This year at Yorkshire's request the match will be played in daylight using a red ball so the transparently bogus reasoning of the last seven years that it was an experiment in pink ball day night cricket has been completely dropped. Yet the traditional English curtain raiser is still played abroad. With so much cricket played in the Emirates these days I don't know why we bother to show any interest. It's clear that the only game that the players and administrators want to play here is t20 in June and July then lounge in the obscene decadence of the desert kingdom built on the backs of slave labour for the other ten months.
