Rain Stopped Play

A cricket match at the highest level has five days to be completed, with roughly six hours per day. If it rains or it is too dark then play is suspended, and the time is usually lost. Should the match be incomplete after five days then a draw is declared. It is therefore possible to draw a match simply by having bad weather. Take for example the first test of the ashes series of 1926, played at Trent Bridge in Nottingham. After less than an hours play it started raining, and kept on raining. Play was never restarted and the match was drawn. Only two of the England team even got onto the pitch, the rest stayed in the Pavilion and presumably drank a lot of tea. Fortunately there were four more matches in the series, which England won 1-0.

The Pakistan team of 1998 were unluckier. Trailing 1-0 after the first two matches of their series against Zimbabwe they must have fancied their chances of winning the last match in Faisalabad to draw the series. Unfortunately the match was abandoned due to four days of fog.

Our local cricket match yesterday suffered a similar fate. A pitch inspection revealed that it was raining, and so we moved directly to the beer garden. By the time the rain had stopped the light was too poor, and play was abandoned.

Here is a link which can be saved for a rainy day: a list of strange weather events which have occurred during cricket matches, which goes to confirm a quote by Benny Green, which roughly went as follows

The world is divided into two groups of people: those who think that nothing ever happens during a cricket match, and those who know that anything that could possibly happen already has.