Dez Corkhill believes the controversial end to Thursday’s India versus England ODI has dealt cricket a severe blow.

As international cricket faces a fight for its very survival in the face of the emerging superpower that is Twenty20, the farcical nature of India’s One Day International victory over England at Kanpur was a classic example of how to distance yourself from the public - your consumer.If Twenty20 cricket has taught us one thing, it’s that the public crave entertainment. The game is an entertainment and needs to behave as such. Twenty20 recognises that, One-Day International cricket clearly doesn’t.

The idea of an unnecessarily long 45-minute delay before the start of the game, an inflexibility to change the duration of a lunch hour, and the fact that a stadium fully able to host matches under floodlights was, because of rules, not allowed to turn those floodlights on, means that the public was short-changed in India’s 16-run win at Kanpur.

India’s captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni said he always suspected that the contest would have to go to Duckworth Lewis. “We knew that it would come into play here because of the weather in this venue. It gets dark after 4.15pm,” he said.

Instead of headlines of another excellent India cricketing performance, the headlines are instead about a farcical ending to a match. An ending brought about because rules are not allowed to be bent. Crazy.

Any young fan going to a match for the first time at Kanpur won’t really know who won. India were supposed to have scored 241 runs to win - yet scored 198 and then wandered off into the dressing room having secured the victory.

“I knew there was no way we were going to get the game finished,” said England skipper, Kevin Pietersen.

“It is a very bitter pill to swallow. We tried to have a chat to see if we could get the lunch break shortened but we were told it was an ICC regulation that it had to be 30 minutes.” Andrew Flintoff echoed Pietersen’s dissatisfaction, calling it “a bizarre scenario”.

This is no criticism of the players, and it is fully acknowledged that there needs to be a method for dictating a result. But when the game forgets that it is there to entertain as much as anything else - particularly whilst under such sustained commercial pressure - it can hardly act shocked, horrified or even surprised if Twenty20 takes over completely.

Duckworth/Lewis didn’t alter the result yesterday, but strict adherence to inflexible rules and regulations meant that Messer’s Duckworth and Lewis were the headline makers. That cannot be good for cricket.