England missed out on playing World Cup ties in front of a record 60,000 crowd at the London Stadium – because of the floodlights and jumbo screens. Tournament organisers wanted to include the London 2012 venue, where West Ham are now the main tenants, using drop-in pitch technology imported from New Zealand. But although the London Stadium can be adapted to host the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees’ Major League Baseball fixtures in June, the logistics of introducing cricket defeated World Cup managing director Steve Elworthy. He said: “At the 2015 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, they shifted around 1.2million tickets, so if we wanted this year’s event to be bigger, aspirationally we had to look at bigger venues. “ICC pushed us on that and asked, ‘Are there any other (non-cricket) venues we can have a look at?’ “The Olympic Stadium is big enough to host cricket, we commissioned three drop-in pitches and they are currently growing at Loughborough. “But we would have had to build a whole set of temporary infrastructure in the stands that would have reduced the capacity by 15 to 18,000 seats, and suddenly it wasn’t so attractive economically. “The floodlights are…