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England Ashes squad in Belgium
The England cricket team and support staff are paying an overnight visit to Belgium where they are visiting war graves and memorials on the Ypres Salient of World War One.
Yesterday (Friday June 27) they visited Oxford Road Cemetery and the grave of the former Kent and England bowler Colin Blythe before moving on to Passchendaele and Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world.
The team spent more than an hour at the cemetery, which has more than 11,000 graves and a Memorial to the Missing of over 35,000 names of men who have no known grave.
At Tyne Cot they visited graves and names on the Memorial which included E.B. Lundie, the former South African Test cricketer, and Ernest Seaman VC, one of six Victoria Cross winners at the cemetery, who died aged 25 just 43 days before the end of the war.
In the evening the team attended an extended nightly Last Post Service at the Menin Gate in Ypres, which bears the names of almost 55,000 men who have no known graves. After the service team members found themselves surrounded by a large crowd before they walked back to the main square and dinner with officials from the West Flanders town.
© Belgian Cricket Federation
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