It's been a summer of "No Play - Rain" so far, but there has to be a better answer to weather-affected games than a shrug of the shoulders.
Five full days have now passed since my English county side, Lancashire, managed to get out on the field to play some cricket.
With three Twenty20 games washed out, and now the first two days of the crucial four-day Roses match against Yorkshire meeting a similar fate, what should be a key stage of the season has turned instead into a soggy, ludicrous non-event.
Based as they are in Manchester, Lancashire have always been more at the mercy of the elements than most. Invariably in the course of a season they lose dozens of hours, and hundreds of overs, to the weather. The bulk of those are usually due to April showers (make that downpours) at the beginning of the campaign or, once autumn starts to close, in towards its end.
But here we are, in the nominal height of the English summer, and a major contender for the various domestic titles can't get out on the field to play. Frankly I'm beginning to find it hard to take seriously any more a game which has no credible answer to the vagaries of the elements. Indeed I can't think of any sport which deals with bad weather worse than English cricket does.
Postponed football games are always replayed, Rafael Nadal and his fellow tennis players may take four days to complete a rain-affected match at Wimbledon, but complete it they do, and if rain washes out the last day of a golf tournament, at least there's a certain amount of logic in awarding the tournament to the third-round leader.
But if Lancashire and Yorkshire are prevented from playing one of the matches of the season, what is the solution? A shrug of the shoulders and a few lousy bonus points each.
There must be a fairer way than this. How about replaying the match at a later date? (I'd much rather have free days set aside for replays, rather than a meaningless 40-over tournament clogging up the business end of the season.) Or moving to a neutral venue elsewhere in the country where the weather is kinder? Or even flying the teams to Ireland, or Holland, in search of sunnier skies? And failing all that, why not work out some sort of Duckworth-Lewis type points system to better compensate teams in rain-affected matches?
Even if these suggestions are fanciful or impractical, at least let's get some debate going, rather than just accepting the situation merely because that's how it has always been.
Supporters want constant thrills and excitement as they follow their team. They want to share in the momentum of a title challenge, or a great cup run. If all cricket can offer is five days in the pavilion when you're supposed to be out there playing, eventually the supporters will just lose interest because the absurdity of the situation becomes too much to take.
The English weather will always be with us – unless global warming drives the rain away for good – and so too, I hope, will English cricket, but submitting meekly to one wash-out after another simply won't do any more. There must be another way.