On Friday I spent the day at The Oval watching a keenly fought contest between England and Pakistan with my three best mates. The talk before play began was whether Alistair Cook would come good with the bat and what sort of future test match cricket has. Cook answered the first question in the most emphatic way, scoring a fine century, but the ECB and ICC need to seriously improve their treatment of supporters of the game for test match cricket to survive.
Despite strong ticket sales for last year’s Ashes series, attendances at test matches this summer had been poor with tickets available for the first two days of the Oval test. Test match cricket needed to sell itself to the general public.
So imagine the reaction at 5:15pm when the players left the field of play due to poor light, despite the floodlights being on. How ludicrous that it is still too dark to play even with the lights on? I recall a test match at Lords two years ago between South Africa and England, when England had to open the bowling with two spinners (Panesar and Pietersen) due to poor light. Why were Pakistan not given a similar option?
This ridiculous ruling deprived us of 17 overs of play and with tickets costing £46 each we felt short-changed. A feeble tannoy announcement followed just before 6pm that there would be no further play and within minutes we were surrounded by stewards who couldn’t get us out the ground quick enough.
Having shelled out £184 on tickets, the four of us agreed that we would not be going back to The Oval and would instead be watching county matches next season. And with it; reasonable admission prices, a sensible alcohol policy (more on this next week), no floodlights and a chance for a knock about on the outfield at lunch.
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