T20 World Cup: When the rain pours officials drown in their own red tape

Cricket administrators should opt to keep faith with the public rather than adroitly follow tournament guidelines.

Heavy rain falls over the SCG forcing the cancellation of the World Cup semi-final between England and India. Picture: Getty Images

Friday in Sydney dawned cloudily, clearing in the afternoon, with a forecast top of 28 degrees, and perhaps a shower or two. Just about as good an autumn day as you could hope for if you had an important game of cricket on.

Of course, the cricket had come and squelchingly gone the night before, the semi-finals of the women’s T20 World Cup having become hemi-semi-finals.

England and India did not even take the field, ending the former’s tournament; Australia and South Africa played just enough cricket for the hosts to scrape into the final.

Dramatic? In its way. But had Meg Lanning’s team been allotted the earlier fixture, or the evening rain relented 10 minutes later, they’d only have been listening to Katy Perry this weekend on Spotify.

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Nothing is quite so frustrating in cricket, at any level, as the climate getting the better of you. Cricket takes an inordinate time to prepare for, and longer than most games to play; it can be delayed and truncated, but a day lost, especially in this era of constipated scheduling, is very seldom reclaimed.

Yet imagine had this been a men’s event. And imagine had the team missing out about been India. “It’s all very English isn’t it, talking about the weather and getting knocked out,” said England’s good-hearted captain, Heather Knight, on Thursday. Would Virat Kohli have been quite so sanguine?

So why the farce? As Mark Twain observed: “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” And that goes especially for the International Cricket Council.

There was the opportunity to take action even at the 11th hour to find an alternative to a washout, the most obvious being the use of Friday as a reserve day.

Cricket Australia even made inquiries about it, according to chief executive Kevin Roberts on SEN on Thursday. The answer came down from on high. “We’ve asked the question and it’s not part of the playing conditions,” Roberts reported.

Well, we all know about “playing conditions”, don’t we? They’re what decides the crown of world cricket by a boundary count. They represent a triumph of the bureaucratic mindset, whereby the game becomes not about playing but conditions, where the objective is not cricket but compliance.

That’s why they so regularly become non-playing conditions, as in November when a T20 international between Australia and Pakistan was abandoned 11 deliveries short of constituting a game because of a seemingly immovable 20-minute break.

The rationale for sticking to the schedule in this case is that the finalists need a full day for travel and a full day for training before Sunday’s big event.

Provision of a reserve day, said an ICC spokesman/woman/thing, was that a semi-final reserve day “would have extended the length of the event, which isn’t feasible”.

Who knew that transit from Sydney to Melbourne was such an ordeal that it required a full day? Are they travelling by XPT? If not, do they need counsellors on hand in case anyone is triggered by the explosives check?

And just why was extending “the length of the tournament” not “feasible”? Have you got anything on? Me either. Anybody rushing off? Nope. Just the ICC, to the bank presumably. Because for “feasibility” read “cost”, which if anything makes no sense these days can generally be understood as the determinant.

Amazingly, the cricket world managed to struggle on before “playing conditions”, even when it rained. Think back to the famous Oval Test of 1968, where a deluge at lunch time on the last day left the ground under an inch of water, with Australia 5-85 chasing 352.

England’s captain Colin Cowdrey got on the loudspeaker and enjoined spectators to help. Thousands swarmed the outfield with buckets and blankets, items of clothing, even handkerchiefs — anything to soak up the surface moisture. So successful were their efforts that the ground was fit for play by 4.45pm, and England managed to win with six minutes left.

Imagine trying this now. Cowdrey would need a team of QCs to help him through the relevant statutes. Spectators would need to be issued lanyards and checked for health and safety certification before coming on the ground.

Any items of clothing would have to be official merchandise, in case of ambush marketing, and any handkerchiefs screened, in case of coronavirus. As for the old ladies at The Oval in 1968 who used their knitting needles to perforate the outfield, they’d have been pinioned by security guards already. You could take someone’s eye out with one of those.

Alternatively, cast your mind back to the third Test in Melbourne in 1970-71, where England won the toss on a Thursday and sent Australia in only for it to rain for three days solid.

A press campaign sprang up, urging that the match be recalibrated to start on the scheduled rest day, Sunday, with a day added to the end. When authorities recoiled from altering the shape of a fixture that had nominally already begun, The Age’s sagacious Percy Beames observed: ‘Try and tell cricket followers a game is in progress when a ball has not been bowled nearly 48 hours after the start.”

Yet when play was formally abandoned, something was offered in lieu: a game of 40 eight-ball overs a side on what had been the Test’s scheduled last day. It’s now celebrated, of course, as the inaugural one-day international.

This, it’s worth noting, took precisely one meeting to organise, involving Sir Donald Bradman, his Board of Control colleagues Bob Parish and Ray Steele, and their English counterparts Gubby Allen, David Clark and Cyril Hawker — not exactly a garage of start-up entrepreneurs, one would have thought. But 4252 one-day internationals later, their intuition seems to have paid off, yes?

Revisiting the auspices of that match while the rain poured on Thursday, I was struck by the adroit compromise between respect for cricket’s integrity and the need to keep faith with the public. Also its sheer informality: England received no extra money for the game, and the players took the field unsure if they were to be paid (they were eventually slung 50 quid each).

Most interesting was the attitude of England’s team manager, Clark, widely regarded as a genial old duffer – he was actually a former paratrooper who never mentioned the glider crash he’d survived during the invasion of Sicily, or being taken prisoner on the bridge at Arnhem. Clark called the impromptu fixture “a calculated risk in the interests of the game as a whole.”

Thursday was important to “the game as a whole” too. This is the first women’s T20 held out from under the shadow of the men’s; it has been, in lots of ways, a great success, an entry point for new fans, a rallying point for old. The final should be great, even the autumnal Melbourne weather.

But the participants deserved better than their damp semi-final squib. We scoff at ancients like Clark now. But maybe we have something to learn from their idea of cricket’s welfare and their calculations of risk.