Theatre of the Absurd

With a rare day off work and the spring sun shining gloriously, I didn't see a huge amount of the action in either Cape Town or Guyana yesterday, but I was ready for a good finish when the first England-West Indies ODI was curtailed in another farcical denouement of the type cricket seems to specialise in.

Okay, John Dyson made a mistake in his interpretation of the Duckworth-Lewis tables. He's not the first person to do that and he won't be the last. But what really grated was the alacrity with which the West Indies batsmen fled the field, when what they should have been doing was giving a huge crowd what it had paid to see, namely an exciting finish to a fairly mundane game. To a certain extent it could be argued that the Windies got what they deserved, but you just know that England would have done exactly the same if the teams' roles had been reversed.

And all this on a ground with floodlights which couldn't be switched on because of some inviolable advance agreement.

Simon Hughes had it about right this morning when I heard him on the radio describing the whole sorry mess as the latest production from cricket's 'theatre of the absurd'.

It needs sorting out, but can anybody really imagine the ICC doing anything meaningful about anything?