Behind the pavilion is the Royal Harare Golf Club, where Nick Price learned to play. Squash courts, a swimming pool and, most ironically in this instance, a shack of a cricket school - more Alf Gover than Adelaide Academy - where young Zimbabweans learn to bat and bowl, complete the sporting picture that has inspired the many wonderful cricketers who have graced it.
Sadly, and it really was sadly on such a bright, Boxing Day occasion, the England batsman could not find it in themselves to do justice to the picture. Almost to a man, they forgot their prematch plan and betrayed their pre-tour plot by making a succession of such poor strokes that the bowling appeared unplayable and the pitch impossible. Neither was so as John Crawley showed, and it will take some sort of Herculean effort to win from this fine mess.
On Monday night over dinner Michael Atherton said that the biggest problem with English cricket was its lack of variety, the stale pitches and the stereotyped cricketers. Even he, a modern man, did not rule out the idea of playing on uncovered pitches again, though he thought that the soils used to bind pitches today would respond to the elements differently and perhaps dangerously in comparison to the soil used more than a decade ago. This is a subject on which Ted Dexter - in talk of uncovering pitches - is worth a listen whatever those who mocked him, and misunderstood him, said during his time as the chairman of the England committee.
Yesterday the English batsmen were exposed for their lack of flexibility, which comes from playing cricket without variety. This damp, slow and yet springy pitch was not made for extravagent front-foot drivers of the ball. It was made for more suspicious technicians who graft their innings and win mind games with bowlers who torture their patience with the drip, drip of a disciplined line and a full and inviting length.
Batting in Harare yesterday needed maturity, it needed strict concentration and it needed an unwavering self-belief that the means to a long, unforgiving innings would be justified by its end. Put simply, runs had to be earned but England did not earn. Perhaps that is the problem with English first- class cricket, not enough success is truly earned.
The word graft, when applied to batting, came from miserly batsmen who had to be torn from their wicket. When English professionals played on wet pitches, they could not thunder their strokes so they nurdled and nudged them. They ran like hares between the wickets, knowing that each run earned more coal for the winter. They did not play pretty cricket, but they were capa- ble of pretty effective cricket.
They had to be able to adjust to the ball which stopped and sprung, or sometimes spat, at them and this meant playing from the back foot and watching and waiting for the bowler to err. Sometimes the outfields were soggy and slow and boundaries were hard to find, as they were yesterday when the appallingly slow Harare outfield, thick matted and spongy with Kikuyu grass, denied the batsman full value for their strokes and denied the spectators full value for their money. All of these problems were examinations of will and the weak-willed failed and the strong- willed survived, as they did yesterday.
Not that yesterday's surface was tainted by the elements. Far from it, but it was a touch soft from the moisture brought by the storms of the past few days, and so the ball gripped; and the air was still humid, so the ball swung. It should have been a comfortable pitch on which to stay in but a hard one on which to score runs. It was miles from a 137-for-nine-pitch and only Crawley, who has the most old-fashioned method of the England batsmen, managed to rise above it.
Now England must rise above themselves, rise from their overnight position among the ashes, and combine discipline with passion in their performance. This need not be beyond them for they have men with both. It might be a lovely place, this Harare Sports Club, but yesterday for its visitors it provided a nightmare.