Send in the Clowns

So thousands of people turn up at Durham expecting to watch a 20/20 quarter final.

There are probably a lot of kids there with their parents, keen to watch their first ever live game so they can tell all their friends at school about it the next day.

There's also a fair smattering of local businesses using it as an ideal opportunity to entertain some clients - and put a few quid back into the county organisation at the same time.

The ground authorities at the Riverside are looking forward to making a tidy profit on the bar, souvenir shop and food concession takings.

We're constantly told that 20/20 is going to be the financial lifeblood of a lot of the smaller counties - and a heck of a lot of the larger, test venue ones too.

Well, this sort of Keystone Cops routine isn't going to help anyone - and the final outcome of no play shows an alarming lack of nous on behalf of the organisers and authorities.

Here’s a simple solution taken from baseball – the game that everyone says is ‘just like 20/20’ (Incidently, everyone who says that has obviously never been within a hundred miles of a baseball game – but we’ll let that pass… for now) The match gets played 'under protest', so that the result can be challenged if it's deemed to be necessary at a later date. This logical, simple, ‘no one gets hurt’ step takes into account the customers who have paid good money to enter the ground and means they see some cricket.

Instead, thousands of people go home having witnessed no cricket, but just a pantomime.