itself, have all been cancelled or postponed and their venues abandoned. Many grounds, halls and temples of games and sports may never re-open… leaving them to just who or what after darkness falls?

A ghostly young boy dressed in cricket whites walks the halls of Felpham Manor

It might be presumed that such robustly embodied activities as physical