Let’s stop throwing our toys out of the pram when a match is cancelled due to bad weather

It’s a pity that the second England-Pakistan Test was so badly interrupted by rain and bad light, and a pity too, that this provoked so much moaning.

Cricket has always been at the mercy of the weather. At least half the matches in the most ambitious season of Test cricket ever staged in England – the Triangular Tournament of 1912 featuring England, Australia and South Africa – were disrupted by rain. If Old Trafford was the only ground at which Don Bradman failed to score a Test century on his four tours of England, he had no chance of doing so in 1938 when not a ball was bowled in the match. One can easily imagine the caterwauling this would have provoked from our TV pundits today.

In actual fact, we lose much less time to the weather now than ever before, one reason why there are fewer drawn Tests than there used to be. Improved drainage makes the outfield safely playable where it used not to be, and the installation of floodlights allows play to continue in conditions which would previously have led to a stoppage.

Now, we are told that the floodlights aren’t powerful enough, and some, among them Michael Vaughan, successful England captain turned somewhat irritating pundit, have suggested switching to the pink ball used in day-night cricket whenever the light deteriorates. It took a bowler, Jimmy Anderson no less, to remark that this switch might give an unfair advantage to the fielding side, since the pink ball behaves more mischievously than the red one. Imagine the fuss there would be if an hour of the pink ball saw wickets tumble and shifted the balance of a Test, even deciding the result. The cry “it’s not fair” would resound.

Of course, stoppages for bad light irritate us all, though one cannot help thinking that some of the indignation expressed this week was provoked by the TV company which had paid a lot only to find it had no live cricket to put screen. The outcry was excessive, grown-ups behaving like spoiled children. When light becomes very poor, cricket is dangerous for batsmen, fielders and umpires. A cricket ball can be a dangerous object, especially when struck by today’s power-bats.

Batsmen used to be allowed to appeal against the light, and very boring and time-consuming this could be. The present system whereby the umpires take a reading of their light-metre and adhere to that reading throughout the match is perhaps as good as any solution; it makes for consistency at least. There can be no complaint that one side was compelled to bat in poorer light than the other.

Meanwhile the improvised county championship (the Bob Willis Trophy) is proving a happy success. There has been good cricket and there have been close matches, some in spite of the weather in the third round of fixtures. One feels for Somerset, deprived of an all but certain win by rain on the last afternoon in the third round of games. Perhaps, however, their admirable captain, Tom Abell, will conclude that he batted just a little too long before declaring in the second innings.

The reigning champions, Essex, continue to win. They haven’t actually been batting well but their bowlers, especially Jamie Porter and Simon Harmer, win matches for them. The South African Harmer interests me. From what I have seen and read, he seems to be an old-fashioned off-spinner with no great mystery about him; he bowls length and a probing line, asking questions even when there is no sharp turn. I’ve often read that off-spinners of the past like Fred Titmus, Ray Illingworth and Gloucester’s David Allen, all successful Test cricketers of the Sixties and early Seventies, would have struggled against today’s powerful and aggressive batsmen. Harmer makes this opinion seem ridiculous, for his virtues are those of the classical off-spinner, and year after year since he came to Essex, he has gobbled up wickets at a low cost.

There have been some notable performances from young players. Kent’s 19-year-old, Jordan Cox, became the first player born this century to score a double –hundred. He was then perforce omitted from Kent’s next match for breaching Covid-19 protocol. Kent posed for a photograph with some admiring young Kent fans, a shame for him, but a reminder that we are fortunate to be having any cricket at all in these strange times.

I have been delighted to see Hampshire’s young wrist-spinner Mason Crane taking wickets again. Crane, still only twenty-three, has had enough ups-and-downs to blight any career. Going out to play Grade cricket in Sydney, he so impressed Stuart McGill, the former Australian wrist-spinner, that he was drafted into the New South Wales Sheffield Shield side. McGill’s approval was enough to excite interest, for he was good enough to take more than 200 Test wickets and would surely have had many more if he hadn’t been competing with Shane Warne for a place in the Australian side.

Then young Crane was selected, promise rather than achievement, for England’s unhappy 2017-18 Ashes squad. He played only in the Fifth Test at Sydney where Australia ran up a Bradmanesque score of 649 for 7 declared.

He bowled 48 overs and took 1 for 193, his only victim being Usman Khawaja, stumped for 173. (Crane may be grateful it was Jonny Bairstow rather than Jos Buttler behind the stumps.) This was disappointing, but to put it in perspective, Moeen Ali’s figures weren’t much better: 48-10-170-2.

Returning home, Crane suffered a stress-fracture in his back, a common condition these days. That set him back, and he has since been more often out of the Hampshire team than in it. This month, however, he had played two of his county’s three matches and taken 11 wickets cheaply. It’s true that six or seven of them have been tail-enders but given the difficulty England often experience in getting through the tail, the value of a wrist-spinner who can mop them up is not to be overlooked. He may have benefitted from sympathetic captaincy from Sam Northeast. Be that as it may, it would be nice to think that his troubles are behind him and he is ready to fulfil his early promise.

Finally, the success of the Bob Willis Trophy, however much it may be dependent simply on the relief with which the return of cricket has been greeted, may point to a revision of the County Championship format. This might become a two-stage, rather than two-division, tournament, the first stage being regional. But to be successful it would require the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to recognise the importance of four-day cricket, and not consign so much of the championship to the first and last weeks of summer. Given their determination to launch their wretched “Hundred”, this is probably too much to hope for.