ECB not giving up on day-night Test in England

Despite the plans to hold Warwickshire’s final County Championship match of the season Lancashire at Edgbaston under floodlights getting shelved, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) will continue in their efforts to hold more matches with the pink ball to test its durability ahead of the day-night Test they are hopeful of hosting against West Indies in 2017.

Edgbaston has been identified as the potential venue for the day-night Test and has already hosted a 2^nd XI fixture at the venue recently. Plans were in place for taking the experiment to the next level with the game between Warwickshire and Lancashire identified as the fixture. However, with both teams battling against relegation from Division One, a decision was taken to abandon any experiments for a game of such magnitude.

Instead, Division Two fixtures between Leicestershire and Glamorgan and Gloucestershire and Sussex, which begins on September 20, will be played with the pink ball as the ECB hopes to reach a consensus before tickets for the England-West Indies Test in 2017 goes for sale.

"Tickets for that game go on sale in mid-October," Neil Snowball, the Warwickshire CEO, told ESPNcricinfo. "So we really need to have made a decision before then so people know what they are going to be watching. I went into that Second XI match open-minded and came out of it very positive about day-night cricket.

“We would like to make it work and I think the ECB would, too, but we would need to come to a conclusion within the next few weeks."

Andrew Strauss, the director of England cricket, is also keen to conduct more matches with the pink ball as he hopes to push forward his plans for day-night Test cricket in the future.

"We are looking at it from a sample size of one at the moment but on reflection that seemed like a good match for Test cricket," he said. "The question will always be: is that something we can and should replicate in this country, are there other things we can do?

“What I don't want us to do is stick our head in the sand and pretend everything will be okay. There will always be people who will be saying everything is fine and dandy as it stands, but with the shifting sands of international cricket we need to be proactive rather than reactive."

Strauss is so keen to push forward his vision that he would also accept a proposal from Cricket Australia to play one of the 2017-18 Ashes Tests under lights even if England don’t play a day-night Test prior to the series.

“Where I am generally with day-night cricket is that I don't want to let performance get in the way of taking Test cricket forward, so if Australia wants us to play a day-night Test then I think myself, our coaches and players are comfortable with that as a concept,” Strauss said.

“What we'd need to be clear on is how we prepare ourselves properly for that. We'd want to give ourselves the best chance of winning an Ashes series in Australia."