Stranger to Failure

For a fully paid-up cricket tragic, the Long Room at Lord's is a dreamlike place. It is also multi-faceted: part art gallery, part social centre, part grandstand, part green room to one of the greatest sporting theatres on earth. The right to enter it during a Test match - conferred after many years waiting for people to die and the procurement of a substantial sum of money - gives you the opportunity to study players with a proximity granted to few. At Twickenham, at Wembley or at Wimbledon it isn't possible to hang around the dressing rooms or follow the players' progress to the arena without being arrested. At Lord's, it is.

I once saw Darren Gough leave the field at the end of the last spell he would ever bowl in Test cricket. England's opponents South Africa had scored 682 for 6 declared, and Gough had bowled 28 wicketless overs for 127. His face was scarlet and he walked with an uneasy gait that spoke of mental and physical exhaustion. He appeared disillusioned, on the verge of tears. He wouldn't be walking that way again.

I've also seen many batsmen walk from the dressing rooms to the pitch's edge. Convention and the demands of their profession dictate that they wear a serious expression. The message they are conditioned to give off is that this, what they are doing, what they have wanted to do since they began to play the game, is work. They are not there to enjoy themselves. They are there to make runs. After they have done so, from the safety of the middle, where people they don't know cannot see the whites of their eyes or guess at their deepest emotions, they will allow themselves to show that they are enjoying what they are doing.

Last Saturday, with Joe Root, things were different. With Root they usually are.

As Root, who is 63 not out, returns to the field after lunch, he strides ahead of his older partner and fellow Yorkshireman, Tim Bresnan, and his soft manchild's eyes betray a brief hint of levity and recognition. Then, before he puts his helmet on, he breaks into a smile. It seems to me, standing right in his eyeline, that he may have realised that he is going out to bat for England against Australia at Lord's and that he is in a position to fulfil the childhood ambition both of himself and of virtually everyone who is watching him. He can make a century for England at Lord's and he is not daunted by the possibility of failure. Instead he is relishing the prospect of success. There is also the feeling that he is a little flattered and amused by the fact that a roomful of people he does not know, and who are far removed from him in age, background and experience, are applauding him, a lad from Sheffield who simply knows how to bat very, very well.

From the time he came into the England side at Nagpur at the end of last year, Root's performances in all three formats of the game - with their combination of poise, judgement, technical acuity and nerveless flair - have been those of a phenomenon. But he is, in some ways, an unlikely phenomenon.

To watch Root at the wicket is not to be awed by genius. His stance is a little ungainly, perhaps as a result of his relatively recent transformation from a slight lad to a tall young man, although he retains a freshness of face which can make him appear 17 instead of his chronological age, which is 22. He has no signature shot, although he is perhaps happiest working (and sometimes stroking) the ball through the off side off the back foot. When anyone overpitches he is quick to recognize the length and drive the ball, with an exaggerated crouch through the off side, or with fine timing straight or through the leg side. When the ball is dropped short he will pull, when the nature and circumstances of the game demand it he will improvize. He is a workmanlike, predominantly orthodox batsman in the classical Yorkshire idiom, where runs, not empty style, are all.

His batting carries echoes of Atherton, although, where Atherton was hunched, Root is upright, and where Atherton was careworn by the demands of captaincy and the stresses of playing in a consistently overmatched side, Root is carefree. His Long Room smile is far from unique.

For now Root is a stranger to failure. Watching him bat, or bowl his sharply ripped off-breaks, or skip around in the field, or simply take his place with unforced self-assurance among his seniors on the dressing room balcony, it is possible to see the years sliding away into the future. Where now he is 22, one day he will be 34. He will have known failure, and the smiles will be less common, but the powerful sense is that he will still be there and he will still love what he is doing.

Joe Root will be walking through the Long Room for many years to come.

Wishing Well

I had ideas of writing something about Jimmy Anderson this afternoon. I've never really done that before.

But it can wait. It's hot and I've got a lot of other things to do as I'm heading for London and the Second Test very early tomorrow morning. Also, the way Anderson's bowling, there'll be a lot more to write about before the series is out.

Overnight I received a message from Sara Bradshaw, wife of Keith Bradshaw, former Chief Executive of MCC, who is once again fighting cancer. As an MCC member who remembers what Bradshaw did for the club very well, and how approachable he was, I'm only too happy to post this link. If you can, give.

We wish him well.

Do Believe the Hype

I recently looked at some TV listings from the summer of 1994. The BBC were still covering Test cricket then and it seemed impossible to imagine anyone else doing so. The day in the autumn of 1998 when it was announced that the broadcasting rights for home Test matches had been awarded to Channel Four was still years away and everything bumbled along as it had since Bob Willis was a boy. It was the natural state of affairs.

On the morning of a Test match day coverage began at 10.55, usually just in time to see the umpires walk out. Every hour they would cut away to a news bulletin which was nearly always exactly the same as it had been an hour earlier. On many an occasion coverage was interrupted to allow other sporting events to be shown, the most memorable (for all the wrong reasons) being the time a minor horse race (to me all horse races are minor, but we'll leave my prejudices to one side) was deemed more important than the fact that Graham Gooch was 299 not out and about to score the first triple century in English Test cricket since 1965.

Now we have Sky. Coverage begins an hour before play starts to allow enough time for the revolving cast of ex-Test players to cogitate, to speculate, to fulminate and occasionally (with tongue firmly in cheek, for the party line demands that the day's play which is about to commence is sure to be the greatest day in the history of cricket), to reminisce.

Nothing is ever underhyped. Over-analysis is all. Occasionally, shafts of reality intrude.

This time, though, the start of the series has lived up to the advance billing, with much of what has happened being beyond prediction or rational assessment.

The sun shone and temperatures rose in a way which anyone who has lived through the last few British summers could have been forgiven for wondering would ever happen again. The tempo of the match soared and dipped like a swallow riding the breeze.

While England, ultimately victorious, still look the more versatile and experienced of the two sides, the game had the feel of the type of tight, resonant Ashes contest which was familiar down the years and decades which preceded Australia's era of dominance and the crash which followed. The feeling is that there is more, much more, to come.

For all Ian Bell's timely judgement, the mature Anderson's now-routine brilliance and the arguments over Stuart Broad and DRS, the game's most significant story may just have been Agar. People - understandably getting carried away - mentioned Sobers and Lara, but for me the most apposite comparison was with the young Yuvraj Singh, batting in the Champions Trophy in Kenya in 2000. Youth, flamboyance, a backlift for the gods and, with his maturity and vivacity, a stunning future. His bowling, with its loose-limbed echoes of Daniel Vettori, carries plenty of promise, but his batting is of a different hue. When Sobers made his Test debut for the West Indies against England at Sabina Park in early 1954 he batted at nine and bowled slow left-arm. Expect to see Agar much higher in Australia's order in the future.

As ever, as one career begins to flourish, another one, somewhere, comes to a conclusion, and, as Agar was settling in at Trent Bridge, Ricky Ponting was bringing the curtain down on his time in the game with an innings of 169 not out at The Oval. If Agar, with his fresh-faced teenage insouciance, represents the future of the Australian side, Ponting signifies its hard-nosed but peerlessly successful past. Jon Hotten, The Old Batsman, a writer with many of the qualities of Ponting's greatest days, described it in a way few could match.

We knew Ponting. We now know Agar. We know Anderson, and Bell, and Cook. We are in this for the long haul.

My train for London leaves at 6.52 on Thursday morning.

It Makes You Think

Last Tuesday it was exactly forty years since I went to my first game of professional cricket.

Makes you think, that.

The match was a John Player League game between Surrey and Warwickshire, and it took place at my local cricket club, Sunbury, in the far south-western corner of what used to be known as Middlesex. I was seven years old.

I can remember little about it, apart from the fielding side (Warwickshire, led by Alan Smith, his career as a TCCB bureaucrat still ahead of him) coming out of the low-slung pavilion (where, as a fourteen and fifteen year-old, I was later to change) with an old-fashioned static television camera pointing at them over the picket fence. I don't know why the camera has stuck in my mind, but it may have something to do with the fact that in those days the John Player League was a competition which owed much of its identity to television.

Although I have some hazy memories of the 1972 Ashes series, most of my cricket-watching up to that time had consisted of Sunday afternoons in the company of Peter Walker (the former Glamorgan player, not the man who at the time was a minister in Ted Heath's government), Jim Laker and John Arlott. For anyone who doesn't remember it, the John Player League's reputation was built on a combination of artificially shortened bowlers' runs, packed venues (which were very often club grounds) and pulsating matches. There was a whole match on BBC2 every Sunday afternoon. Until its lustre started to fade in the early eighties (which can be traced to the fact that more top-class sport was being played on Sundays and hence its television hegemony was lost) the John Player League was an absolutely central, wonderful, part of English sporting culture. The thought occurs, not for the first time, that it was Twenty20 before Twenty20 had been dreamt of.

I can recall precisely nothing of the action, but little reinforces the feeling of a bygone era more than the fact that the senior player on either side was a man generally known as MJK Smith, who was a former captain of England and who had made his first-class debut in 1951. Not only that, but, with his specs and his air of distracted academic diffidence, he now seems in the memory to exemplify the way the game was. Despite the billboards essentially advertising cigarettes (hard enough in itself to believe now), the ground, the stumps and the players' clothes were white and unsponsored. I doubt if anyone, least of all the likes of David Brown, Norman McVicker or Bob Willis, did much diving or sliding in the field.

In the era of the IPL, of saturation international cricket, of Cricinfo and of Twitter, it seems like a different world. The distant past invariably does. Perhaps the best way to capture this is to reflect on the fact that if someone was then the age I am now and was reflecting on having seen his first match forty years earlier, he would have been talking about a match that took place in 1933, the summer after Bodyline.

Now that really makes you think.

England's Bass Player

These days, it seems, whenever England play, whatever the weather, or the competition, or the format of the match, there is an unemotional man in his early thirties with a perpetual scowl on his face at the wicket. And he is making runs.

Jonathan Trott is a man who averages more than fifty in both senior formats of the international game. A man who has made thirteen international centuries, two of them doubles, and two other scores over 150. A man who has made Test centuries in England, in Australia, in New Zealand, in India and in Sri Lanka, mostly from number three. A man, in other words, who can really bat.

If you weren’t paying attention it could seem difficult to believe that his value is still doubted by so many. But if you know a little more about how the British choose their sporting heroes, it’s not quite so surprising.

The most obvious - but, in context, utterly relevant - thing to say about Jonathan Trott is that he is South African. Born on the Western Cape, schooled in the intensely competitive cricket culture of the Rainbow Nation with an English father for a coach, he was a relative latecomer to the county game. In this Trott is far from unique - Tony Greig, Allan Lamb, Robin Smith and Kevin Pietersen, to name just four - trod a similar path in the years before him, but it remains central to the feeling that he isn’t embraced in the way that the natural born Englishmen with whom he shares a dressing room - Alastair Cook, Ian Bell, Jimmy Anderson, Graeme Swann - are.

The players that came before him had other qualities. Greig an impulsive charisma and distrust of authority; Lamb a punchy, uncomplicated flamboyance; Smith a disarming, counter-intuitive reticence, coupled with an ability to roll with some of the hardest punches anyone ever had to take on a cricket field; Pietersen a complicated, unalloyed genius.

Trott, with his unfeigned seriousness and his fussy, uncompromising preparations, doesn’t feel the need to reassure people other than with the reliability of his batting. Because of this, his personality will never really chime with people in this country. We prefer a hint of vulnerability, of light and shade, of humour, to mechanical, rigorous excellence, even if it’s tempered by the best drive wide of mid-on that you’ll ever see.

There was a time, not so long ago, when any type of consistent excellence from an England batsman was a rare and wonderful thing. Now England have three batsmen who, in their differing ways, are as good as almost anyone else around. Pietersen, when fit and psychologically settled, is England’s flamboyant lead guitarist, Cook is the rhythm guitarist, setting and maintaining the tone, impossible to shake or dislodge, and Trott is England’s bass player. Always there, and all too often taken for granted.

Pietersen is an outlier, but there are obvious similarities in the ways in which Cook and Trott bat. Early on, judgement of line and sound defence are everything, but later, as the bowlers tire and fade, their errors are mercilessly exploited. However, there are also differences, and, aside from the fact that Trott bats right-handed and Cook left, these have their origins in the players’ varying characters and backgrounds. Trott, as the outsider desperate to underline his worth, plays with an aggression and combativeness which Cook, with his soft features, dark eyes and choirboy’s background, feels no need to emulate. Of course, Cook’s outward appearance belies his immense toughness of mind, but with him it is always the iron fist in the velvet glove. Trott doesn’t wear gloves.

These differences also have their bearing on the players’ popularity. Cook is a classically well-mannered young Englishman, Public School background worn lightly, eager to please. Trott doesn’t concern himself with pleasing anyone.

Then there are the statistics. At the time of writing, Trott averages a shade over fifty in Test cricket, with a strike-rate of 47, and more than 53 in ODIs, with a strike-rate of 77. It can reasonably be argued that there are times when he scores too slowly in the limited-over game, especially when batting at three, but this can be countered by pointing out that he simply scores runs across all formats with a consistency that is beyond almost all his team-mates. Occasionally, as late on the second day of the Leeds Test against New Zealand in May, Trott’s self-absorption clouds his judgement, but, most of the time, his instincts, his feel for the pace and rhythm of an innings, are sound.

What is better: to be at the wicket and scoring runs even if at a slightly slow rate, or to be sitting on the dressing room balcony? The answer will vary according to the circumstances of the match about which it is asked, but, most of the time, I’ll take the former.

Like Cook, and like Pietersen, Jonathan Trott is one of the best batsmen in the world today. Unlike the others he has neither the personal qualities to be truly popular, nor the character flaws to be truly interesting. Trott was a relatively late starter in international cricket and he is already thirty-two years old. Within the next two or three years it is possible - likely, perhaps - that his star will begin to fade. It is, in all probability, already too late. He will never be truly loved.

All he has are his runs. And, for now, they will do.

A Lot to Like

Taunton's well-honed image as a bowlers' graveyard is no longer as justified as it once was. For the last three or four years there's been noticeably more grass and bounce in the pitches, and they reward both skilful bowling and patient, discerning batting. In the old days it was usually a simple question of how many runs a side could make before it became too bored with the ease of it all to go on. Unsurprisingly, Somerset have never won the championship.

Now there is help there, although, as should be the way, you need to bowl well to find it. This season, with few exceptions, Somerset haven't been doing so often enough, and, when coupled with a general lack of form and runs from their batsmen, they currently look as far away from a maiden title as they have ever done.

The main exception has been a nineteen year-old from the north Devon coast called Jamie Overton.

Overton's bowling in Somerset's game against Warwickshire in late April, which was covered on Sky, led both David Lloyd and Mike Atherton to suggest that he could be a contender for next winter's Ashes tour, and Mike Selvey has recently joined this club of slightly breathless admirers. As Overton has played just eight first-class matches and taken 23 wickets, it instinctively feels as though people who should know better are getting just a little carried away.

There is, though, a lot to like about Overton.

For a start, unlike so many bowlers of his age, he doesn't look as though the kind of icy wind which plagues the county grounds of England at this time of year will pick him up and carry him over the nearest sightscreen. Overton is bulky, robust, muscular. In the old-fashioned way, he is built to be a seam bowler. Built for hard labour on capricious English tracks. And, from a well-balanced, high, rhythmical action, he has pace. Mid to high eighties with ease, and the ability to make the ball bounce and move away. He keeps his slips on their toes. Although his Cricinfo profile describes him as a medium pace bowler, he is nothing of the sort.

With any bowler of Overton's age, whatever their potential, the uncertainties of future form and fitness hang as heavily in the air as a lower-order hitter's skyer descending to earth; until their potential is realised or they fade from view, nobody can be certain what will happen.

With Jamie, whose name I've known since he and his twin were tearing up the Devon youth circuit as eleven year-olds, I have a hunch that he's going to be good.

Really, really good.

Danger: Genius at Work

Towards the end of March I saw Jos Buttler at my local rugby ground. The Exeter Chiefs were playing Leicester in the Aviva Premiership and he was standing close to where I can usually be found on Devon winter Saturdays, frequently struggling to retain feeling in my limbs as the estuary winds blow in. He was among a group of lads his age and a couple of older men, one of whom I took to be his father. He was relaxed, happy, smiling. He didn't stand out, other than for the lush appearance of his skin, which spoke of time spent far from the grim, biting greyness of the British winter months.

In many ways, Jos Buttler is characteristic of his cricket background. Somerset players, whatever their gifts - and Marcus Trescothick is the ageless template here - tend to be unpretentious and self-aware, mistrustful of metropolitan slickness and artificiality.

Talk is cheap. It is what you do on the pitch, with bat or ball in hand, that matters.

This is Buttler. When interviewed he is quietly spoken, modest, a little reticent perhaps. He doesn't stand out. Except in the way he uses his bat.

After Sandy Park, my next sighting of Buttler came at Taunton during Somerset's first home Championship match of the season against Warwickshire. He made a fluent, easily commanding 119 not out from number six, putting on a creamy 193 with Alviro Petersen. For Buttler, whose name has largely been made in the limited-over game, this was an important innings, showing as it did the level of restraint and shot selection - though never excessive conservatism or lack of fluency - which he is going to need to regularly display if he is to press his claims to be among England's future plans in Test as well as one-day cricket.

At the wicket Buttler has the stillness and capacity for late movement which distinguishes the very best. With a full slip cordon in place and the ball moving, he can be vulnerable, as the quality of his eye and hands can lead him into unwise temptation and misjudgement. However, such is his class, he can usually ride the danger. As with other players of genius, what is almost certain to be fatally inappropriate to a lesser mortal is usually just the simplest way to accrue runs. The difficult and unwise is, in his hands, made to look easy and prudent.

However, it is in the short-form arena that Buttler's virtuosity has its clearest expression. Here he can do what he does as well as any player on the planet. He can innovate and extemporize, and he can bend any bowling attack to his will. The coruscating innings of 89 from 51 balls which he made for Somerset against Yorkshire at Headingley yesterday was simply the most recent example of his gifts. There were the ramp shots to both sides of the hapless wicket-keeper, played with unnatural consistency of timing - the difficult made to look easy - and there were the lofted on-drives, hit with merciless power. But there was also more: lofted off-drives (though in truth they were more like tennis shots) played with a lazy, elastic whip of the arms, subverting the textbook's imprecations to keep the left elbow high and enabling the ball to be directed to parts of the offside boundary which cannot easily be defended by a captain with only nine fielders at his disposal.

Many of Buttler's early games for England were characterized by an air of diffidence which is never apparent when he is playing for his county. Until he made 32 not out off 10 balls in a T20 game (which was reduced to 11 overs per side) against South Africa at Edgbaston last September, there was a sense that he was wondering to himself whether he was good enough. Since then he has appeared more confident and has been marginally more influential, although, as Bob Willis, who, in his mad Uncle sort of way has become Buttler's greatest champion, has said, he needs to bat higher in the order.

Buttler is a one-day player in the modern idiom. As everyone knows, in modern limited-over cricket, reputations are won and lost in the IPL. Because Buttler has never played in the IPL there are wide swathes of the cricket world who don't yet know how good he is. At Headingley yesterday the applause he received when he left the field was hesitant. While this can be attributed at least partly to partisanship, you can be forced to conclude that it is not just on the Indian sub-continent that people are yet to really grasp how good Buttler is.

Before long, you can be sure, they will.

Read It and Weep

I've never made much of it here before but for many years my day job ('What do you do in real life?' Matthew Engel asked me the other week) involved looking after archives. These days I spend more time encouraging others to value them, but I still pass most of my days surrounded by registers, by maps, by deeds, by wills, by letters. I like it, and I can get days off to watch cricket.

We value the things we look after and we try not to let them get eaten by insects. This, at the most basic level, is part of our ethos.

Because of this, and perhaps because I've been reading and thinking about Wisden and the game's rich written heritage more than usual recently, I was truly shocked by this, which Aakash Chopra, the former Indian Test batsman, was good enough to post on Twitter yesterday.

As my friend Chris Smith, of Declaration Game, has suggested, the sad state of the Kanga Memorial Library could be regarded as a metaphor for Indian cricket; that beneath the gleaming facade of the IPL, or in this case the redeveloped Wankhede Stadium, the infrastructure of the game, or the fabric of its history, has been left to wither.

It's hard to know what to do. This is a library I've never visited in a country I've never visited. But, at the moment, I feel as though I ought to do something.

I'm going to explore a few avenues and report back.

In the meantime, read it and weep.

The Wisden Experience

In the first chapter of Rain Men, A Matter of Faith, Marcus Berkmann likens cricket to fundamentalist religion:

'...Cricket is a matter of faith. Either you believe or you don't believe. There is no rational explanation...We have the devilishly complex theology, whose baroque byways confuse even the most dedicated adherents. We have the curious vestments, for white is a holy colour in many religions. We have our holy book, published each April in both hardback and paperback editions.'

In what is possibly my favourite part of a great book, Berkmann is both persuasive and hilarious. However, questions arise. If Wisden is cricket's holy book, what is the status of the editor? Cricket's Archbishop of Canterbury? Its Pope? Or someone more senior?

Like any self-respecting cricket tragic (and, I suspect, plenty with no self-respect whatsoever), I've been reading Wisden since I was a lad and I always liked the idea of writing something which would appear in it. Until last year, I wasn't really sure how I was going to do it. A bit like the many cricketers with glorious futures behind them who ply their trade on the country's club grounds on the increasingly rare British days when it isn't raining, I probably felt that the opportunity to taste the big time (like the chance to open the batting for England at Lord's) had passed me by.

I could have been a contender.

Then came the Wisden Writing Competition. I wrote something and sent it in, just ahead of the deadline. For the next couple of months I largely forgot about it. My father became ill and subsequently died. Life, in the shadow of the longest British winter of modern times, went on.

One office-bound morning at the end of January, while I was trying to decide which of a thousand competing demands on my time I was going to tackle first, I noticed that I'd received an e-mail from the Editor of Wisden, Lawrence Booth. He was telling me that I'd won the competition, inviting me to the Wisden Dinner and asking me to keep the news to myself 'for the time being'.

This was it. A message from cricket's Archbishop of Canterbury. Or perhaps it was more akin to a missive from the monarch. Every year, when people (some of them cricketers) receive OBEs or Knighthoods, they mention the fact that they were told to keep the news secret.

'Oh, it was difficult', they say. And they're right.

In the end, people are told, sartorial advice (for a Black Tie virgin) sought and my bank account left reeling. April comes, and I find myself in the Long Room Bar at Lord's, drinking champagne.

Life can be tough sometimes.

Then a barely audible fire alarm sounds, quickly followed by a man telling us to evacuate the building. Within minutes I'm standing outside the pavilion in the murky drizzle, surrounded by the pride of the British cricket media and one or two people who've even made the odd Test match run.

Life can be interesting sometimes.

The cause of the alarm is rapidly dealt with and we return to more important matters, such as eating, drinking and congratulating people. Toasts are proposed and drunk, leather-bound Wisdens are presented to deserving candidates, and speeches are delivered with appropriateness and sensitivity. Nick Compton talks of his first encounter with English cricket, in the company of his grandfather and Peter Parfitt (who is sitting nearby), while Michael Palin expertly evokes the atmosphere of backyard Test matches in 1950s Sheffield and concludes by reciting a classic Monty Python sketch. Everywhere there is reminiscence and the exchange of the seasoned anecdote. I speak to various well-known people, none of whom have any idea who I am.

In many ways it is like a journey through the adolescence of a cricketing child of the 1970s and 1980s, who may well have spent more time with his nose among the covers of a chocolate and yellow book than is strictly healthy. Selvey is here, Brearley is there, Agnew and Marks are somewhere else. John Woodcock surveys proceedings with the air of a benign éminence grise. David Gower relishes the speeches, laughs in all the right places and finishes the evening in the bar with a few representatives of the press. He may look a little old for his years but to those of us of a certain age he will always be the man who made Test match batting look like the easiest thing in the world.

Unusually, I leave Lord's in darkness. The County Championship season began today, and, of course, it is raining steadily.

A Prior Engagement

Things have been quiet here recently. As ever, too much going on and too little inspiration. However, in the aftermath of the Auckland Test, I wrote this, which subsequently appeared, in slightly edited form, on Cricinfo. I think I got a little carried away, but Matt Prior does that to me.

Anyone who has watched sport for a long time, supported teams, will know what it feels like. From time to time players come along who, to you, are simply better, more captivating, than the rest, often for reasons which can be hard to define and may not be apparent to others. It is a little like falling in love.

To me, Matthew Prior, now at the absolute summit of his powers, is such a player. Here, from personal experience, are some reasons why.

Scene One: Lord's Cricket Ground, Friday 18th May 2007.

It is the afternoon of the second day of the first Test Match between England and the West Indies. By mid-afternoon the piercing early sunshine has faded to haze and the vapid West Indian attack is fading too. England, superior and confident, are 363 for 5 when Matthew Prior of Sussex comes to the wicket. This will be his first innings in Test cricket. We feel we know Prior a little; he has been around England's one-day team for a year or two, opening the batting, achieving little. Now, though, he is the latest person to assume the status of wicket-keeper-batsman in England's Test team, a role which has not been convincingly occupied by anyone - though Geraint Jones has tried hard and briefly flourished - since Alec Stewart retired four years ago. He is a short, muscular man of 25, a product of Sussex, with his shaven head hidden beneath a blue England helmet, proudly worn. He exudes intent and instinctive, unapologetic confidence.

Barely more than two hours later he has made a century, striking at 98 runs per 100 balls. At the day's close the crowd leaves the ground and takes to London's dusty streets in a state of noisy excitement. For once, after a long day at Lord's, this excitement is not exclusively induced by alcohol. We are yet to see Prior keep wicket, but we like what we have seen of his batting. We feel - because, when players start careers like this, you always do - that we could be watching him for many years to come.

Scene Two: Lord's Cricket Ground, Sunday 19th July 2009.

England, after a period of stagnation caused by Kevin Pietersen attempting to bat when he can barely run, require quick runs to enable them to declare and bowl at Australia. Once more, Prior comes to the wicket with the warm July sun on his back against a listing, vulnerable attack. There is a sense among the packed crowd that the tempo of the cricket is about to soar. We now know more of Prior and we expect him to do things like this.

Prior is instantly into his stride, driving Siddle repeatedly for four and then turning his attention more subtly and inventively to Hauritz and Clarke. He defends well when necessary, head still and level, hands and feet in all the right places, but he is the type of player who, you sense, always sees a defensive stroke as a kind of defeat. He is strongest on the off side but anything short or full directed towards leg stump will go for runs. And he runs between the wickets with the low-slung speed of a breaking scrum-half, his lucid blue eyes holding a steely gaze which betrays the intensity of his competitive desire.

In the two years which have elapsed since we first saw him he has spent time out of the team because of weaknesses in his wicket-keeping. Now, though, he has played a vital part in putting England in a position to beat Australia at Lord's for the first time since 1934. He is here to stay.

Scene Three: Lord's Cricket Ground, Sunday 24th July 2011.

This is an afternoon of Lord's afternoons. Once again England are ahead and chasing runs but they have been briefly shocked into unease by a burst of wickets. There is a slight sense of déjà vu as Stuart Broad joins Prior in a vibrant partnership which will go far towards defining the match's outcome.

By English standards it is an unusually clear and warm day, and, as the sun fades and shadow intrudes, the packed grandstand is a vital, hypnotic sight. There is, as always at Lord's, conversation and frequent laughter, but nobody's attention strays far from the play as Prior bends the attack to his will. He faces a range of bowlers - the talented but inconsistent Ishant, the aggressive but fading Harbhajan, the subtle, unpredictable, Praveen Kumar, the lost Suresh Raina - but all come alike as he eases through his concordance of cuts and drives, adjusting the shape of his body to steer the ball to a different part of the boundary. It is off-side batting from the Gods, based on technical proficiency, pin-sharp reflexes and crisp, decisive execution. But it is never hurried, or messy or inappropriate. It is batting to fall in love with, to become obsessed by.

Scene Four: Eden Park, Auckland, New Zealand, Tuesday 26th March 2013.

Matthew Prior plays forward, defensively, to Trent Boult. He fails to score but he is not dismissed. He raises his arms in the air to salute England's draw. This isn't normally Prior's style - ostentatious emotion, celebrating drawn matches - but it fits the moment. Thousands upon thousands of miles away, in dark, cold, Britain, sleep-deprived people celebrate with him.

To borrow from and paraphrase John Moynihan, from his classic work on the first twenty years of post-war English football, The Soccer Syndrome:

Is this not why we watch cricket?

Homework

I wasn't sure what to think or believe about this week's crisis in Australian cricket. (This isn't to say that there's a crisis every week, although, at the moment, it might seem like it.)

My initial reaction was that Arthur and Clarke had been heavy-handed, although Brydon Coverdale's nail on head piece on Cricinfo, led me to re-consider my initial view. It seems, from comments made later by Clarke, that the failure of the four players to 'hand in their homework' on time was the straw that broke the camel's back. And James Pattinson, in an admirable display of contrition which I'm naive enough to believe was genuine, appeared to have learned a lesson of sorts, although, as the team's best bowler, he was always destined to return to the side at the earliest opportunity. For Watson, who high-tailed it back to Australia to be with his pregnant wife while muttering about the injustice of it all, and Khawaja, and Johnson, the future is a deal more uncertain. All are cricketers of talent, that much is beyond dispute, but all have histories of under-performance, and, in at least Khawaja's case, this apparently wasn't the first time they'd failed to meet their disciplinary obligations.

For all of them, time will tell. This is about something bigger.

It is trite and obvious to say that this wouldn't have happened a few years ago, when Australian were one of the greatest teams in the game's history. For one thing, individual and collective navel-gazing is less likely to be demanded when sides are winning, and, if it is, players are more likely to respond positively. They will be happier and more relaxed because they are winning and they are likely to be more conscious of the need to preserve their place among a privileged elite. It would be a surprise if the Australian cricket team, beaten from pillar to post by Dhoni, Pujara and the rest over the past few weeks, currently feels much like an elite.

In an extension of this, one of the earliest and least surprising reflex reactions to the news came from people asking whether the likes of Viv Richards or Shane Warne would have come up with their three suggestions for improvement in the prescribed manner. Well, no, they probably wouldn't. In fact, in Warne's case, he definitely wouldn't, even if he's recently developed the waning, raging, retiree's addiction to putting the world (or at least his country's cricket system) to rights. Things were different then, and, if John Buchanan had asked Warne to do such a thing, the reaction would doubtless have been short and not particularly sweet. And he would still have been picked for the next Test.

Last week's affair had as much to do with a national cricket culture's confusion and uncertainty about what to do in the face of decline as the errant actions of a few individuals. When your cricket team has been as fecund and impregnable a source of national pride and cultural identity as Australia's was a few short years ago, people start scrambling for excuses and solutions once the inevitable regression and decline sets in. And a relatively new, foreign, coach, will feel the dead weight of past glories all the more and consequently try harder to free himself and his charges from the pressure imposed by the hand of history. And things can seem even worse when your hopes have been raised by illusory and often facile successes which led you to think you were making progress. Cleaning up Sri Lanka in home conditions is one thing, meeting India under roasting skies with a hand of inadequate spinners and floundering batsmen, and with twin Ashes series against better equipped opponents on the horizon, is very much another.

This is an uncertain time for Australian cricket, and Australian sport. The customary narrative, which a generation or more of Australians has grown up with, is that Australia is good at sport. When it comes to cricket, they are among the best. In fact, they have often been the best. Now they are not, and with every fresh stroke of Shikar Dhawan's bat, or each time Phil Hughes is dismissed in clumsy circumstances, renewed doubts and uncertainties raise their heads.

It will take more than three bullet pointed ideas to put them to rest.

Searching for an Identity

On the front cover of Christian Ryan's book Australia: Story of a Cricket Country there is a photograph taken by Patrick Eagar at Edgbaston in 1975. It shows the Australian side after the dismissal of one of the England batsmen in a match which Australia won easily. Both the Chappell brothers are there, as are Lillee, Walker, Mallett and Edwards. Thomson and Marsh are out of shot but the implicit message is clear. We are Australia, we hunt as a pack and we mean business. Most of us may be smiling but we don't mess around. We are as one, and, if you're Mike Denness's England, we will crush you into the ground as quickly as we will look at you.

Almost thirty-eight years later Cricinfo carries a photo of the Australian fielders during their recent match against India A. The effect isn't quite so intimidating. Cowan is there, and Watson, and Lyon and Wade, but they don't look as hard. Like their 1975 forebears they are happy, as they have just claimed a wicket, but they also look younger and more fragile. Partly this is because we know what the 1975 side was capable of, but it is also because it is a realistic appraisal of where the Australian team is at this moment in time.

It is a side in transition and it is searching for an identity. And their current opponents, India, are doing just the same.

These are similarities, but there are also differences. The Australian team identity tends towards the collective: there are stars, whether they be the Chappells, or Lillee, or Thomson, or Warne, or Ponting, or Gilchrist, but the team is the thing. Get above yourself and you will quickly be dragged back into the pack.

This works. No team in Test history has won as many Test matches as Australia. At times - and those of us who've followed international cricket over the last fifteen years remember the best of these - Australian teams have strode the world like a colossus.

For a range of reasons, India has never done this, and the best Indian sides have relied far more on the brilliance of a few individuals than collective competence and iron competitive will puctuated with excellence.

In Chennai, India's victory was founded on the rediscovery of Tendulkar's equlibrium, the savage elegance of Kohli and the dominant brilliance of Dhoni, while Ashwin issued a reminder that he can bowl as well as bat like a clone of another man of the Indian south who preferred to be known by his initials alone.

Australia still have the same collective desire and competitive edge they always had - indeed it is hard-wired into their players' DNA - but they lack the experience of the particular challenges which sub-continental Test cricket presents, and they lack real era-defining quality of the type which India have in spades, even if the eras being defined have, in at least two cases, passed. Clarke is a very, very good - possibly great - batsman. If he can overcome his fitness problems there is every chance that James Pattinson could become a great fast bowler. Mitchell Starc, too, will have plenty of days in the sun if he sticks around. David Warner, you suspect, has a few more surprises up his sleeve. Perhaps Philip Hughes does too. But the majority of the side will finish their career as footnotes in their country's rich cricket lineage in a way that Tendulkar, and Dhoni, and Sehwag, and almost certainly Kohli and Pujara (though their greatest days lie ahead), simply won't.

However, there is no blueprint for success in Test cricket. In some matches and circumstances collective endeavour will triumph over sporadic brilliance. At other times the reverse will be true. This series is fascinating for many reasons; prior to its start the perception was that the sides were quite evenly matched and this idea shouldn't be abandoned completely.

India, playing at home and one up, appear to hold all the cards. However, people said that after the first Test of their last home series just three short months ago, and look what happened then.

How Does It Feel?

How does it feel to be Sachin Tendulkar this week?

How does it feel to stand on the threshold of a series which will surely, one way or another, decide your future?

How does it feel to know, deep down, that your powers are fading and that what was once (to you, if no-one else) commonplace may now be beyond you?

How does it feel to be aware that bowlers who you used to dismiss from your presence can now get you out in ways they could once only have dreamt about?

You're in the autumn of your career. They know it, you know it, and they know you know it, even if, with your unshakeable determination, and pride, and refusal to be beaten, you're doing your best to deny it.

Professional sport is a harsh, unforgiving mistress. And professional cricket, where, ultimately, numbers are all, is tougher than most. As someone once said, time waits for no man, and this - fighting against the dying of the light - is what it usually comes down to. Some players have to face the reality that it is over in their third Test, or their fifth, or their fiftieth. No man has ever had to think about it in his 195th. We are all in uncharted territory.

There was a time when Australia set the standards for the whole world. Few could live with them, but you always could. In those innings at Sydney and Perth when you were 18. Those innings when McDermott, and Hughes, and Whitney, were, in Ian Healy's words, gunning for you. Or when you made 300 runs in the game back at the SCG to cloud Steve Waugh's final Test. Or when you made 155* to set up the win in Chennai and for once rendered Warne impotent.

You could do all these things and more. It seems increasingly unlikely that you will ever go there again, but the next few weeks will tell all.

As always, in times of stress and high moment, people have theories. Martin Crowe, no stranger to the ravages which time and physical decline can inflict on a pure technique, has advanced the view that it isn't your eyes that have gone, it's your legs. And someone else felt that you're hanging on simply because cricket is all you've known since you were a child on Shivaji Park and you can't conceive of a life without it.

I think there's something in that.

In any sport it is an awkward and uneasy thing for a great player to accept that his powers are in decline. Your old foe Ponting has recently done so, and it will be to his lasting credit that he got the timing of his decision so emphatically right. But it is hard. Whatever your outward modesty, you don't get to be recognized as the greatest batsman of your generation without an unshakeable sense of your own worth.

For you, though it is harder still. You have put more than twenty-three years of your near forty on earth into this. You are emblematic of what modern India holds itself to be - talented, positive, optimistic and immune to decline - and the end of your career will transcend the game in a way that no player's leaving ever could in the nations of the old cricket world.

No-one yet knows what the next few weeks will bring. But, if the worst comes to the worst, it is to be hoped that the decision will be yours alone.

For if it is taken out of your hands it will be the saddest and most inappropriate end to one of greatest careers the game has ever seen.

Louder than Figures

Over the years many people have said many things about Jacques Kallis. People have said that he is selfish, that he plays for his average, that he lacks the capacity or the inclination to raise the tempo of his innings when the situation demands it.

It has also regularly been said, especially over recent years, that he doesn't like bowling. Such comments, whether they are accurate or not, create an impression. An impression which Kallis, with his low media profile, has done little to dispel. Kallis has always been a man who has done his talking with his pads on or with the ball in his hand.

If, in your 38th year, with 159 Tests behind you, you can produce the type of delivery which dismissed Azhar Ali at the Wanderers yesterday, and then, later in the day, get off the mark with an off-drive of priceless quality, you have no need to bother about what anyone says.

Of course the statistics say it, but actions always speak louder than mere figures. This is a great, great cricketer.

Blackie

As I've touched on before here, one of the drawbacks of having a life to lead away from writing about cricket - a life with its bereavements, and funerals, and work demands which, sadly, don't involve writing about cricket - is that those people for whom writing about cricket is work tend to find the time to write about people, and issues, well before you do. They also do the job better, by and large, but so it goes. An example of this is Andy Bull's excellent piece about Ian Blackwell, which couldn't do anything other than touch a chord with me.

As time passes, even if, as he hopes, he's seen around the counties in an umpire's coat, people outside the broad acres of Somerset will mostly forget about Ian Blackwell. In many cases, I'm sure, they already have. Ian Blackwell? That porky bloke who hung around the England one-day side for a while, clubbed a few boundaries here and there but mostly got out quickly, bowled a few overs occasionally notable for parsimony but rarely for penetration, and lumbered about in the field.

Oh, him.

But for people such as myself, who watched him play for Somerset at Taunton in his glory years, the memories will be much less marginal. For to be at Taunton - perhaps in the front seats of the Ian Botham Stand, which catch the sun from early morning, in those largely forgotten days when England still had summer weather - when Blackie walked to the wicket from the Colin Atkinson Pavilion was to be touched by a very individual, parochial, vulnerable type of brilliance.

There was never anything very elegant, or refined, or polished, about Blackie. Although many tried to make him conform to the fitness-conscious stereotype of the modern professional cricketer, he never quite managed it. Like Colin Milburn or John Jameson before him, or Samit Patel or Mark Cosgrove after him, Blackie was more interested in hitting the cover off the ball. Ultimately, as Andy Bull records, his indolence was too much for Justin Langer and the parting of the ways came. For me, and, I'm sure, more than a few others, the County Ground has never quite been the same again.

Blackie did his fair share of bowling, where economy of effort was all and 398 first-class wickets tell the tale of a decent operator, and tended to graze in the field. But he could catch, of course, and throw the ball miles, sometimes even over the top of the stumps. Batting, though, was really his thing.

Although he was brought up in north Debyshire there was always something of the rustic Westcountryman about Blackie. Taunton was his adopted home, and, with his parents always around as they were, it never felt anything but right. As he padded to the crease, his sleeper of a bat by his side, you could fondly imagine that he carried echoes of the way Ian Botham used to do the same. Without the same self-regard and flamboyance, sure, but with just the same murderous intent.

His ability to guide the ball to the Taunton ropes with a sweetly-timed off-drive or a robust leg-side punch, or, when his shoulders really came into play, deposit it into the St.James's Street car park or the Tone, got him noticed by England. In his second ODI he made a powerful, rapid 82 against India on a steamy Colombo evening; he was always ruddy-faced but after that knock he looked as though he was about to explode. But he never built on it. At international level he came to be regarded as a bowler who could bat a bit, but that was so, so wrong. At the very top level his statuesque footwork and relative immobility always undermined him, but at county level he was a rough-hewn gem.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of Bull's piece is the photo above it, taken at Nagpur in March 2006. Blackie receives his first and only England Test cap from his captain Andrew Flintoff, with his fellow debutants Monty Panesar and Alastair Cook alongside him. Typically Monty looks happy but a little diffident, perhaps unsure of his ability to fulfil the trust placed in him by the selectors. Equally characteristically, Cook looks self-assured, pleased, but without elation. For him this was always going to happen. Blackie just beams. He is simply overjoyed to be there, perhaps unable to believe his luck. He knows the moment may not last, and he is determined to enjoy it while he can. In the game that follows, Cook scores 60 and 104 not out and Panesar gets Tendulkar out. Blackie makes just four and bowls seven insipid overs for twenty-eight runs. For his fellows the rest is history, but he is never asked back.

But for Blackie there is little sadness. There are 11,000 first-class runs at a shade under 40. There are Championship titles in the colours of Durham and Warwickshire. And, at Taunton, as the ground continues to change, there is lasting hero worship.

There are some things fitness can't buy.

CMJ

I've written about TMS before. The last occasion was just a couple of weeks ago, in fact.

It's been part of my life for a very, very long time. And, in truth, I've always had a bit of trouble relating to the way in which certain commentators who I haven't liked very much (Johnston back in the old days, Blofeld more recently) have been the popular face of the programme. The slightly self-conscious, often contrived, 'humourous' face. A face I could always take or leave. I always thought others were more deserving of wider recognition

I'm a little young to have really appreciated Arlott, so Christopher Martin-Jenkins was always my favourite commentator. To me there was always something timelessly reassuring and empathetic about his unfeigned humanity, his sincere love for the game and his precise, unfussy diction.

His writing never quite had the verve of his commentary. It tended to be stolid and a little bland, but his book about the 1973-74 England tour of the West Indies, Testing Time, has stood the test of time better than most. Tour books of that type - tours of that type, in fact - have gone out of fashion, but if you want a representative example of the best of the genre (not quite up there with Alan Ross's best work, but pretty damn good) you can do far worse. When he signed a copy for me back in the eighties he described it as his favourite book.

When I was in my teens and CMJ was editor of The Cricketer I sent him something I'd written about Sunil Gavaskar. He replied with a warm, encouraging letter. As the tributes paid today by the likes of Andrew Miller and Lawrence Booth show, this was far from unusual. While his commentary may have brought him wider recognition, it's clear that he regarded himself just as much as a journalist.

Ten or so years later I was on a supporters' tour of South Africa for England's first series there after re-admission. CMJ, together with many other members of the press pack, was at a reception which we attended in Port Elizabeth. My birthday was coming up, and, unknown to me, some of my compatriots were passing round a card. Vic Marks signed it, I think Jonathan Agnew signed it, and CMJ signed it. In fact, I saw him sign it without knowing what it was, and I can still remember the comment he made.

'I don't mind signing things but I'm not so keen when someone asks you for a thousand words by five o'clock.'

Greig

In May 1977 I returned home to the London suburbs after the first extended period I'd ever spent away from home without my parents - a 'lively' school trip to a small seaside town in Dorset (name witheld to protect the innocent) which is probably still recovering - and my Dad met me off the bus.

I was only eleven but I really liked my cricket. He knew that, which was probably why one of the first things he told me was that many well-known cricketers, led by the England captain Tony Greig, had signed contracts to play cricket for someone neither of us had ever heard of called Kerry Packer. The news had just broken, which was why it was on his mind, but I, after a week of visiting 'places of interest' and trekking across the rain-blasted Dorset countryside, had no idea what he was talking about.

I soon found out, though. That summer's Test series against Australia was to be the last time Tony Greig would ever represent England, although, with hindsight, it's staggering that he remained in the side after being stripped of the captaincy.

It's almost become trite to say that Tony Greig is better remembered for his intimate involvement with the development of World Series Cricket than for his deeds on the field, but it's no less true for all that. In the days when Andrew Flintoff was everyone's hero he tended to be compared to Ian Botham with barely any thought given to anyone who wore the England all-rounder's mantle before him. But before Botham came Tony Greig, and Tony Greig, I promise you, could play.

My memories of Greig are fractured by the passage of time and age. Not my age now, you understand, but the age I was then. Certain things stick in the memory - like Packer and 'grovel' (I wonder now if I'd ever heard the word before Greig used it so clumsily) and the London West Indian crowd dancing in front of the pavilion at The Oval after Holding bowls him for the second time in that match. And I remember his angular bowling action, which spawned a thousand playground imitations. And I remember his SP bats and gloves. And I remember his upright stance. And I remember the withering power of his cover drive, enhanced by his immense reach and stride and invariably played with a self-conscious flourish. But I don't remember either of his Indian tours, or his trip to the West Indies, or his debut. Those came from a long-forgotten time when I occasionally had other things on my mind apart from cricket.

My lasting memory of Greig, though, is one which has been mentioned in virtually every tribute paid to him in the days since his death. The England tour of Australia in late 1974 and early 1975 was the first overseas tour by an England team that I was ever aware of. Which meant that the first Test in Brisbane was the first overseas Test match involving England that I ever followed. I was up early to listen to Alan McGilvray on my little brown radio, and there were highlights on TV each evening. You didn't need to be very old to tell that Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee were fearsome bowlers. And you didn't need a very mature grasp of psychology to know that signalling the four for yourself each time you hit one of them to the boundary was likely to make them even more fearsome.

I might not have known the expression, or what it meant, but, at the time, I knew what I was seeing.

Tony Greig had balls.

Radio Days

Test Match Special is one of those British institutions which is always destined to be not quite what it was.

You get the impression that for many people over the age of fifty (a demographic I haven't quite joined yet), the programme's 'Golden Age' belongs back in the era when John Arlott was still going strong. Johnston, and Gibson, and a younger Frindall and Martin-Jenkins would have been there too. Now all of those are gone - for me it would be a wonderful thing to hear CMJ again but it seems I never will - but, for those of us who care about such things, the programme is still a central part of winter mornings and summer days. With the right sort of technology you can even hear it without interruptions from the shipping forecast or Yesterday in Parliament.

TMS endures.

As Michael Henderson and a few others will tell you, aspects of it may not be what they were, but, as this fluctuating, unpredicted, enjoyable series has unfolded, TMS has sounded as essential as ever. Like Cook or Pujara on one of their many good days it has displayed an innate sense of control and authority.

For me, the most enjoyable and refreshing element of recent weeks has been the experience of listening to Rahul Dravid. This is a man who has been one of the best and most famous cricketers in the world, yet has retained an alluring air of humility and gentle humour, and his reminiscences and judgements are lent weight by their grounding in recent experience. He could perhaps do to play a few more shots, but he'll learn.

A penny for Simon Mann's thoughts when Dravid thanks him (implicitly for giving him the privilege of sharing the airwaves).

I'd retire there and then.

Ponting in the Age of Certainty

I once met a Yorkshireman on an England supporters' tour of Australia who'd been at the Antigua Recreation Ground when Brian Lara made his 375. He told me that after Lara had been in for about three overs he knew he was going to break the world record. His brother, who was with him, confirmed that he'd stated as much at the time. It sounded ridiculous, but it was simply that he'd seen the pitch, he'd seen the bowling and he'd seen what Lara could do, and decided that nobody was going to get him out. For a couple of days they didn't.

I once had a similar feeling about Ricky Ponting.

In an ODI at Bristol in 2001, England won the toss and batted, making what those of us in the shadow of the Jessop Tavern thought was a competitive 268, the innings rounded up by an unbeaten partnership of 70 between Ben Holliaoke and Owais Shah, who was making his debut. At the start of the Australian reply Darren Gough dismissd Gilchrist cheaply, and we thought England were in with a shout. Ponting, batting at three, knew different.

I can see him now, low-slung and determined, businesslike but with just a hint of swagger, in his gold and green uniform and helmet. Very early on he plays a forward defensive that is so solid and the product of such an all-encompassing stride down the track that I know that no bowler will get him out today. They don't. 104 runs later, with the game almost secure, he is run out. Steve Waugh and Ian Harvey finish the chase off.

When we arrived in Australia in December 1994, everyone was talking about Ponting. It took him another year to get into the Test side, but, by 2001, he was approaching his greatest years. All bowlers came alike. The concept of retirement would never have entered his head. It was his Age of Certainty.

As Russell Degnan points out in this masterly piece, Ponting represents the last link with one of the greatest teams the world has ever seen, and he was that team's greatest batsman.

Within the next two days his career as a Test cricketer will end. The thoughts of the cricket world go with him.

Timing

In sport, timing is everything.

Timing the shot. Timing the pass. Timing the punch. Timing the jump. Timing the attack (do you go before or after the bell?)

Timing the retirement.

Like any great batsman, Ricky Ponting could time the ball. Not, perhaps with quite the lustrous subtlety of David Gower, or Larry Gomes, or Mohammad Azharuddin; the last word in footwork and the psychological domination of the legendary batsman were more his thing. But if someone, anyone, dared to drop the ball short, he would swivel and pull them through midwicket with the finality, and the sound, of a gunshot. If the ball was slightly overpitched - or, with Ponting's stride, not even that - it would be driven straight.

For some reason, in my mind's eye it is Headingley, it is a Friday in July 1997 and Ricky Ponting is making his first century in Test cricket. The straight-driven ball accelerates smoothly up the hill and hurdles the rope. It is timing that has got it there.

Yes, Ponting can time the ball.

But for the greats, knowing when to go is always far more difficult than knowing how to time the ball. Growing up you were always the best. As an adult you were always the best (apart from the odd guy from another country and then it just came down to people's opinions). Even as you got a bit older, and your hair started to thin and you lost too many games to your country's oldest enemy when you were captain, you were still the best. As you dropped a place in the batting order, you were still, at least in your own mind, the best. You know what it is to fail once too often and to be forced to leave the stage - you've seen it happen to countless other players - but, somehow, until the last year or two, you've never quite understood that it would happen to you. And your confusion and uncertainty is exacerbated by the knowledge that you still have the privilege of being able to decide when to go. Lesser players don't get the chance.

Eventually, though, you decide to go in the knowledge that people's lasting memories will be of what you were rather than what you became.

And, before the adulation and the tears flow (as, in Australia, they surely will) you leave yourself one last shot to get it right the way you used to when it seemed like tomorrow would never come.

Played in the Head

For all that Pujara - with his mature, seemingly innate, understanding of the mechanics of batting long on the dead tracks of western India - took India away from England at Ahmedabad, it was Virender Sehwag who set up India's first innings in the manner which was once customary but has become rarer over recent years.

This wasn’t the 293 at the Brabourne, or the triples in Multan or Chennai, or even the 195 at Melbourne, with attacks scattered to the winds like confetti for session after session. For a start, England, Swann aside, bowled poorly, and Viru these days is just slightly more moderate in achievement, if not execution or intent. Two years of fifties - at high strike rates, but fifties nonetheless - have seen to that. Also, as he himself said at the press conference at the end of the first day, batting wasn’t easy as the ball wasn’t coming on. It didn’t show.

But as a Test batsman - and even more so as an opener - Sehwag has always been an outlier. A player who instinctively ignores the textbook and plays simply as he feels. Where the textbook advocates that a batsman facing the new ball should be watchful and circumspect, Viru has always been ambitious, expansive and destructive, as much in the early moments of an innings as at its glorious conclusion or in its death throes. This is the essence of his greatness.

But this greatness - for that, conclusively, is what it is - can be disorientating. According to the conservative logic of the batting manual, Sehwag should have begun failing years ago. In fact, his career at the highest level should have ended almost as soon as it started. You can’t play international bowlers with such a disregard for your wicket, or such rigid footwork, or such a penchant for hitting the ball in the air, even if, when you do, it usually goes for six. These things can’t be done. Except, when Sehwag is batting, they can.

His ability to whip the ball through the leg-side off the back foot and to clear the ropes at will is well-known, but a facet of his approach which has perhaps become more noticeable as he’s aged is the glorious inventiveness of his off-side play. This is emphasized by the reductive nature of his footwork; to anything pitched on or around a good length with an off-stump line (by most conventional standards this is good bowling, but Viru re-writes the bowling textbook too), he simply plants his leading leg slightly inside the line of the ball and uses his bat to guide it into whichever off-side gap he fancies. If it is over-pitched it is driven with withering power and timing, if it is sliding away through the air or off the pitch, it is driven square of the wicket or guided between the slips and gully by opening the bat face at precisely the instant of impact. It is typically Asian in a sense - many another Indian or Pakistani or Lankan player has played in a similar manner - but there is somehow less fragility and more certainty to Sehwag’s off-side play than that of most of his compatriots.

There are two factors in this. One is his natural eye; that is an accident of birth. The other is his head. In this aspect of batting, if few others, Sehwag conforms to the textbook. In fact, he exceeds it. The next time you watch Sehwag bat - in all probability this will be tomorrow - watch how still and level his head is. Like much else about his batting, this is exceptional, but it is also natural and uncontrived. He has not had to think about it.

Like Jimmy White in his greatest years at the snooker table, Sehwag illustrates the way in which genius can both subvert and reinforce orthodoxy, but, apart from the odd embellishment, neither man has ever spent too much time thinking about what they do.

Sehwag may be reaching the autumn of his career. But he is a genius. It is for us to enjoy him while we can.

Clarke

A few years ago there seemed to be a lot of unjustified doubt and malice directed towards Michael Clarke, as much within Australia as elsewhere. I could never understand why this was, as he'd always looked to me like a batsman of the very highest possible quality.

The type of player, himself apart, that his country just doesn't seem to produce any more.

There's no time now to produce anything original, but I stand by every word of this which I wrote back at the start of the year.

Nostalgia

English cricket - perhaps all cricket, but I haven't spent enough time among the cricketing cultures of other countries to know - is infected with nostalgia. Often, as when someone whose cricket-watching experience pre-dates one-day cricket can't stop telling you that the modern game is rubbish, contemporary players are lazy and the sport is going to hell in a handcart, this is a bad thing. At other times, such as when a reminder is required of why this is the most complex and vivid and culturally rich of games, it is most definitely a good one.

For English men - and often women - of a certain age, one of the players who has been the focus of more dewy-eyed reminiscence than most is Denis Compton. Denis Compton played in 78 Test matches between 1937 and 1957, and scored nearly 6000 runs at 50. He could really play. But what stands out from people's recollections of him is the way in which he played the game with an insouciant joy and an improvisational abandon which acted as a blissful counterpoint to the eras of austerity and consuming war during which he played.

My father is nearly 87. He loves cricket and has watched it since before the Second World War. He isn't the nostalgic type and it can be difficult to persuade him to talk about the past, even though he has led a more interesting and cosmopolitan life than most. Something he once told me about, though, was what it was like to watch Compton and his favourite partner Bill Edrich at Lord's during their peerless summer of 1947. This, with war gone but rationing still biting, seemed like the greatest sporting experience known to man, while my mother, who went to the Headingley Test of 1948 at the age of eighteen, wasn't sure which player she fancied the most, Compton, or his Australian opponent and friend, Keith Miller.

Now, more than seventy-five years after Compton came to Test cricket, his grandson Nick is about to make his debut. Like his grandfather he is a good-looking man but in a way which betrays his upbringing on the eastern coast of South Africa. It is a look which speaks of long days in the sun and the carefree pleasures of existence, but, as a batsman, he is about as dissimilar to his father's father as it is possible to be. After an inconsistent start to his professional career in England, Compton has settled for being a player of self-denial and discipline. While he has the straight bat and classical nuances of a player brought up on true wickets at good schools, he leaves the ball more than most, and, when he hits it he often gives the impression of forcing it away with more effort than timing. It is possible to mistake him for a player with a lower ration of natural ability than he has.

In Ahmedabad this week, with the Indian spinners probing his mettle and the sweat welling up inside his shirt, the younger Compton's talent and discipline will be tested more than ever before. Early-season Taunton, with the chill wind cutting through the sound of the St.James's bells, it will assuredly not be.

With the iron-hard Cook at the other end and his impeccable lineage, Compton won't lack for support, on the field or off it.

As ever, he will carry many people's hopes.

As ever, time will tell if he can fulfil them.

End of an Era

This, from Alan White's often superb blog The Crap Cricketer, is a find which, for me, turned the clock back nineteen years in an instant.

For anyone who doesn't remember it, the game took place in September 1993, at the conclusion of what was briefly called the 'AXA Equity and Law League'. It was the old John Player League by yet another of its many names, but for the first time matches were played over fifty overs per side rather than forty, and, for the first time in English cricket, players wore coloured clothing.

Memories of the way things used to be were strong, and the changes were largely unpopular, but the competition did throw up a winner-take-all final match between the league's top two sides, Kent and Glamorgan, at Canterbury, which also happened to be the last game of major professional cricket that Viv Richards would ever play.

Glamorgan ended up winning comfortably, but what really stuck in the mind was the bowling of a young Australian called Duncan Spencer, of whom nobody had previously heard but who bowled like the wind. As Alan says, the sight of the ageing Richards fending off Spencer's thunderbolts carries a sense of the passing of an era, with the old master trying desperately hard to show that he wasn't intimidated, or even surprised (as everyone else was), by what was coming down at him. He largely succeeded, and went on to finish on 46 not out, never to be seen again in a match that really mattered.

At the time the game created waves. For one thing Glamorgan had won a trophy, for another Richards had retired, and for another Kent seemed to have found one of the fastest bowlers in the world from nowhere.

And if you're wondering what the players thought, have a look both at some of Steve Marsh's takes and the expression on Carl Hooper's face after an early one whistles past Adrian Dale's bat. These were people who'd seen a bit, and they knew they were watching something remarkable.

Aspects of the film are massively evocative. The standing ovation given to the helmetless Richards for one, and also the sheer size of the St.Lawrence Ground crowd (12,000, some of whom had started queuing at 4 a.m. according to Wisden). Forget Twenty20, which can still pack them in like that in places such as Taunton and Chelmsford, this, in a small, fading way, was what domestic limited-over cricket in England was like in its greatest era. But an era which, in truth, had ended years before.

Earlier that season I saw Richards make a double-hundred in defeat at Cardiff against Middlesex. One lunch interval, in the old Sophia Gardens clubhouse, I glimpsed him sitting opposite Mark Ramprakash. They chatted as Richards finished his ice cream and it was easy to suppose that Richards was passing on the advice of a cricketing lifetime. That's how things were with Richards then. His career was ending and everyone was taking what they could from him in the certain knowledge that his like would never be seen again.

In many ways that day at Canterbury was also the end of an era for both players. Duncan Spencer's career faded away amid injuries and a failed drug test. In late 2006 I saw him bowling for Buckinghamshire against Devon. His hair had gone, and so had most of his pace.

When I saw his name on the scorecard I instantly thought of Canterbury.

In his quiet moments I suspect he still does too.

Periods of Transition

I don't know whether anyone has noticed but I haven't been around for a while.

If I wanted to sound a little pretentious, I'd say I'd been suffering from 'writer's block'. I've had ideas for pieces, and on one occasion I even started to write something. But it didn't flow. The familiar ritual of transmitting my thoughts to the page felt forced and clumsy in a way that it never used to. In the manner of a batsman (something I've never really been, but I've watched a few good ones and I have a vivid imagination) going through a bad trot, my timing was off. My drives were slicing off the inside edge and my pulls were top-edged. My feet weren't moving and the runs weren't coming.

If I wanted to sound a bit less pretentious and a bit more realistic, I've just been bloody busy. Sadly, my day job doesn't involve writing about cricket. About a year ago I moved to a different role in the same office I've worked in since David Gower was still playing. My new job, while much more satisfying than my old one, is also much more demanding. At times recently I've wondered what the inside of my house looked like, and, when I finally found out, I certainly wasn't in the mood to sit in front of a computer trying to say something original and perhaps just a little bit poetic or resonant.

And if I wanted to be completely honest, well, there hasn't been a lot around that's really held my attention. The World T20 came and went, mostly while I wasn't in front of a television, and, as for the Champions League, I know it's been going on but I've found it impossible to muster any interest in it at all. I might have checked one of the scores the other day but I can't really remember.

This encapsulates the difference between those who are fortunate enough to be able earn a living from writing about cricket, and those of us who, in the (hopefully far from immortal) words of the unlamented Kenwyn Williams, remain 'unlicensed'. If we don't want to write about something, we don't have to, but, if we do, nobody's going to give us a cent for doing so.

Some people, though, are kind enough to read and comment, and I look forward to making their acquaintance again over the coming months, because things around the world are about to become a lot more interesting.

As Chris over at Declaration Game has pointed out, the forthcoming series between India and England could be a minor classic. To use an age-old cliché beloved of 'licensed' journalists and bloggers alike, both sides are, to some extent, 'in transition', but, while India will enter the series with the confidence which home advantage and English opposition will bring, there is a dark cloud on the horizon.

If Sachin goes on failing, they may be about to enter the period of transition to end them all.

Wicket-Keeping as Art

Even though I only managed to see the game's second half - on account of following a large group of elite cyclists around Dartmoor - yesterday's final of the CB40 competition between Hampshire and Warwickshire had an inevitable sense of wistfulness about it.

For one thing it was the final game of the English professional season - a season which has been far from outstanding (the sublime, unforgettable batting of Hashim Amla aside) and which has been plagued by truly terrible weather - but the final game of the season nonetheless. And it also caused me to reflect on the days when the September final of what was then a knock-out competition really was the climax of the season.

Teams were at full-strength and players played in the knowledge that a good performance could - for good or ill, and it was often the latter - gain them a place in a winter tour party. Teams weren't weakened because their players had already departed to play twenty over cricket for their country on a distant island.

Every seat was taken and the air bristled with partisanship.

Those days are gone for ever, and the CB40 is a clumsily scheduled, unloved competition, but yesterday's game had something.

Not just a thriling finish, but the truly superb wicket-keeping of Michael Bates.

Hampshire have a rare collection of young players, even if the majority of them have only shown their best form so far in one-day cricket: Liam Dawson, James Vince, Chris Wood, Danny Briggs, and Bates. After their win in the Twenty20 competition a few weeks ago, Briggs and Wood received the plaudits, but I felt at the time that Bates's keeping had been unfairly overlooked.

Yesterday the 21 year-old was at his best again, standing up to spin and seam and producing a series of unfussy yet brilliant takes which, in their agility and precision, carried echoes of the ghost of English wicket-keeping's glorious past. Of Knott, of Taylor, of Keith Andrew, of late period Jack Russell, standing up to the stumps to the likes of Mike Smith and Ian Harvey as Gloucestershire strangled the life out of side after side.

Bates will have to improve his batting a lot to get anywhere near to international cricket, and, indeed, to maintain a place in his county side in the longer term, but, whatever happens, his career is going to be worth following.

For this was wicket-keeping as art.

Timing

In cricket - and the higher you go in the game the more important it is - timing is everything. For a batsman it involves moving the feet into the right position to play the chosen shot, then introducing bat to ball at precisely the right moment. For a bowler it is the co-ordination of the range of unnatural movements which go to make up a bowling action, with the synchronisation to ensure that the ball goes in the intended direction with optimum pace, or swing, or spin. To some it comes naturally. Others have to work.

But there are other kinds of timing too.

The many eulogies to Andrew Strauss that have been published since his retirement have concentrated, rightly, on the balance, modesty and understated toughness of his temperament, together with the cool rhythm of his best batting. And in this, while never a great player, he had the timing - especially with a straight bat through the leg side - of the best. As The Crap Cricketer wrote, in one of the most thoughtful and original pieces about Strauss I've read, he was in some senses a limited player but the sum of his parts - his batting, his captaincy and his personality - made him a figure fit for the English post-war pantheon.

Strauss's impeccable sense of timing extended to his retirement itself. The form of his side - partly but far from exclusively due to his own decline - has crumbled over the past year and things are not about to get any easier. In November and December India, although they have crucial vulnerabilities in the form of Sehwag, Gambhir, Tendulkar and Raina, will be gunning for England. Before the year is out Strauss may be reflecting on the fact that batting against Ashwin or Ojha, or deploying his bowling resources to counter the varied qualities of the purposeful Pujara or the lyrically brilliant Kohli, is easier from the comfort of his armchair.

If, as they very well could, things go badly for England in India, he would not be human if he failed to breathe a sigh of relief and feel that he got out at the right time.

Sachin Tendulkar has never had to think about timing. For the last twenty years and more it has just been. Now though - as a result of a succession of dismissals to full deliveries, the three most recent of which have seen his stumps shattered - there are renewed signs that his omnipotence may be fading a little. One of the most familiar sights in international cricket over the last two decades has been the hunched figure of Tendulkar working the ball through the leg side for runs. Across the line, sure, but, in the old days it never seemed to matter. Now, increasingly it does.

For years now Tendulkar's demise has been anticipated, even perhaps welcomed by some who relish the warm reassurance of predictability. The idea of an Indian Test team voluntarily taking the field without Tendulkar remains - just about - unthinkable. So, when the Ahmedabad Test begins, Sachin Tendulkar will be far from his armchair. He will be where he is happiest, among the sweat and the dust. He will be looking to recapture his timing, while knowing that, if he cannot, he may have to think about another sort of timing.

The post-cricket road is a long one for anyone who has spent the best years of their life playing the game, let alone a 39 year-old who has been playing international cricket for more than half his life, but, as Strauss would happily acknowledge, its inevitability cannot be avoided for ever.

For Tendulkar the four Test matches which will be played between India and England before the end of this year could make him or they could break him.

During his retirement press conference Andrew Strauss said something about watching what happened from here on with interest.

He will not be alone.

Standing Out

In his classic football supporter's memoir Fever Pitch, published exactly twenty years ago, Nick Hornby wrote about a young player who first represented Arsenal in the mid-1980s named Gus Caesar. Gus Caesar had a promising start to his career at the club before finding that, at the highest level of the game below international football, he couldn't cut it.

The point Hornby was making was about the way in which football has a series of levels, of standards. Local park, county league, regional semi-professional league, Vauxhall Conference (as it was then), Football League (as it was then). Now, at the head of everything - and it has been so for exactly the same twenty years - is the FA Premier League. At each and every level there will be players who have been outstanding at the level below, but who, when they step up to the next, are found wanting. At the very top - in the modern football world this is where Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo reside - are the players who have never really been found wanting. They are the best of the best of the best.

Cricket is the same. At the level of cricket which I've played for the last couple of decades - friendly matches between village sides in England's west country - a player capable of playing in the local premier league will stand out. Go and watch a match in that premier league and a player who represents the local minor county, or who once was among the best teenagers in the country, will stand out. Go and watch that minor county and a player who has played a lot in the County Championship will - if he is not a physical or psychological wreck (long cricket careers can do that to you) - stand out. Go and watch a County Championship match and someone who has played in 88 Test matches and scored 21 centuries, including some of the most brilliant innings played by an England batsman in the modern era, well, he will stand out.

So it was with Kevin Pietersen yesterday. So much has been written over the past few weeks, so many opinions offered, about Pietersen's undeniably complex psychology, that it has been possible to forget, or at least briefly overlook, the fact that he is, when all has been said, a batsman of the purest genius.

And, if the eleven players in Somerset's side, or his Surrey team-mates, or the thousand or so in the Taunton crowd, were in any danger of forgetting how good Pietersen was - and some would never before have seen evidence of his ability at first-hand - they will not do so for a very long time.

In many ways Pietersen's century seemed understated, largely on account of the ease and assurance with which it was made. Such was the superiority of Pietersen over a useful Somerset attack that the need for extreme violence or self-preservation was obviated. It was bloodless.

In the early stages of his innings Pietersen occasionally played and missed at seaming deliveries from the eternally fiery Steven Kirby and his erstwhile England colleague Sajid Mahmood, but, when he had settled, it was simply a question of how often he felt like hitting the ball for four or six. Far worse players than Peter Trego - a locally-raised all-rounder having his best season with the ball - have played for England. Pietersen, when he desired an acceleration in the tempo of his side's innings after lunch, danced down the pitch and flicked Trego to the leg-side boundary with the disdainful ease of a teenage elder brother humiliating a younger sibling. And then, when, as night follows day, Trego dropped the ball short, Pietersen pulled him for a flat six with the venom of a cornered snake.

The young Irish slow left-armer George Dockrell is a spin bowler of huge potential. Until yesterday he had found that his easy, grooved action and fine control of pace and spin were enough to see him through against some of the better batting sides in the first division of the Championship. Against Pietersen, receiving little help from the surface, he found that he could do nothing to prevent himself being milked for run after run, and then, when Pietersen felt it was necessary, he was hit out of the ground into the River Tone. Although he took three wickets, the lasting value of the day will be as a lesson in what players from another realm can do. One day - perhaps with a Test career behind him - he will look back on it with wryness and appreciation of its value.

Pietersen's celebrations were also understated. There was none of the leaping and fist-pumping which always accompany his international milestones. Here there was simply a raised bat, first to the Surrey dressing room and then to all the ground's corners. There were friendly conversations with Alfonso Thomas and, later in the day, with all the scoreboard damage done, with Mahmood. This, somewhat incongrously, was Pietersen attempting to play the part of the humble everyman. Something about his body language suggested contrition, and even, perhaps, a longing for forgiveness.

The saga of the last few weeks is far from over - it will probably take another twist within the hour - and the sense is that, for all Pietersen's gifts, things will always happen around him which people will not understand or like.

Many words have been expended on Kevin Pietersen and many more will be used before his career is done.

You can say what you like about Kevin Pietersen.

Just don't ever say he can't bat.

Contrasts

There are few greater contrasts in the cricket world than the back of the Warner Stand at Lord's, with its pervasive ambience of old school English privilege, thinly disguised wealth and liberally-consumed champagne, and the dusty acres of the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium at Hyderabad in India, where, over the past few days, an Indian side successfuly marrying new and old, youth and experience, put an anaemic and underprepared New Zealand side to the sword.

Sitting in the Warner shade on a steamy Saturday morning as England played South Africa in August 2012, an idle glance at Cricinfo revealed that VVS Laxman, a son of Hyderabad himself, had retired from Test cricket.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the news brought sadness, or even surprise. It had been coming for a while and merely marked the latest staging point in India's transition from a team pivoted around a group of ageing superstars to one with a fresher, more original hue.

All that can and needs to be said about Laxman has already been said by many people far better qualified than me to do so. In particular Murali Kartik, a player from the same Indian generation who, though chiefly a bowler, shared much of Laxman's elegance and ease of style. For this, certainly for those of us in England who were denied the specific memories of his greatest days in India and Australia, is what will pervade.

A bowler - any bowler, but perhaps Brett Lee - pitches the ball on a good length, off stump line, and Laxman leans forward, slightly off perfect balance but eyes level, and whips the ball through midwicket with an air that is businesslike and slightly apologetic. 'This hurts me a little', he seems to say, 'but this has to be done'.

Laxman's replacement, Cheteshwar Pujara, is cut from very different cloth. There is little flamboyance or elegance there, but there is high talent, ambition and patience. He left the field in Hyderabad plainly disappointed to have only made 159. He was expecting far more.

In time, you can be sure, he will get it.

Something Extraordinary

As one or two people may have noticed - and I hope I'm not flattering myself unduly in thinking that - I've been lying low recently. It hasn't necessarily been a deliberate decision but rather a consequence of a lot happening in the day job and a memorable - truly memorable - trip to London for the thirtieth Olympiad.

Ordering your thoughts after something like that isn't easy.

I used to really love watching major championship athletics. It was bigger then, in the era of Coe, of Ovett, of Cram, of Thompson, of Edwin Moses, and Roger Kingdom and Sergei Bubka. In the years that followed the disgrace of Johnson and the unravelling of the state-sponsored doping programmes in eastern Europe, I largely lost that love. I'd check back in every four years during the Olympics, but, even allowing for some heady moments with Gunnell in Barcelona and Kelly Holmes in Athens, it never endured.

The last week has reminded me what it was I saw in it with more clarity than ever.

All sports have their signature elements, but two aspects of track athletics are among the most dramatic moments to be found in any sporting arena. They are the silent pause that precedes the gun in a sprint, and the bell that marks the start of the final lap of a distance race.

One is about anticipation and the other is about the inevitability of climax. Hearts stop for less.

Athletics, though is only one part of the Olympic experience.

Anyone who was fortunate enough to attend the London Olympic Games in the British summer of 2012 knows that.

It is early August and it is late in east London. A sunlit early evening has given way first to dusk over the Olympic Stadium and then to darkness, broken by the lights that surround the arena and also by those which are attached to the other structures which punctuate the Olympic Park: the Orbit, the Aquatics Centre, the Velodrome. Further away, to the south, are the lights of Canary Wharf, and to the west those of central London.

It is cool but not cold and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people here. We are among the crowd and we are required to wait to enter Stratford Station. This is no hardship: in fact it has been a difficult thing to drag ourselves away from the Park. As we walk away people are constantly turning around, taking photographs. This has been their field of dreams.

While we wait, a young Irishman who carries echoes of Dylan Moran and is one of the army of ‘Games Makers’ sits in what appears to be a tennis umpire’s chair and attempts to keeps us entertained. His stories are rambling and imperfectly delivered, but no matter. Everyone is in a good mood. These Olympic Games do that to people.

As we walk forward into the station a lad of about twelve runs ahead, high fiving a series of policemen, troops and Games Makers. Everyone is smiling. The thought occurs that this is Great Britain. This sort of thing doesn’t happen here. Except that, in London in the summer of 2012, it does.

Earlier in the day we explore the Olympic Park. After passing through the gates we turn to the right in front of the stadium and look down what is known as London Way. The sight which confronts us reminds me of a Biblical Epic. For as far as the eye can see there is an unbroken sea of humanity. It is moving - in more ways than one - as people either walk away from the Stadium after the morning’s athletic events or return to the heart of the Park from its distant fringes. We have travelled to the park on the Docklands Light Railway from the southern end of east London but it is hard to avoid the sensation that we have arrived on a different planet. Something extraordinary has been created here.

The signature sights of the Park are the Olympic Stadium itself, the Aquatics Centre, the Velodrome, the Basketball Arena and the Copper Box, intertwined with flower beds planted with a range of species of British wild flowers which add a flavour of originality and colour to the scene. Once we are part of the crowd it is obvious that the atmosphere is the same blend of happiness, friendliness and tolerance that we have encountered at other Olympic venues. In stark contrast with most other major sporting events held in Britain, nobody is drunk.

There is nationalism, but it is not the aggressive, blinkered partisanship of football. It is the benign, sincere national pride of the Last Night of the Proms. It feels right.

At the far end of the Park the Great Britain men’s hockey team is playing against Pakistan, and, as they score two early goals, thunderous cheers ring out, letting those who are admiring the architecture, or smelling the flowers, or watching the swallows, or following the tennis on the big screen, know that there is live sport taking place. It is a welcome reminder that reality is out there somewhere.

It was never meant to be like this. From the time London was awarded the right to stage the thirtieth modern Olympic Games on 6th July 2005, the popular expectation, encouraged by the lazy, reflexive cynicism of the media, was that the event would be terminally damaged by what was perceived as typical British ineptitude. The venues wouldn’t be built on time, or, if they were, London’s transport system wouldn’t be capable of coping with the additional demands placed upon it.

None of this has happened. Although there is an early mix-up over the display of flags at a football match, and concerns over the number of empty seats in some of the venues, the organisation of the Games is exceptional.

In the Olympic Stadium we have seen Greg Rutherford qualify for the final of the Men’s Long Jump final. The following evening he will win Great Britain’s first gold medal in the event since 1964. We have also seen Jessica Ennis, whose elfin grace and winning smile re-define the girl next door cliché for the modern age, compete in two events on the way to her gold medal in the Women’s Heptathlon.

Yes, something extraordinary has been created here. Of course, it is necessary to consider how a lasting legacy of this can be established, but this is for others and it is for the future.

We are finally allowed to move forward towards the station. The movement of the crowd is synchronous, orderly, contemplative. Although the prevailing mood is one of joy, there is little exuberance. It is late, people are tired, and there is a sense that they are, whether consciously or unconsciously, reflecting on what they have been fortunate enough to experience.

This is a time none of us will ever forget.