The author, a sports journalist on The Times, was one of the many disappointed England supporters in Antigua yesterday

It is my first visit to the Caribbean, every cricket lover’s dream trip. And so far it has cost me about £3,000 a ball.

My first experience of the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium was shuffling down a hill alongside a metal fence for 50 minutes with a queue of simmering but still expectant supporters, struggling through security simply to get in. I missed the only completed over.

I was then soaked by a sharp shower before finally reaching my seat to watch Fidel Edwards plough through the sand to bowl two balls, abort three others — and the Test match descend into, for me, a very expensive farce.

As ever, it is the spectator who suffers most. Text messages from England told me that play had been called off half an hour before an announcement was made at the ground. A solemn statement was made that a meeting was being held to decide what happens next. No clues for the fans.

Ultimately, the only recourse was to drag reluctant feet back up the hill and seek out the ever-smiling Joe-Joe, who drove our party back to our hotel.

There things began to look up. The sea was a glorious turquoise, the ice clinked in glasses being slid across the bar. My fellow travellers and I did what aggrieved sports fans do the world over. We sat around and complained to ourselves — bitterly — because nobody in authority would listen.

The main focus of our anger was that this was another fiasco waiting to happen. Marcus Williams, my Times colleague, had told me in the autumn, after a trip to Antigua, that the outfield was being relaid and may not be ready in time.

So why did the officials acknowledge that the ground was a sandpit only when the media visited final practice on Thursday? Why was Giles Clarke, visible on a balcony in a nice mustard suit, so busy getting himself re-elected as ECB chairman that he did not find time to ensure that England cricket followers would not be wasting money flying out to support the side he is supposed to be running? Would Allen Stanford, who has built a perfectly grassed ground near the airport, have done a better job of staging a Test match than the West Indies Cricket Board?

When the rum punches kicked in, it all became a bit silly, of course, but such indulgence was probably the only way to obliterate the memory of the latest act of spectacular ineptitude perpetrated against sports fans.