Sport Story

08 January 2009 03:45 BST

Not the light fantastic

Anyone following the England tour of India so far may not have been terribly surprised to hear that England lost again to go 3-0 down in the ODI series.

But the way it happened this time was entirely unsatisfactory.

With the "green city" of Kanpur turning distinctly grey, what could have been a gripping finish ended in anticlimax amid the certainty that bad light would win the game for India under the Duckworth-Lewis method.

The problem is not with the way the win was calculated, but the fact that Kanpur has lights that were not used. The advent of floodlit cricket has brought custom-designed coloured clothing and white balls (despite this year's bid to make pink the new white). It seems incongruous that such an arrangement should be in use while those same pylons stand idle.

Of course, not every ground has floodlights, although more are going up. This is even so in England where mad administrators thought a few years ago it was a great idea to play day-nighters in June, when a clear sky would stay pale blue in northern venues until 11:00 GMT. But it is even madder administrators that allow a situation where lights cannot be used when a ground has them available. Surely playing on whenever possible should be the priority over all else?

None of this, of course, is to knock the Duckworth-Lewis method. People sort of know it works, even if almost nobody knows exactly how it works. In this respect it is similar to the ratings for the best bowlers and batters. You can't be sure how and why Murali is on 895 points, but everyone knows he has taken an awful lot of wickets to get there.

The Test team rankings sort of work too, although there was something attractive about the flawed simplicity of the old system of a simple league points system, one which was thought up by Wisden in 1995 and led to it preposterously declaring Hansie Cronje's South Africa to be the best Test team in the world. (The ICC then adopted a very similar system and was panned by Wisden in 2003 when it preposterously declared South Africa to be the best Test team in the world).

But while it is true that administrators just can't win sometimes, on other occasions they just don't help themselves. The floodlight nonsense in Kanpur is a case in point. So too was the scare this week over the scheduling of the first Test, with the Indian board "considering" moving it back a day in case a grand total of one player might - and only might - be performing the night before in the Twenty20 Champions' Trophy final.

Thankfully for the integrity of Test cricket, no change has been agreed, but the Ahmedabad Test last time England toured India came about after a venue change and this has happened too often, particularly for the liking of travelling English fans. It happened in Australia in 2002-03 when the Ashes tests at Perth and Adelaide were switched and the Australian board failed to tell anyone until three months of flight booking time had passed.

Occasionally, such switches can have benefits for touring fans, such as the 2003 Sri Lanka tour when a change of venue away from Colombo (which ground amid the city's alphabet soup of venue initials it was nobody remembers) took England up to Kandy, allowing for visits to places such as the sacred mountain of Adam's Peak and the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. The latter provided not just snapshots posing with baby elephants but also the chance to buy notebooks made from recycled elephant dung.

This being early December, those notebooks made excellent Christmas presents. However, one cannot help but think at times that they would also be the most appropriate items for administrators to use when jotting down their latest daft ideas.

Charles Britten