As rain fell and puddles spread across the Trent Bridge outfield on Wednesday, Steve Birks was almost beginning to lose his trademark smile. “It’s all very well spending £8 million on a new stand,” the head groundsman at Nottinghamshire said, jabbing a finger at the sodden turf beneath his wellington boots. “But what about getting it right down here?”

Yesterday, Nottinghamshire duly confirmed the redevelopment of the Parr Stand and West Wing, leaving Birks to hope that the next investment is a drainage system to match the one at Lord’s. “The future for all the grounds is an outfield like that,” he said wistfully.

A week earlier, during the first npower Test, play restarted little more than an hour after a full-on storm. Yet, here we were yesterday, with the sun beaming, wind blowing and stumps in the ground, waiting four hours for the game to begin.

“The crowd were very understanding,” Birks said. “Most of them live in and around Nottingham and they know how bad it has been.” What they could not have known was the labour that went into the operation. Birks and his team of three went to bed at 2.30 yesterday morning; by 4am, they were back at work. In fact, the word “bed” is misleading. They brought quilts and crashed down in the storeroom. Birks said that he has an understanding wife. “But I owe her a good meal for this one,” he said.

The ground has taken almost a foot of rain during the past two months and some four million litres of water have been pumped from the surface into storm drains.

Birks and his team ought to be lobbying for generous overtime payments. Had play been washed out, then the ECB would have been forced to pay full refunds amounting to an estimated £500,000. Then again, with England struggling, did they really benefit from the hard work of the night before?

Alastair Cook, who became the youngest England batsman to reach 1,500 Test runs with 43 as they struggled to 169 for seven yesterday, believes that they still have a chance of winning the second Test.

“It was quite tough because the ball swung around and the Indians didn’t give us many scoring options, but if we can sneak up to 200 tomorrow and then bowl like we did at Lord’s, I think it will be quite competitive,” Cook, 22, said.