Sport is incredibly cruel. Don’t get me wrong, it can be your best friend, your family even, the voice in your head when you’re all alone.

It can provide structure to your existence and prop you up when everything else in life is threatening to bring you to your knees. But it can just as easily take everything away from you that it has ever given, with interest.

After giving him a rollercoaster ride for the past two decades – rise, fall, rise, plateau, rise, fall, rise – sport may well have saved the life of England cricketer James Taylor, though at the cost of his career.

The 26-year-old, heralded as a potential future England ODI captain, began to feel ill during the warm-up ahead of last week’s First Class game against Cambridge MCCU.

He thought it was a bug. It wasn’t. It was a serious heart condition, similar to that which caused the collapse of Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba during a game.

Less than a week later and Taylor is facing a future without sport – in a participation sense, at least. He is younger than Andrew Strauss was when he made his Test debut.

That is cruel, however were Taylor and Muamba not such athletes, then they may well not have survived at all.

Sport gives and takes. It is indiscriminate which makes it all the crueller.

Jordan Spieth might not be the most popular player on the pro-golf circuit among fans but he came out of Sunday’s US Masters denouement with credit.

His three-hole capitulation after turning for home in the final round gave back six hard-earned strokes and paved the way for Englishman Danny Willett to claim the Green Jacket and his brother to win Twitter with gold like ‘I’ve shared a bath with a Masters winner’ and ‘I once punched that kid in the head for hurting my pet rat. Now look.’

Spieth is 22-years-old but managed to hold it together to congratulate Willett moments later and formally handover the Green Jacket and trophy.

Of course it was not Lady Luck or sport itself that decided to clunk successive shots into the water on the 12th, it was Spieth and his nerves.

What Spieth did achieve, of course, was to provide a sliver of hope to fans of Tottenham and yes, Arsenal, that Leicester can be caught in the race for the Premier League title, despite the Foxes fans' 'Champions' scarves and songs insisting the race has long since been over.

I remember joking in the office several months ago that Kent’s opening Championship game at Worcester would be washed-out because ‘it always is.’

It doesn’t seem so funny now.

How can a team be able to play several weeks of warm-up cricket, get their players into form and fitness, ready to peak at the right time, ready to make a winning start, for once, to a prospective promotion push and then get the rug (or bath mat?) pulled from beneath their feet?

I think serious attention needs to be paid to preparations for games at New Road, especially early season games and teams need to come up with contingency plans to deal with the exceptional conditions there.

If the fixture had been flipped to Canterbury, there’s no way there would have been less than three days play.

It's not the first time it's happened but the only real losers in this equation are Kent and their fans, but this time, that is not sport’s fault.