Of fading light and falling fortunes

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.

The real problem for Pietersen & Co is not the fear of a similar shortened fixture in Guwahati, which, as he pointed out, is in the north-east where darkness falls even quicker, but what the team will do in the two matches before making the journey to Assam.

In most other countries, 3-0 would’ve been a series whitewash. Not too many teams play seven bilateral one-day matches with each other these days, and though England still have a theoretical chance to bounce back, the length of the series is perhaps the worst thing that could’ve happened to a team who have strangely never settled as a one-day unit.

There was a four-nation title in Sharjah under Adam Hollioake 11 years ago, and they made the final of the ICC Champions Trophy at home in 2004, but England’s failure to come to terms with the 100-over game is becoming a baffling reality of cricket’s modern era.

For a country that is the pioneer of all formats of the limited-overs game — three of the four county cricket championships are one-day competitions, the 50-over Friends Provident Trophy, Pro40, and Twenty20 — England’s all-time success rate is now dangerously close to falling below the 50-percent mark.

In their 501 one-dayers since 1971, England have won 240 and lost 238. Over the last 20 years, the win-loss numbers are down to 153-172, over the last five they’re 49-57, and in 2008 England have lost 9 of the 15 matches played so far. They’ve never won the World Cup, the ICC Champions Trophy, or any major multi-team event involving more than four countries.

And the sparks of an English one-day revival, rekindled with a

4-0 win over South Africa in Pietersen’s first series as captain in July, already seem like a fallacy.

Their Test team will do much better next month, no doubt, perhaps give India a better fight than the Australians did earlier this month, but KP will have to ensure the one-day woes don’t continue unabated right through the seven games, and then spill over to the Tests.

England need to stand up and fight, now, somehow. That’s the pressing issue for them. Not common sense, or the lack of it.