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Boos rang out around the Kia Oval as umpires sent players off the field due to bad light for the second and final time at 5.54pm.
The crowd’s reaction was not unreasonable. Ollie Pope had just hit a drive through the covers to reach his seventh Test century, in just 102 balls, and it is hard to argue that the England batsmen were in any danger when they were racing to five runs per over. It looked as if another good bit of play was possible but, inevitably, stumps were called half an hour later.
These booed fans had paid full price, starting at £85, for their tickets. The English batsmen had entertained them, but only 44.1 overs, less than half the allotted number, had been bowled. As more than 30 overs had been bowled, no refund was forthcoming.
The “frustration” was not confined to the fans. Sri Lanka, who had failed to take advantage of very favourable playing conditions, were certainly more eager to get off the pitch than Pope, who saw it as a beach ball, as Ben Duckett had seen it when the players were first evacuated at 12.18pm.
He scored 51 runs from 48 balls, but a combination of low light and very light rain kept the players out of action for three hours before and after lunch. Sri Lanka dropped their specialist spinner, Prabath Jayasuriya, and so we weren’t going to throw the ball to part-time tweakers before lunch as the match was slipping away from them on the opening day.
Duckett was phlegmatic, saying the players no longer had a say and would simply follow the orders of the umpires – in this case Chris Gaffaney and Joel Wilson – but during that first break, England cricket’s chief executive Rob Key expressed his “frustration” with the situation and wondered what more the game could do to keep its participants on the field for longer.
“The way they moved [it]playing really well, it didn’t look like it was dark,” Key said on Test Match Special“What you need is to have the right vision and invest appropriately in what is dangerous.
“When the floodlights are on full blast, is it hard to see the ball? I don’t think we’ve ever done a study on that. It’s frustrating. I say that as an administrator. As a player, I would have said, what are we doing here?”
“Take the pink ball and keep going.”
Former England captain Michael Vaughan has lamented the speed with which players are being taken off the pitch in his Telegraph Sport Friday, and again called for a regulation change to give fans more cricket to watch.
“What passes have we seen in the last 15 minutes that have posed a physical threat?” Vaughan said on TMS. “You go to a pink ball and you keep going. Teams will have to accept that they’re unlucky.”
“Not all of these ideas are going to please everyone. I just want to see them stick.”
The timing could not have been worse for a cricket test at the end of a quiet summer. The ticket prices, value for money and visibility of test cricket have been in the spotlight this week, after England’s crushing victory at Lord’s, which was half full on day four, with adult tickets starting at £95. The Oval test, the last of the summer, comes after the start of the school year (meaning another low attendance is expected on day four) and with autumn approaching, increasing the possibility of delays throughout the match.
The final moments of the Vitality Blast quarter-final between Northamptonshire and Somerset were played out in pouring rain on Thursday night, but there was a determination to see the game through to a natural conclusion and provide a packed Wantage Road stadium with as much entertainment as possible. Test cricket, with its dark red ball, is different, but not so different that it doesn’t have to work harder to keep its fans coming.
