finishing early, there was nothing on Spring Bank Holiday Monday. Gerald Mortimer, Derby Evening Telegraph cricket correspondent for 30 years and afterwards a columnist wrote: “Bank Holiday was pleasant where I was, a nice day to watch some cricket. Because of an early finish to the Lord’s Test, not a single first-class ball was sent down on Monday. Nor was there a National League (40-overs a side) programme. The Championship season opened on Good Friday, when a combination of excellent weather and people on holiday brought encouraging crowds. For the England and Wales Cricket Board to ignore another Bank Holiday is lunacy. By its nature, Championship cricket cannot attract those who work, especially as Saturdays are often blank. It smacks of a conspiracy to run it down.” These opinions found support and there was a good deal of grumbling in members’ enclosures and around the boundary edges. For a retired person, becoming a county member was a passport to a season’s cricket. The loss of a Bank Holiday Monday, while regrettable, could be absorbed. For people still at work, such days were precious and there was a feeling that they were being robbed of a day’s play. Nothing could be done about days lost to rain but this was akin to being short changed. No attempt had been made at an organised programme over the Bank Holidays, which continued to make do with scraps from the table. There were a few morsels. Glamorgan began a Championship match at Colwyn Bay on August Bank Holiday Monday in 2003 and the holiday crowd sawMichael Powell make a hundred before bad light ended play with nine overs remaining. Test matches and ODIs sometimes offered consolation but the former are dependant on the match going the full course. A Twenty20 between England and Pakistan attracted 14,511 to Bristol on August Bank Holiday Monday 2006; a miserable Spring Bank Holiday Monday in 2007 found England and the West Indies shivering in temperatures of 9c at Headingley – the lowest in which Test cricket had been played since 1965. More than 21,000 attended an ODI between England and India at Edgbaston. In 2009 eight Twenty20 fixtures took place on Spring Bank Holiday Monday, which was, at least, an improvement. That year’s Wisden carried an article by its former editor Matthew Engel lamenting the fixture chaos which was destroying the rhythm of the season. It echoed the complaints aired on the county grounds, complaints driven not by nostalgia but common sense. The 2010 fixture list brought hope, with six Championship matches – Nottinghamshire-Essex, Warwickshire-Durham, and Yorkshire-Lancashire and, in the Second Division, Glamorgan-Surrey, Leicestershire-Middlesex and Worcestershire-Gloucestershire – starting on the Saturday preceding Spring Bank Holiday Monday. In addition some Clydesdale Bank 40 League games and the final day of the first Test between England and Bangladesh at Lord’s were planned. Similarly August Bank Holiday Monday offered the final days of the England-Pakistan Test at Lord’s and Sussex-Glamorgan in the Championship, with Clydesdale 40 League games also featured. It represented a considerable step towards a happy medium but otherwise the scheduling for 2010 was criticised. A first-class season which opened in Abu Dhabi at the end of March continued with counties in action against the universities on Easter Saturday (3 April). This, the earliest ever start to an English cricket season, was followed by the first round of the LV=County Championship programme beginning on 9 April. Almost a quarter of the four-day competition Dying Embers 193