HEAR from acting captain Hamish Hartlett above on PTV.

Day 6

8am
I woke up nice and refreshed after a good sleep ready for another exciting day in London. After a shower, headed downstairs for some eggs on toast and a glass of juice before heading out for some more sightseeing in London.



9.30am
A group of the lads hired some bikes and pedalled around the streets. I tell you though, you've got to keep your wits about you because it's absolute chaos on the roads with double decker buses, cars, cabs, bikes, gophers, prams, you name it, going in all directions. We cruised up Oxford Street and Carnaby Street, which was the theme of our major auction from earlier this year. Along the way, we stopped and saw Boaky and Robbie doing an AFL promotion in Hyde Park with Western Bulldogs players Daniel Giansiracusa and Tom Williams.



They were spreading the word about our great game and mingling with players from the local Aussie Rules teams here in the UK. After that, we cruised around a little bit more on our bikes, stopping for a sandwhich and also a spot of clothes shopping - no fingerless gloves this time! Arrived back at the hotel just before 12.30pm ahead of our bus trip to Lords cricket ground for a tour.



1pm
Arrived at the home of cricket, the prestigious Lords cricket ground. We were greeted by two older gentleman, both of which would turn out to be our tour guides and extremely passionate and knowledgeable about the game of cricket. Our group split into two groups and our tour guide Rodney took us straight upstairs to the visiting teams changerooms and pavillion area. Talk about history. We were standing in the same area where some of the greats of the game had changed into their whites and watched the game from. Then we stepped out onto the famous balcony, where we think the great Shane Warne danced with a stump in his hand taunting the English fans while celebrating another Ashes victory back in 1997. Some other cricket tragics thought that Warney celebration may have taken place at Trent Bridge or even at the Oval where we're playing against the Bulldogs. Maybe we should have asked our tour guide Rodney who knew every single stat from Don Bradman's batting average in the 1934 series to how many hair follicles where in big Merv's moustache in 1989.



After viewing the visiting team's pavilion we took the walk downstairs into the very exclusive, very toffey Long Room. It's a long spacious room on ground level directly behind the bowler's arm with numerous potraits of famous cricketers lining the walls. The tables were set up immaculately in the room which holds around 250 MCC members at a time. Rodney explained that dismissed batsman and incoming batsman have to walk down through the entire long room on your way to and from the crease. Crikey, imagine if you made a first ball duck...tough walk back!



After the long room, we headed out the back of the ground into a separate section at Lords to watch a bizarre game called Real Tennis, a cross between squash and tennis. They use a racquet like a miniature version of Bjorn Borg's famous wooden varieties from the 1970s and a tennis ball which is slightly heavier than a standard tennis ball and doesn't bounce as high. We watched a doubles match between four old blokes for about ten minutes which was pretty entertaining, especially when one of them threw his racquet after an airy. As you can imagine the boys absolutely erupted.



Our next stop was the musuem - wow wee was there some cricket history in there. Unfortunately it is MCC regulations that you can't take photos in the musuem or the pavillions but take my word for it, it was amazing, particulary if you're a cricket lover. There were hugh potraits of the likes of Viv Richards and Kapil Dev on the walls, old gloves, bats and balls from previous encounters and plenty of signed memorabillia as well. But the icing on the cake was when we got to see the tiny urn, the legendary Ashes. They are so small in real life but we all know how big they are to Australia and England.



We then made our way down to the other end of the ground to the media centre, the one that you see on TV that looks like a big alarm clock. The facilities were very impressive inside and it would give journalists and commentators alike a superb view of the action. A couple of things you do really notice from the view is that ground is really more of a square than an oval and also how much the ground slopes from one side to the other. Rodney says it slopes nearly two metres from one side to the next and he reckons the best exploiter of the slope was our very own Glenn McGrath who once took a record 8 for 38 at Lords.



After our look at the media centre, a few of the boys grabbed some momentos from the souvenier shop and then it was on the bus and back to our hotel for a team meeting.

4.30pm
The boys had their pre-game team meeting in a room at the hotel. Without going into too much detail, the new coaching group, with Ken and Alan at the helm, were looking for us to each show what we can do and as a team enjoy the contest and play some quick, attacking football. The team broke from the meeting really looking forward to continuing our great start to pre-season with a strong performance against the Bulldogs.

6pm
The entire group sat down for a team dinner at the hotel afterwhich all the boys went back to their rooms to watch a bit of TV and unwind before tomorrow's game.