THE first round of championship matches ended in a soggy mess, the game at the Oval between Surrey and Somerset ending in a draw like all the others. At this rate, with 13 of the 20 rounds scheduled to end on a Saturday, spectators who can not take a weekday off will not be able to see much first-class cricket this summer.
England's selectors therefore have four rounds left before the first Test, one of them coinciding with the Texaco Trophy, in which to assess the personnel best suited to their Ashes strategy. What that strategy is, Mike Atherton in his accompanying column declines to specify publicly, lest the enemy catch wind.
It is thought, however, that England are planning to bat first with a similar specialist line-up to the one that bedded down during the winter, then to pressurise the Australians through the two spinners, Robert Croft and Phil Tufnell. The pair did a fine job in Zimbabwe and New Zealand by giving Atherton a control in the field that he has seldom enjoyed elsewhere. But if the Australians do catch wind, their nights are unlikely to be tormented by insomnia.
England's plan is partly based on a highly optimistic faith in the value of finger-spin. The rest of the world is fast-tracking wrist-spinners, who not only rival fast bowlers now for effectiveness but sometimes exceed them. Finger-spin wins just as few or fewer Tests today as it did 10 and 20 years ago.
Croft and Tufnell bowled 396.5 overs in last winter's Tests for 774 runs and 32 wickets. An excellent effort, but if we are to be realistic, the standard of Zimbabwe's and New Zealand's batting was below county standard, never mind that of most Test countries.
After years of seeing his bowling average touch 40 in county cricket, Croft took his winter Test wickets at 18 runs each. Of course he improved during the tour, flighted the ball to a full length and turned it, and deserved the label of being the most promising English or Welsh off-spinner for a generation. But Australia's left-handers will surely not charge him so naively as Stephen Fleming, or the Waugh brothers try to cut too hard and slice him to slip as Nathan Astle did.
Tufnell matured as a character, whatever Mark Waugh might jeer, and the only misfield he made in a Test that springs to memory was when he went for a ball at deep square-leg with only his right hand. His figures improved too, 14 Test wickets at 31 each being the kind of analysis he achieved before 1993. But underneath it all he remains a stock-bowler: again at Auckland, as at Adelaide two winters before, he quickened up at the crisis, and did not give the ball air until Astle and Danny Morrison had saved the day.
To back England to outspin Shane Warne is therefore ambitious at best, and possibly unrealistic. But there is another reason why England are contemplating it: the fact that their seamers have so often let them down.
The first session of the Zimbabwe series was a nightmare for Atherton as the home team scored 109 for one from 30 overs of Mullally-led dross. In the first session in New Zealand, England ``played as poorly as I can remember'' in Atherton's own words. After being sent in on a damp seamer's pitch, New Zealand did not lose a wicket in 29 overs of drivel. It was uphill from there, and in both cases England did not get back on terms or ahead until the fourth day.
In the last two Ashes series as well, England's seamers did not perform when it mattered in the opening session, to be taken apart by Mark Taylor and Michael Slater: and there was no way back against Australia. No wonder then that Atherton is not keen on fielding first at Edgbaston, though the ground may be damp and the sky cloudy. Yet on these four occasions there was one common factor: namely that England's most (only?) reliable seamer of recent years missed all of them.
Angus Fraser is now 32 and in his benefit season. But at the least it should be a priority for England's selectors to monitor how he bowls in Middlesex's first championship match, against Kent at Lord's, and in their second, which happens to be away to Warwickshire on May 21. If Fraser were able to offer some new-ball control, England would have the option of sending Australia in at Edgbaston, and testing their weakest link, their now-questioned opening pair of Taylor and Slater. He might even be able to contain Australia enough at Lord's for England to escape their traditional thrashing there.
A revival of Fraser, to take the new ball with Andy Caddick, would also allow Dominic Cork to revert to what he does best. In the last year Cork has been straining to play the role of a second Botham, to be a strike bowler delivering all sorts of deliveries, many of them short. Make him first-change, as he was for England two years ago, and he is more likely to go back to his full-length outswing. But the planning has to be done now with Derbyshire.
If it turns out a damp summer, England may not need a second spinner at all, especially in the Tests outside London. And if their five bowlers were Cork, Croft, Gough, Caddick and Fraser, that is not too bad a tail. The top six are settled apart from Nick Knight, or they are so long as Alec Stewart continues to defy gravity as England's first top-order batsman/keeper.
It was not only Knight's left knuckle which came back from New Zealand in a mess, but his technique too. His hands were so far away from his body that his bat described a semi-circle against a straight ball. Mark Butcher could thus have done with a second innings yesterday to further his case as Knight's successor, but the rain forced an abandonment at tea-time.
Adam Hollioake might win a Test cap later in the summer as a No 6 who can bowl, and as a possible heir apparent. In Surrey's match against Somerset his medium-paced outswing did a job, but he might need to incorporate some of his Sunday variations to trouble Test batsmen.
In his first match as Surrey's first-team captain, Hollioake also gave evidence of his natural leadership qualities when he administered a dressing-down after the opening day. He warned all his team against believing all the favourable publicity which Surrey have received in advance.