Cricket: Edgbaston Test rained off again

The third Investec Test at Edgbaston became the first in England for almost half a century to suffer a washout for each of the first two days.

As persistent rain showed no signs of moving away from Birmingham, umpires Kumar Dharmasena and Tony Hill abandoned play shortly after lunch without a ball bowled for the second successive day. No toss or exchange of teams has yet taken place in this final Test of a series England have already won – after victories over the West Indies at Lord’s and then Trent Bridge.

The last time a home Test failed to start before day three was in 1964, when England and Australia were kept off the field at Lord’s. This double washout means there is still a chance the tourists’ lynchpin batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul may be able to take part after all, despite a side injury.

Chanderpaul had a scan this week, and a slight side strain rather than a tear has been diagnosed. It will be the end of this tour for the left-hander if he does not feature here.

Chanderpaul has not played limited-overs cricket for his country since last year’s World Cup, and is not in the Windies’ squad for either three NatWest Series one-day internationals or a one-off Twenty20 against England. Back to this final Test, a minimum of 156 overs have been lost – with only eight extra overs permitted on each of the final three days, assuming no further interruption from the weather. Today’s forecast is significantly better. England will have precious little time nonetheless to try to close out a 3-0 whitewash – although there is minor encouragement in the reduction of the follow-on from an initial 200 to 100 for what has become a three-day match, at best.

Meanwhile, cricket’s only appearance as part of an Olympic Games will be recalled later this month when teams from France and Britain meet to reprise a match that took place in Paris 112 years ago.

France Cricket (FC), the national governing body for the sport, will field a side against the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in Twenty20 and 50-over-a-side matches at Chateaux du Thoiry on 16 June to help raise awareness of the sport within the country. In an Olympic year, the matches will also be a reminder of one of the more unusual episodes in the history of the Games.

The 1900 contest, which took place at the Velodrome de Vincennes, featured a British side from the south west of England – the Devon Country Wanderers – and a French line-up made up of players from the Standard Athletic Club and the Albion Cricket Club in Paris.

The match was 12-a-side and the majority of France’s team were expatriate players, many of them born in England. Britain won the game by 158 runs, with totals of 117 and 145-5 declared, easily outstripping France’s scores of 78 and 26, but the match was only formally recognised as an Olympic event by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1912.

“It is a bit of a quirk that we are the silver medallists,” said Mark Moodley, the general manager of FC.

“When we talk to people about the sport it has become a bit of an ice-breaker before we have a more detailed in-depth discussion... but it is not something we boast about as it happened so long ago.”