Not particularly because I want to go out, or even because I want the cricket at Edgbaston to be played, but simply because it would stop Agnew and his friends from talking nonsense.

This morning we had two new reasons why Twenty20 was a bad thing. They boiled down to:

• Players will be upset if they lose close games
• All of the additional people now coming to watch cricket might not stay forever

And now we have someone, I think Dougie Brown, going on as if no sportsman had ever been paid to play before. All this stuff about team mates falling out over errors on the pitch, or getting angry with managers, or lying about injuries, is just plain ludicrous. Are the Yankees afraid to play in the World Series in case ARod gets paid more than Jetter? Would Alex Ferguson turn down a Champions League final place because he didn’t want to upset some of his players by leaving them out of the side? Does Ron Dennis spend all his time worrying about whether Lewis Hamilton might have a niggle knee injury that he hasn’t told him about? It is just absurd. The only conclusion anyone can take away from this is that while cricketers might have been paid to play before, they have certainly never treated the game like professionals, because they clearly don’t have a clue how to do so and are driven into a gibbering panic by the idea that they might have to.

Today, for the first time ever, I have turned off the BBC’s cricket commentary in disgust; not once, but twice. For goodness sake, BBC, get some people with brains on the program (like the folks at Sky Sports who did a really excellent feature of the Pietersen switch hit this morning).