THE England team coach rushed from the Nehru Stadium yesterday before violent clashes inside the ground left at least one policeman and a spectator seriously hurt. Tempers flared after the fifth one-day international against India was abandoned without a ball bowled because of heavy rain during the previous three days.

Part of the outfield was left littered with plastic bottles and pieces of rubble — some of them weighing up to a pound — thrown by a section of the 20,000 crowd. They were left angry when the umpires, Rudi Koertzen and Arani Jayaprakash, called off play at 1.15pm, realistically the latest time for a decision.

They had made three previous inspections of damp areas that were not visible from the stands. Both teams had been given advance warning of the abandonment and left almost immediately after the formal announcement with clear signs of trouble brewing behind them. Spectators tried to rip down wire fencing at the front of a stand, lit bonfires and attacked police with missiles. Officers responded by throwing back some of the half-bricks and firing teargas. One policeman lay unconscious, after being hit on the head, alongside a spectator who had been struck with heavy sticks.

As the first serious evidence of trouble, it represented the ugliest incident of the tour so far. Andrew Strauss, due to captain England with Andrew Flintoff being rested, said: “There were a lot of police around as we left.While we were there we could see people getting frustrated, but the disturbances were some way from the dressing-room.”

Guwahati is politically volatile and elections were switched to avoid a clash with the game. As recently as last month, a terrorist bomb killed two people, and the ECB was monitoring developments in the build-up to the game. However, the scenes yesterday were spontaneous, stemming from frustration rather than more sinister motives.

The city is positioned among pleasant scenery in the northeast of India, between Bhutan and Bangladesh, but has none of the affluence of emerging business centres such as Bombay, Hyderabad and Bangalore. It was hosting its first international match in four years and the earliest spectators arrived five hours before the scheduled start of 9am.

Expectation was such that on Saturday a crowd of about 200 people followed a tour bus as it negotiated parked rickshaws along a narrow road leading to the hotel, even though it contained the English press corps rather than the team. With Roshan Mahanama, the match referee, due to submit a report to the ICC, it may be some time before the next visit.

The Assam Cricket Association (ACA) spent 90,000 rupees (about £1,200) to hire a helicopter for an hour in the morning in a desperate attempt to speed the drying process after the first gloomy prognosis by Koertzen and Jayaprakash, but the wind created by the rotary blades made no positive difference.

P. K. Deb, the vice-president of the ACA, tried to limit damage to his own organisation by suggesting that conditions were fit for play. “We felt the game could have gone ahead and the scenes afterwards would have been avoided,” he said. “We did all we could to get it right for the people who came, but I think the umpires made the wrong decision.”

As ground host, the ACA should look at its own responsibilities. The covering operation was below-par and five English spectators among the crowd — all at the opposite end to the trouble — described information given over the publicaddress as minimal. “All we were told was to be patient,” one of them said.

The teams were due to travel to Jamshedpur this morning for the penultimate game on Wednesday. England have not visited since 1992-93, when boundary fielders were pelted with objects and Devon Malcolm avoided serious injury when an eight-inch steel bolt missed his head narrowly. No such trouble is expected this time.

SERIES DETAILS

RESULTS

DELHI: India won by 39 runs
FARIDABAD: India won by four wickets
GOA: India won by 49 runs
COCHIN: India won by four wickets
GUWAHATI: Match abandoned

TO COME

WEDNESDAY: Jamshedpur
SATURDAY: Indore