Perhaps when play begins in the second test at Worcester's New Road this morning or

Perhaps, when play begins in the second test at Worcester's New Road this morning or in the third game at Guildford on Friday next week, there might be a better turn-out - that third game will be the 100th women's test match, after all, and you'd think English cricket-lovers might want to mark that centenary. And for the poorest people in society, the balance is swinging too far the other way.. It was a bit of a shock, said Clare Taylor, when that big lump of brick hit her in the back of the head Still, she was all right - tough head, her. One of her team-mates grinned and said, "I think it bounced back further than it was thrown from." It happened last winter. England's women were playing a test series in India, the crowd in Patna was over 15,000, and they weren't too happy - but England's manager Shirley Taylor (no relation to Clare) was perfectly content. She said: "We had India in trouble, and the fans started lobbing missiles on the field.

It's what they do with the men - so they were doing us the honour of treating us as real cricketers, weren't they?" It was an isolated incident in an otherwise wonderful six weeks; the outfielders got more proposals of marriage than missiles. But out, too, has gone a suggestion that legal aid be used to finance loans for middle-income groups to bring cases, on condition that they covered the costs of their opponents if they lost. In comes a disincentive for those least able to assert their rights themselves.The title "Striking the Balance" says it all. Instead law firms and specialist agencies meeting quality criteria would tender for block contracts, with cash then being concentrated on the best practitioners.

While many solicitors were busy protesting at this latest inroad into their traditional practices, the Government was quietly claiming credit for proposing reforms that would raise quality.But the support Lord Mackay might have had for his original plans will have been significantly eroded by the final upshot. Yet more bureaucracy to extract ever-greater contributions from people of modest means is taking a sledge-hammer to crack a nut.It all began rather differently with last year's Green Paper, when the accent was on improving access to justice. While opposition to the proposed introduction of pre-determined budgets - the law's first encounter with rationing - remains, even some of the Government's most ardent critics were prepared to back the ending of the system of paying solicitors hourly rates. Opponents can already get their costs paid by the Legal Aid Board where they would suffer "severe" financial hardship.

That test could be softened to allow for hardship instead of severe hardship. That would cost a few more millions than the Treasury would like to spend, but only about 6 per cent of legally aided people (about 25,000) lose their cases. But a tighter test of merit, or as the paper now puts it, "deservingness", alone would have solved most of the problem of waste.Nor does it mean that there is no costs injustice to some opponents of assisted people, only that the problem could be tackled in another way. A string of high-profile names with chequered histories - Asil Nadir, Darius Guppy, Peter Clowes, Roger Levitt - have been beneficiaries of the seemingly bottomless pit that is legal aid, prompting a clampdown on "apparently wealthy" claimants with substantial assets in bricks and mortar.But let us take another example from the Government's own research: an unemployed man on pounds 63 a week invalidity benefit who turned down legal aid because he could not afford a pounds 5-a-week contribution.There are not going to be many Rottweilers at the bottom of the pile.None of this means that there is no need to tighten the rules. To do this it would increase contributions to the costs of people bringing cases and abolish the existing protection that unsuccessful assisted people have from the usual rule that losers pay their opponents' legal costs.Those on low incomes already struggle to pay contributions and are unlikely to risk a potential doubling of their liability, which will be repayable in some cases by years of monthly instalments.