If ever there was a summer that underlined the difficulty of keeping cricket both engaging and competitive outside of the big three, then the 2024 Sri Lankan and West Indian tour to England has been that season.
A West Indies team continually trying to bed in new and raw talent fell 3-0.
Sri Lanka lost the series at Lord’s on Sunday after showing some belated grit, determination and skill as they did at Manchester.
There was one glorious Friday afternoon at Trent Bridge in July that felt like real Test cricket.
Kavem Hodge and Alick Athanaze defied England and batted in attritional style to wear bowlers down before displaying true Caribbean flair.
It was a throwback, a fleeting mirage as the same batting line-up was massacred in the second dig.
The current aggregate score reads England 5 Sri Lanka and West Indies 0 after five games.
The Sri Lankans, like Kraigg Brathwaite’s team, had a solitary warm-up hit before they entered the unforgiving Test arena.
Their dreadful starts in three of their four innings so far are a testament to a lack of drills in real world English conditions.
There have been resistance fighters.
The veterans Angelo Mathews and Dinesh Chandimal kept the Sri Lankan boat afloat as did the very promising Kamindu Mendis and Milan Rathnayake.
However, the crowd needs a competition over the best part of a week rather than a slow, inevitable defeat.
