Within two hours of the deluge, the teams were out playing
As we discovered when discussing object fifty-three, cricket has given us many colourful phrases over the years, whether it be ‘tickling one down to fine leg’ or ‘dabbling in the corridor of uncertainty’. Yet if there’s one sentence guaranteed to strike dread into the heart of every fan, to make his or her shoulders collapse like the England middle order, it’s the hated ‘Rain Stopped Play’.
Our magnificent game has given us some enduring partnerships in the last 100 years, from Sutcliffe and Hobbs, to Ramadhin and Valentine, to Lillee and Thomson, but none has endured quite like the alliance between cricket and our next object – the faithful umbrella.
They come in all shapes and sizes and just about every colour under that rainbow that often appears as the ground staff work feverishly to drain the outfield of surface water.
Fortunately for cricket lovers, umbrellas are an ancient invention, so they were available to our forebears in 1879, reputedly the wettest summer in the second half of the nineteenth century. More than 580mm of rain fell in the five months from May to September, and Hubert Lamb, writing in Climate, History and the Modern World, described this summer as the ‘coldest in the long instrument records for England… the decline of English agriculture, which lasted for fifty years, dated from this time’.
The next English summer when the heavens remained open was 1903, the wettest in London since 1697, according to records. It was also the coldest, with the average June temperature in the capital down to minus two degrees centigrade. Not that the adverse conditions had much effect on W.G. Grace; he scored his 200th innings of 100 or more runs in first-class and minor cricket, though by this stage of his career his physique, as well as his beard, was of such generous proportions that it afforded him much-needed insulation.
Grace had retired by the time of the next calamitous season, that of 1912, when the summer produced a record 384.4mm of rain (the average is 241mm). August alone saw 193mm of rainfall – not so much the ‘Golden Age’ as the ‘Sodden Age’. Yorkshire, the county champions, lost an estimated £1,000 in gate receipts because of all the cancelled matches, and the Triangular Tournament (see object thirty-two) proved a damp squib on account of the rain. Still, at least umbrella manufacturers were happy, as they were in 1924. That summer had just about everything: torrential rain, biting cold and, in Somerset on 18 August, 238.8mm of rain and hail in a twenty-four-hour period. Three years later Wisden labelled the 1927 season ‘one of the worst in the history of cricket’ and reported that competitive cricket lost approximately £20,000 in revenue to the rain.
Within two hours of the deluge, the teams were out playing
In recent years clubs have come up with ever more sophisticated methods to combat the rain, beginning with Warwickshire’s ‘Brumbrella’, a 200-yard cover which was unrolled to protect most of the Edgbaston ground from the rain. First introduced in 1981, the Brumbella survived for twenty years before it was outlawed by the ECB’s insistence on flat covers.
For the MCC the key in defeating the rain lay not in what they put on the surface of Lord’s but what they did underneath. So in 2002 work began on a new drainage system at the home of cricket, one which involved digging up the outfield, removing the clay to a depth of 80cm (20,000 tonnes in total) and replacing it with a fine-sand mix. It cost the MCC £1.25 million, but that sum was recouped in one very wet July day in 2007. On the second day of the first Test against India it rained with a ferocity that Mick Hunt, the MCC’s head groundsman, hadn’t experienced in his thirty-eight years at Lord’s. But was Hunt worried? ‘Even when I saw the water pouring down the slope off the covers towards the Tavern Stand side I wasn’t that concerned because our filtration rate is two inches per hour, so I knew all that water would go away,’ he explained to the Daily Telegraph.
Within two hours of the deluge the teams were out playing, and the MCC weren’t obliged to fork out the £1.2 million in ticket refunds that they would have if no play had been possible.
But sometimes even twenty-first-century technology is powerless against the merciless might of the English summer: 2012 was the wettest summer for a century, with 370.7mm of rain, not to mention a miserly 413 hours of sunshine up to the end of August, making it the greyest since 1987. The rain eased a little in August, allowing the touring South Africa to beat England in the Test series, but the County Championship was the dampest of damp squibs. No side suffered more than Yorkshire, who lost 138 hours of play to rain out of a maximum of 384 (36 per cent), while seven more counties saw more than 100 hours washed out in the Great British summer.
According to the BBC a jet stream, a fast-moving band of air high in the atmosphere which came from America, was responsible for all the rain.
Typical. Americans don’t even play cricket, but they still find a way to rain on our parade.