Common sense is an uncommon degree in what the world calls wisdom. I hadn’t thought of that Samuel Coleridge witticism since school, until Kevin Pietersen brought back memories by pointing out a lack of rational thinking from the organisers of the Kanpur one-day international.

Since I am from that part of the world, I can perhaps get away with taking the Kanpur theory forward and saying that scheduling any match there, irrespective of the season, is itself proof of the deficiency of good judgement.

Match referee Barry Jarman’s car once got pelted with stones in the city before a meaningless ODI against Zimbabwe, at another game a local cricket official’s son was apprehended for coming to the ground with a revolver, and in the match before this, a Test against South Africa, the pitch was so sub-standard that even the toothless ICC fearlessly growled about it.

Pietersen can rest easy, a lot of us from the region agree that this Kanpur game should not have been played there, and we take his point that both sides knew from the start that there was bound to be an intervention from Messrs Duckworth and Lewis.

But the non-existent brainpower of India’s powerful cricket administrators, who consider quota-based venue allocations above all else, is only a small sidebar to the week’s top story, which is the repeated failure of the English one-day team in India.

England have now lost 10 of the last 11 one-dayers they’ve played in this country. So, while it’s easy to be sympathetic with Pietersen after the third ODI ended in a farce — too few overs were reduced at the top after a 45-minute delay, and the light predictably started fading early in the evening — it’s not that easy to be too benevolent either.

... contd.