Reign stops play for the Queen, who spent much of her 96 years around big sport

Rain rituals. Sombre men in coats. Waiting in a grey, mannered place while the BBC talks about the Queen. A day of non-cricket at the Oval turned out to be an eerily fitting place to wait out Thursday afternoon.

For much of the time it felt like a pastiche of ceremonial Englishness, the kind of thing John Lennon might have scribbled on a napkin in the back of a London cab and considered turning into a waspish and satirical limerick. Timings and statements and black ties on the news. An obsessive tending of lawns. Queues, flags, beer and measured talk (nice pins, Rodney Hogg said, for an old Sheila). Prince Charles has arrived at Balmoral. Tea will be taken early. And we will now cut to a special announcement.

I make no apologies for writing about the Queen here. It has after all after been 96 years, a fair part of this spent around the kind of places where big sport happens, from the Austerity Games to the Matthews Final to a minute’s Uefa-approved solemnity in the Europa Conference League (it’s what she would have wanted) on Thursday night.

Not that the Queen had any obvious fondness for sport. “I have often observed in women of her type a tendency to regard all athletics as inferior forms of fox-hunting,” Evelyn Waugh wrote of Lady Circumference in Decline And Fall. Does that sound about right? The Queen did love the horses. She seemed to quite like going to cricket. One of her first non-ceremonial appearances was to meet the touring Indian team of Vijay Hazare at Lord’s in 1952. She met Don Bradman’s Australians at Balmoral and her sister stood very near Keith Miller looking pleased.

But generally the Queen’s regular appearances at sport had an air of something to be endured, on the spectrum between another garden