Windies make mockery of cricket. Yet again.

England seemed to be heading in the right direction, by the very reason that pushed D/L in our favour once Ramdin was out, so it wasn't too unreasonable to think that they were going to win. As such I won't say that John Dyson's screw up with primary school mathematics changed much. It's such a shame to see the rules being so selfishly applied though.

In a similar way to the groundsman blatant preparing dead pitches during the test series to ensure draws, this is a horrible way to twist things to your advantage. As has already been pointed out in so many places, they are by no means the first to do this, and technically they are entitled to do so, but what happens to the Spirit of the Game in situations like this?

Whilst he seldom seems to know what day it is Bumble was right with his continual chanting of "Play the game! Play the game!" and maybe this will teach the Windies, and indeed, other teams, a thing about sportsmanship. Unfortunately it'll probably just teach them not to let a pensioner read a newfangled spreadsheet.

Is there nothing that can be done about this sort of behaviour? Obviously with something as basic as a shitty pitch nothing realistically can be done to save the match at the time, but when a team is just being a big old spoil sport can the umpires (oh shit, dodgy ground already) not have the final say? I don't think there are many people who wouldn't, if they were put into a darkened room and told to think carefully at the risk of unleashing the badgers, confess they'd rather see a good fair match than their own team win by default.

Letting umpires use their own version of common sense was shown to be a very dubious thing with the referral trials, but surely letting them say "Look, there are a floodlights... just turn them on." can't be a bad thing, with only tired stuffiness getting in the way of simple logic like this happening.

Either way, let's not think about poaching Dyson any more, huh?