England to play four-day Test year early as Lord’s is washed out
Both sides expected to change teams and plans MCC have to refund £2m to ticket-holders
Supporters of four-day Tests could feel gratified, even if nobody else was, when the opening day of the second Test was abandoned without a ball bowled.
England’s inaugural Test against Ireland at Lord’s next July is scheduled to be England’s first four-day Test, but this one against India is now a four-dayer in effect.
A five-day Test is a fight to the death: just occasionally it might end in a draw but very seldom (England have had three draws in the last two years). In a four-day Test the clock enters the equation and offers the lesser team a place to hide.
The shorter the game, the more superfluous a second spinner becomes as the pitch has less scope to wear and tear, though these hours of play have been extended by half an hour (to 6.30pm), and the number of overs from 90 to 98. And as the captains never came close to tossing, both England and India can revise their teams to suit conditions – and any chance Moeen Ali had of playing instead of Chris Woakes has receded further.
Likewise, on a pitch that will be damp after a day under covers, India are less likely to play a leftarm spinner. Bowling first, especially under cloud-cover, with the four pace bowlers they had at Edgbaston, would be India’s quickest way back into this series against an England side containing the debutant Ollie Pope at No 4.
In a four-day Test the chances of the side batting first are reduced: the normal strategy of batting until tea on the second day, and declaring with 500 or 600 on the board, if applied to a four-day game, would place a huge onus on the bowlers to take 20 wickets with little if any rest. Whereas the side bowling first can get ahead of the clock with one successful session.
It is a shame this is not England’s 1000th Test but their 1001st. MCC do these celebrations rather well; at any rate, if the ceremony had been at Lord’s, they would have amounted to more than the presentation of two plaques before the start, as at Edgbaston.
A parade of former England Test players, or at least of the former captains, would have been some compensation for the full house that endured a day of rain.
It was the first washed-out Test day at Lord’s since 2001 and left MCC to refund about £2 million worth of match-day tickets. Rain insurance will cover the cost of refunds, and the bars were busy all day, so the financial loss will be rel-
atively small. Strangely, the England player who had the best day may have been the one who was dropped for Lord’s, Dawid Malan.
He has lost his Test place, but he has yet to play for England in his most successful format of 50 overs – and there is a possibility that England will have one or even two vacancies in their ODI team for the World Cup.
Malan’s batting average in List A cricket is exceptional at 41, his firstclass average of 37 not so.
“When a player has been left out, there should be clear communication on the way they can improve in order to get back into contention,” England’s national selector Ed Smith said.
“That is the conversation I had with Dawid yesterday, I spent a couple of hours with him face to face and the message is very simple.
“He has had a full calendar year of Test cricket and he knows where he is at. He has shown that he can play very well at Test level. He showed with that excellent Test hundred at Perth that he can play very well on the international stage.
“We talked about general form, which everyone understands, and then specifically he has aptitudes that not everyone has. Not that many people score hundreds at Perth, I know Ben Stokes has and Brian Luckhurst scored a hundred at Perth but not that many Englishmen have looked as comfortable at the WACA as Dawid did.”
So as one door closes, another opens, and it is possible that England’s World Cup squad – even their team – could contain two Middlesex left-handed batsmen in the captain, Eoin Morgan, and Malan.