KENT'S LV Championship match with Worcestershire broke a 40-year-old record when the game was abandoned on Tuesday without a ball being bowled.

Moderate overnight rain left the outfield and bowlers' run-ups at New Road under water leaving match officials Martin Bodenham and Richard Kettleborough with no choice but to call play off for the day.

The umpires contacted their ECB chiefs at Lord's expressing a wish to abandon the game and by noon their view had been supported.

Speaking after the decision to call the game off, Kent's director of cricket Graham Ford, blasted the decision to attempt to host the game here.

He said: "I can’t understand what’s happened here because there were other options, very easy options that should have been put in place for the game to go ahead (at Kidderminster or Beckenham).

"To try and ask my players to play with full intensity when you can’t even run up properly just doesn’t gel at all with me.

"The whole thing has been pretty farcical and had we tried to play, or been ordered to play, I think we’d have ended up with an even greater farce on our hands.

"Had we tried to fit in a one-innings game here, a one-off afternoon slog for 12 points, that would have just added to the feeling of being hurt, let down and disappointed. It would have been the ultimate insult."

Ford added: "I fully sympathise with the flooding problems Worcestershire have had, it’s terribly tragic, but surely from there on good decision-making was vital and to my mind this whole debacle could have been avoided had good decision-making been put into place."

The high water table following the summer flood here on June 26 means the standing water really has nowhere to go.

The last time Kent suffered in such circumstances was on May 30, 1967, against Warwickshire at Edgbaston.

Though Kent's game with Essex in Colchester in 1977 was also abandoned, that match was re-scheduled and played at the Garrison Ground.

This was Worcestershire first total abandonment since four-day cricket was introduced and their first in the championship since 1992.