da premier bet： The denizens of Darwin were surprised yesterday: the sky, which hadbeen resolutely blue throughout the town’s inaugural Test, acquiredsome clouds
Roving Reporter by Steven Lynch20-Jul-2003The denizens of Darwin were surprised yesterday: the sky, which hadbeen resolutely blue throughout the town’s inaugural Test, acquiredsome clouds. At first they were just cotton-wool jobs, straight out ofThe Simpsons, but towards the end of the second day’s play thesky was uniformly grey. At Derby it would have counted as a finesummer’s day, but at Darwin there were worries that the umps wouldgo off for bad light.Even my taxi-driver was fooled by the cumulative cumulo-nimbus.”Those clouds are too high for rain,” he pronounced, in a fineimpersonation of Michael “No Hurricane” Fish. “It never rains here inJuly. We might get a shower or two in September, then the rainyseason really starts in October.”But there’s an unwritten rule of cricket which states that when you puton a Test match you get rain too. At Bulawayo a few years ago a longdrought was broken by the deadly double of staging a Test andgetting Dickie Bird to umpire it. The Bird option isn’t available anymore, although it was rather a surprise not to find him somewhere inthe Marrara Oval, dabbing his eyes and telling the one about his dadwalking from Barnsley to Leeds every day to watch The Don.Anyway it did rain, during the night. Briefly. For about three or fourminutes, shocked Darwinians reported. It probably constituted half thetown’s annual average rainfall for July, which is one measly millimetre. The third day, though, dawned cloudless as Bangladesh resumed their hopeless struggle.On the field some arcane television regulation ensured that thesponsors’ logos, which had been placed in the conventional positionbehind the wicketkeeper at both ends, had been blotted out andrepainted at the sides of the square. After a change of sponsor forAustralian Tests this year that means there is a giant figure 3 at cover and midwicket. It looks a bit like the ever-expanding Merv Hughes has left his one-day shirts to dry on the outfield.The new sponsors are Hutchison 3G, a telecommunications company,and the big 3 is their corporate logo. This means, confusingly, that this is the 3 Test series, even though there are only two actual Tests in it. Later this year Australia take on Zimbabwe in another two-Test 3 Test series. And that’s followed by the 3 Test series against India, which actually contains four matches. It will be a relief when 3 finally get a three-Test series, but that won’t be until next year at least. In the meantime watch out for the second 3 Test at Cairns …Neatly, this 3 Test is going to end on the third day, which means acouple of days of sightseeing for the teams and the accompanyingmedia circus, which includes six journalists from Bangladesh, most ofwhom are valiantly searching for new slants on the phrase “lost by aninnings”. It’s a shame, though, that Darwin’s cricket lovers are beingslightly short-changed – the whole town has welcomed these strangewhite-clad visitors, and the weather is so perfect for cricket (theoccasional cloud excepted) that it’s a wonder no-one thought of playingup here before. It’s probably a good time to make your reservations fornext July, when Sri Lanka will be here.Steven Lynch is editor of Wisden CricInfo.More Roving Reporter
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