London: At 2:30pm on Monday in Abu Dhabi, an umpire will call "play", and a bowler will run in to launch a pink ball and the new "English" first-class cricket season.
This is not any old pick-up game. It is MCC v Durham, last year's champion county, staged at the Shaikh Zayed stadium, which has a bigger capacity than any cricket ground in England bar Lord's.
Floodlights with pink balls have never been used, in the history of English first-class cricket.
However, if this experiment goes well, the next step will be even more momentous: Test cricket starting in the afternoon and being played under floodlights in the evening when people have finished work.
You might say that Thomas Lord will turn in his grave. But had there been pink balls and floodlights in 18th century Thirsk, the entrepreneurial Yorkshireman would have given them a go, then urged MCC to use them at his ground.
However, while the game in Abu Dhabi will be unprecedented for English cricketers, a pink ball and floodlights have already been used in first-class cricket in another part of the world — in the sandpit that was the Sir Vivian Richards stadium in Antigua when West Indies and England tried to stage the second Test there last spring.
