So how best to organise the final weeks of the cricket season, and showcase the fixture list’s major set-piece events?
What about…staging the third England v Pakistan ODI on a Friday, followed next day by the Clydesdale Bank 40 final, the biggest day of the domestic season. Then skip the Sunday – the most attractive day of the week to watch cricket. Finally, schedule another ODI (as if we’ve not had enough already) on, very conveniently, a Monday. And don’t forget, there’s still one more ODI to come.
It’s Monday, in late September, and a supposedly important international cricket fixture is underway.
And with the big county final in the middle of it all, what are we supposed to be focussing on? Which was the priority, the centre of our attention?
How did we end up in this daft situation? What makes the pile-up even harder to stomach is the fact than more than seven weeks elapsed in mid-summer without any test cricket at all. As only England host much international cricket during the middle of the year, shouldn’t these kind of balls-ups be easier to avoid?
Add to the mix the helpful intervention from Ijaz Butt (“England threw the game…er, no actually I didn’t say that”), and you can see why Jonathan Agnew today wrote on Twitter: ‘Never looked forward to commentating on a cricket match with less enthusiasm than today. Every ounce of interest has gone.’