Gloucestershire chief executive Will Brown has called for more innovation to combat the elements after England’s summer ended in soggy fashion with an abandoned one-day international against Ireland at Bristol.
Ben Duckett’s maiden century in this format underpinned England’s 280 for four off 31 overs but their innings in the final match of this Metro Bank series was interrupted by brief but torrential rain.
The players walked off the field at 2:48pm but the umpires’ decision to announce there would no further play at 3:21pm caught England captain Zak Crawley and Ireland counterpart Paul Stirling by surprise.
Several puddles formed on the outfield within minutes while the ground staff’s attempts to get the covers on were delayed – by umpires Mike Burns and Paul Reiffel hesitating before ushering the teams off – then hindered by gusts of wind, which meant a significant amount of water got on to the square.
Gloucestershire brought in more ground staff for the game but this was a fourth abandonment in a row in a men’s ODI at this venue, which has more basic protections to guard against the weather in contrast to its Test-hosting equivalents.
While the match extending past 30 overs meant no refunds for the paying public, Brown, who revealed rain the previous night had already left the ground with a high water table, believes more needs to be done to avoid a repeat of this situation at a venue which will host a men’s ODI on September 29, 2024.
“In some respects we were lucky to start when we did on time,” Brown said. “We always had the sense that if we had something similar to (Monday) night, 20-30 minutes of rain could be what killed it off.
“It is just gutting. We’ve had our fair share of rain offs such as in World Cups and you wonder if we give it a bit longer maybe it can dry out, but it is what it is.
“It worries me greatly that this is a sign of things to come. We’ve got a lot of cricket being played in September next year and with climate change we’ve seen heavy rain in June and July.
“I think the game needs to be thinking innovatively about how we get games on or prepare pitches and surfaces using different things to get cricket away.”
England celebrated a 1-0 win but the recriminations at a hasty and unsatisfactory conclusion continued, with the wisdom of holding international matches in the UK in September only increasing.
Just one of the three matches in this series – England prevailing by 48 runs at Trent Bridge on Saturday – reached a conclusion and Crawley confessed he was startled by the swift ending.
“It caught everybody by surprise,” Crawley said. “I was in the lunch room when the (umpires) said it was abandoned, I didn’t know. It caught us all by surprise when they came in to shake our hands.
“The ground was already a bit wet after the rain (the night before). It didn’t need a lot more to get abandoned. A lot of rain fell in not a long space of time. There was nothing anyone could do about it.”
Duckett’s unbeaten 107 from 78 deliveries came after Phil Salt had laid the foundations with an astonishing blitz, thumping seven fours and four sixes in his pyrotechnical 61 off 28 balls.
Crawley also contributed 51 off 42 balls and even though Craig Young was able to stifle England, taking three for 31 from seven impressive overs, Stirling was relieved that Ireland were saved by the weather.
“We were all pretty happy that the rain came but we weren’t expecting it to end the game,” he said.
“We thought we might get a bit of a rest and regroup, try to get out there and change it up a little bit. We weren’t expecting the game to be called off.”
Crawley took charge of a second-string side for this series as England’s World Cup stars are resting ahead of the defence of their crown getting under way in India next week.
“I’ve enjoyed it,” he added. “It was only really the one game I had to do anything but I enjoyed it and it made the fielding go quicker. It was a great honour.”
IPL: Mumbai Indians condemned to last-place finish after 18-run defeat to Super Giants
Rohit Sharma's half-century was not enough for Mumbai Indians as they slipped to an 18-run defeat to Lucknow Super Giants at Wankhede Stadium.
The defeat consigned Mumbai to bottom place in the Indian Premier League for the second time in the space of three seasons, after losing 10 matches this year.
LSG were also left to lament their misfortune, as despite reaching 14 points, they did not qualify for the play-offs.
KL Rahul's 55 got the ball rolling for Lucknow, but their innings was ebbing out until Nicholas Pooran's dazzling 29-ball 75 took them to 214-6, despite the efforts of Nuwan Thushara (3-28) and Piyush Chawla (3-29), who stepped up in Jasprit Bumrah's absence.
Rohit's 38-ball 68 set the tone for what looked set to be a promising Mumbai chase, as he struck 13 boundaries around a short rain delay.
However, Mumbai went from 88 without loss to 120-5 in the space of six overs, leaving the tail with too much of a mountain to climb.
Data Debrief: Lucknow miss out
While Mumbai sit bottom of the pile yet again, it is a case of what might have been for LSG, who for the first time in their three-season history, failed to make the top four.
Fourteen points is often enough to get over the line and into the play-offs, but their poor net run rate of -0.667 means they miss out.
Tape ball programme can help England find unorthodox talent – Richard Gould
The England and Wales Cricket Board hopes to unearth a new seam of talent beyond the game’s traditional league structure with a national tape ball scheme that allows players to thrive without “whites, willow and leather”.
The practice of using a soft ball wrapped in electrical tape to aid swing and variable bounce is a common one in Asia, where it has helped produce express pace bowlers like Haris Rauf, Shaheen Afridi and spinners such as Rashid Khan and Shakib-al-Hasan, but has been slow to enter the mainstream conversation in the United Kingdom.
The Chance to Shine charity has long pioneered tape ball cricket as part of its engagement hubs and now, with the ECB keen to live up to its lofty aspiration of becoming the most inclusive team sport in the country, it is at the heart of a new core cities programme designed to engage ‘diverse communities in urban areas’.
Speaking at a launch event where games were hosted in a warehouse space in Birmingham, ECB chief executive Richard Gould was optimistic about reaching out to those with an interest in cricket but limited access to the pavilions and prepared pitches in the club setup.
“We talk about clubs with picket fences around them. In the past that has been seen as the preserve of the ECB. We’ve missed a complete trick on that,” he said.
“When we talk about the recreational game we’re not just talking about Premier League clubs and village cricket clubs now. We’re talking about all forms of cricket that take place.
“You can play the game anywhere, any time, with anybody, in any environment you want. You don’t have to have whites, willow and leather to do it. You can just pick up a bat and a ball and have some fun.”
As well as fulfilling its remit of reaching out to all comers at a grassroots level, Gould also believes there are benefits to finding cricketers with different styles who have learned the game outside the traditional, private-school heavy pathways.
“Without doubt there are,” he said. “We have to get out and try to find the talent. More to the point, we have to try and find talent in areas that we haven’t normally looked for it.
“I do think county pathways will be looking to make sure they don’t miss out on this talent. It’s just about punching through all of our normal procedures and finding ways to both get people in the game and unearthing that talent which may be unorthodox and great.”
Meg Lanning: Exercise obsession and not enough fuel led to Australia retirement
Former Australia captain Meg Lanning revealed her “obsession” with exercise and not eating enough precipitated her surprise international retirement late last year.
Lanning was at the helm of one of the most dominant eras the sport has ever seen but she missed last year’s Ashes for medical reasons and pulled the plug on her Australia career in November.
She opened up about her hidden health issues on the Howie Games podcast, explaining that running up to 90 kilometres a week coupled with eating two small meals a day led to her dropping from 64kg to 57kg.
View this post on Instagram“I was over-exercising and under-fuelling,” the 32-year-old said. “It wasn’t a physical thing. I’ve always been really physically active and liked that side of it, but it became a bit of an obsession.
“I’d maybe eat a couple of meals a day if I was lucky but they weren’t significant. Initially it didn’t start off as a deliberate thing, it just became a bit of a new normal.
“But it slowly crept into conscious decisions because essentially I felt good.
“I wasn’t getting injured like everybody was telling me I was going to do. It sort of just spiralled and I was in denial, even though everybody kept telling me something wasn’t quite right.
“I was not in a place to be able to go on tour and play cricket and give the commitment levels that were required for that Ashes series, mentally and physically.”
Lanning, who led Australia to five World Cup titles in total and Commonwealth Games glory in 2022, said her struggle was not officially diagnosed as an eating disorder.
“It wasn’t labelled as that but I was exercising a lot and I wasn’t eating enough to fuel that – it was a bit out of whack,” Lanning said.
“It was a bit of control because I felt very out of control with what my future looked like. I felt like I was in control of that and that made me feel better.”
Lanning sought help from medical professionals after also struggling with insomnia and continues to play domestically, while she has been signed for London Spirit for The Hundred this year.
“I dreaded night time because I knew I would go to bed and not be able to sleep,” she said. “That would make me so mad. I would just get more angry with myself. If you can’t sleep, you can’t do anything.
“I feel like I’m in a good spot now. Cricket is still part of what I do. But I wasn’t cut out for the international touring schedule and what came with all of that.”
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