'Gayle might not need Test cricket, but Test cricket needs him' © Getty Images

At last, the waiting is over. Again. A tortuous, seemingly endless five entire days with no Test cricket have finally wended their pointless way into the history books, and the long-awaited England versus West Indies rematch now marches towards its thrillingly decisive climax at the Riverside today. The Wisden Trophy is still literally anyone’s. The two captains have been at each other’s throats like two top surgeons in a one-on-one emergency tracheotomy competition. And the Ashes (not to mention West Indies’ forthcoming home clash with Bangladesh) loom with massively gargantuan enormity as the players strain every conceivable physical and mental sinew to touch the elusive heavens of cricketing immortality. Truly, the eyes of the universe are trained through excited binoculars on the green Durham sward, and it is hard to envisage that this will not prove to be the greatest match cricket has ever seen.

Perhaps I am guilty of talking things up a little. The advance ticket sales suggest I may even be guilty of talking things up more than a little. Following three days of medium-to-low calibre action at Lord’s, and with the West Indian captain essentially proclaiming that he would rather be doing something else somewhere else than spending a long weekend standing outside in the north of England in the middle of May, the cricketing public is showing little appetite for this game. In fact, it is pushing this game around its plate. It may nibble the odd morsel, but it is clearly watching its weight and saving itself for a far more satisfying main course – Ashes pie.

The first Test was an unsatisfying match, despite its nail-biting denouement. Admittedly, it was only nail-biting for the friend with whom I watched the evening session of day 3 – he had tickets for day 4, and would have missed out on his refund if the West Indies had resisted until stumps. The tension in his wallet was unbearable.

England played well enough, but the startling ineptitude of their opponents in the field and with the bat renders judgement largely irrelevant. If the Australians are not quite quaking in their boots, it is at least partially because the Ashes remain sufficiently far away that they have not yet put their boots on.

Here, then, are the official Confectionery Stall Conclusions To Be Drawn From The First Test:

• England’s main concern will be about Ravi Bopara. He is clearly a good player, and, on the evidence of his last two Test innings, a lucky one. However, questions must be asked about his temperament under pressure. He had a chance to carve himself a unique place in the history books – he could have been the 700th player to be out in the 90s in Test matches. No-one could ever have taken that away from him. Instead, he played himself calmly to a century, the 3281st century in Tests, yet another name on an overfilled honours board. He had the chance to make his mark by throwing his innings away to any one of the 20 balls he faced after passing 90 before reaching three figures. And he blew it.
• Graham Onions, after perhaps the most inept two-ball start to a Test career (100% bowled out by a full toss, then a long-hop demolished to the boundary), showed himself to be a decent bowler, and his giddy enthusiasm was magnificent to see. He prompted some slightly overexcited comparisons to Glenn McGrath. Other than a good action and a propensity for skittling teams out in Lord’s Tests, this may be a little premature. Onions’ first-class economy rate is 3.7, compared to McGrath’s 2.5. Onions has also thus far shown no capability for unleashing needless barrages of verbal abuse into batsmen’s faces. If he wants to match the Australian’s 563 Test wickets at 21, he will have to work on both of these aspects of his game. The McGrath-style batting is clearly almost there.

  However, the British media clearly do not consider Onions to be a long-term prospect. They blew every conceivable onion-related headline and wordplay at the first available opportunity, rather than pacing themselves over a 70-Test career. Already, journalists and sub-editors will be rifling through their recipe books trying to find more onion-based dishes in case the Gateshead Goliath transpires to be one of England’s greats.

• Tim Bresnan will never be a Test cricketer. Unless he stops (a) being given out lbw when the ball was not even contemplating hitting the stumps, and (b) not having to bowl very much.
• Those wickets in the West Indies really did flatter the batsmen and insult the bowlers. A boring five-day Test is much, much more boring than a boring three-day Test.
• History will never know whether Chris Gayle would have played better or worse had he arrived more than two days before the game began. He would certainly have played in the same way. Arguably, he would have been stroppier for having had to leave the IPL even sooner. In fact, it is possible that Gayle had too much acclimatisation time. If he had arrived just in time for the toss, he might not have had time to remember that he doesn’t like Test cricket much any more.

On then, to the Riverside, the mostly empty Riverside. During his entertaining to-and-fro with Gayle, Andrew Strauss said: “The important thing is that Test cricket gets the attention it deserves. And that means that people prepare themselves properly for any Test match you play. You don’t want Test cricket to be devalued in any way, shape or form.”

These are noble thoughts, which all Test fans would support. But these words ring a little hollow before a Test at a ludicrous time of year against a team that had not been planning to be involved. Test cricket is the pinnacle of the game, but it is not always treated as such by its authorities. Teams (both home and away) are habitually underprepared, some are depopulated by the tedious political squabbling over the ICL, series are raced through at breakneck speed, and pitches are often designed to provide time-span rather than contest. Test cricket is increasingly often devalued in many ways, shapes and forms.

Gayle’s recent mutterings to the media also proved what a phenomenal entertainer the man is, both on and off the pitch. After encouraging Strauss not to “sleep with Chris on his mind” (sage advice at any time, unless the Chris to whom he was referring was Chris Tavare, who was often prescribed as an insomnia cure by the NHS in the 1980s), Gayle bemoaned how the demands of captaincy force him to go through innumerable onerous tasks. “There’s always something you have to go and do, you know, extra,” said the Kingston Cavalier. “Lunch or dinner, some other thing.” These, of course, are meals of which Gayle would normally steer well clear. He is very much a breakfast, elevenses, teatime nibbles and bedtime snack man. The fact that he is prepared to alter his dietary timetable for the needs of the team is a mark of the man.

England should win this game – they have beaten West Indies in 11 of the past 13 Tests in this country, and it seems unlikely that Gayle’s comments about wanting to give up the captaincy and not being particularly fussed about the future of Test cricket will serve to inspire his troops to follow their captain in a Test match. Let us hope it is a better game than Lord’s, however, and that Captain Chris enjoys it. He might not need Test cricket, but Test cricket needs him.

	Ravi Bopara aside, England's performance today has mirrored their efforts in the Caribbean © Getty Images

Let Battle Commence. Briefly. For a couple of weeks. And then let it commence again two months later. After literally weeks of waiting, England’s Ashes Test summer has begun − nine weeks, two Tests, a one-day series and a Twenty20 World Cup before the actual Ashes. The tension has proved too much for the Lord’s crowd, who have mostly not turned up. Either the cricket-watching public is pacing itself to avoid the risk of burnout in a long and demanding summer schedule, or it looked at the ticket prices, remembered what the weather in England in May is usually like, checked how the credit crunch is going, weighed up the pros and cons of watching Nash bowl to Cook, and decided to feed their families instead.

It seems that England (or at least large parts of the English media) have been building up to this summer’s showdown with their oldest enemy since approximately 13th September 2005. Perhaps they have been focusing so hard on it that they have at times appeared to ignore most other matches, series and tournaments in between, including the 2006-07 rematch in Australia (which, according to the internet, did happen, although for the life of me I cannot recall it, and remain convinced it was a hoax – the alleged 5-0 scoreline seems wildly implausible).

Despite this, England began the penultimate Test before the Ashes with a new-look team, including four players making their home debut, and only two remaining from the XI that played the first four Tests in 2005. England are thus likely to take on Australia with a team largely unencumbered by the scars of that victory. No-one will accuse England of being overprepared come July. (Australia could easily begin the series with only three of the players rumoured to have participated in the 2006-07 whitewash, so the message seems to be that winning the Ashes spells the end of your international career. Be warned, ambitious players. Success will be the seeds of your destruction.)

England badly need to win this microseries against West Indies, and to achieve this, their bowlers must rediscover the elusive feeling of bowling teams out twice. Recent history suggests Lord’s is not the best ground for them to attempt to do this. Pitches have tended towards increasing tedium over the course of a game, frustrating bowlers and spectators, and slightly devaluing the once-rare currency of the heroic rearguard.

As I began writing this blog (at the lunch interval of Day 1), they had made a decent start, and the match seemed to be repeating the pattern of the last three Tests in the Caribbean – a steady but undominant, unexplosive start by England’s batsmen in the face of some fairly low-intensity cricket by West Indies, on a pitch that offers the tantalising prospect of a high-scoring draw.

Chris Gayle chose to put them into bat, for two main reasons. One: why change his successful drawing formula from the Caribbean series? And two: to double his acclimatisation time before having to bat. It’s always nice to stretch your legs after a long flight, and what better way to do so than spending a couple of days standing at slip on the hallowed Lord’s turf? All good travel agents recommend it.

Gayle’s plan now looks in danger of being scuppered by one of his own players. Fidel Edwards, heroically but mostly unrewardedly thunderous for most of the series in West Indies, has just blasted out Cook and Pietersen in two balls, and suddenly the match looks far more interesting. Edwards, one of cricket’s most exciting bowlers, deserves more luck and fairer wickets.

Before those wickets fell, I had been in the process of confidently predicting that Pietersen would smash a brilliant century, based on the premise that his stint in the IPL had, contrary to popular opinion, provided him the perfect preparation for this Test. England’s key batsman appears to have played himself completely out of form, and did little to justify his bulging wage packet. My theory is that Pietersen is seldom more dangerous than when he has a point to prove – and is therefore almost certain to smash a brilliant century. If I may qualify my thesis slightly in the light of recent events, Pietersen is seldom more dangerous than when he has a point to prove, except when he still has a point to prove but has just been out first ball. And I’m sure if he had not been out first ball, or subsequently, he would have scored a brilliant hundred. My point therefore stands.

We will now see if Collingwood’s preparation for the Test – a paid holiday watching the IPL and making some new friends – can set a new template for success. If he scores a hundred, perhaps the ECB will consider forcing all England players to become non-playing members of Indian franchises. In which case, we can confidently look forward to newly stratospheric standards in county cricket as players strive even more desperately for international recognition. (Last-minute update: Collingwood out for 8. Bad news for would-be England cricketers. Hundreds of schoolboys abandon their dreams of playing international cricket. I owe Chris Gayle and his toss-winning decision-making an apology.)

The (revised) Confectionery Stall prediction for the Lord’s Test: Pietersen to bounce back from his first-innings blob with a brilliant, point-proving century.

	Show some consistency Mr Bell. And then some more © Getty Images

This has been a momentous week for English history. The selection of a Test squad that was both surprising and interesting seemed to have been consigned to the bulging dustbin of history when central contracts took hold. England team announcements had mostly become as predictable as the returning officer delivering the results of the latest North Korean elections (at which, incidentally, Darren Pattinson last summer won a seat as MP for Pyongyang West).

On Wednesday, however, coach Andy Flower and his selectorial compadres caught the media – and some of the centrally contracted players – unawares with a novel XII for the Lord’s Test against West Indies. There are two brand new bowlers fresh off the splutteringly inefficient production line of county cricket (Bresnan and Onions), a new No. 3 (Bopara, the first current Kings XI Punjab player to be picked for England in 132 years of Test cricket), and a marked failure to base selection on fading reputation.

This is a no-lose selection for England. Either they will unearth a couple of new gems to hurl at the unsuspecting Australians, or they will be able to recall and unleash a seething, jilted Harmison, Vaughan or Bell, or even a justifiably peeved Hoggard, bent on proving their worth one final time. In fact, the trickiest scenario may be that the new players do adequately in the Tests, and the old players do adequately for their counties, and England enter the Ashes still unsure of their best team.

Well done to the selectors for a choice that is both bold and sensible, and that has added further to the necessary competition for places. In the absence of many world-class performers, it makes sense to select the team with greater flexibility than of late. At times in England’s past, the selectors have given the impression that they would quite like to give WG Grace another crack, for old time’s sake, because there is no substitute for experience, and because they did not want to upset him.

This time, however, they have boldly given youth its chance, whilst sending some strongly worded messages to the excluded. The Confectionery Stall’s mole in the ECB post room intercepted some of these strong-worded messages. Here they are:

Dear Mr Bell
Whilst we appreciated your charmingly naive confusion between ‘a good week’s batting’ and ‘earning your place back after an elongated period of irritating failure’, we would like to reiterate that you have been dropped, and properly dropped. Not merely sent to the corner until you’ve cheered up. You are, clearly, a very good batsman. Please prove it consistently and numerically over the next two months. And then keep proving it.
PS: Moving your front foot fully forward might help.

Dear Sir Michael

We want to pick you. The public wants us to pick you. Cricket wants us to pick you. Even the Australians want us to pick you. We all want to see that cover drive a few more times before it retires. You scoring a series-winning century at The Oval in August would be one of the greatest stories in sport history. The only thing that doesn’t want us to pick you are the cold hard statistics. And they are arguing their case loudly and annoyingly. If you could find a way of winning them round, we would be most grateful.

Dear Mr Harmison

Please find enclosed one official ECB time-machine. It has been set to travel back to early 2004. Please get in it, do some bowling, then set it to return you to Cardiff on July 8. Please. Please.

Dear Owais

Call us when you get home. Something’s come up. Bad time to take a paid holiday.

And, finally:

Dear Mr Zaltzman

Thank you for your application to fill the vacant No. 3 spot in the England batting line-up. We regret to inform you that you have been unsuccessful on this occasion.

After careful consideration, we concluded that your CV demonstrated that you lack the required experience for this highly specialised role. The job of batting first-wicket down in Test cricket essentially requires that the successful applicant be very good at batting, and you fall markedly short of the necessary standard in this regard (notwithstanding your outstanding century for Penshurst Park against Chiddingstone in a Sunday village friendly in 1997, as described in painstaking single-by-single detail in your covering letter).

We also noted your congenital fear of fast-moving hard round red objects, and, whilst we acknowledge that this has been assessed by your doctor to be a psychological condition dating from early childhood, we are nevertheless concerned that it would detract from the England team’s performance in the field.

Additionally, we felt that your claim to be ‘a dangerous partnership-breaking occasional wrist spinner’ in your spare time was a bare-faced lie, and our research has revealed that every single wicket you have ever taken has been due to either luck or criminally negligent batsmanship.

Furthermore, your two referees, whom we contacted, both testified that, given your catastrophic failure to control the audience for 20 minutes at a rowdy Christmas gig at the Comedy Store in Manchester in 2002, you would probably struggle to deal with the intense pressure of five days of Test cricket.

And, finally, having dropped Samit Patel due to his over-enthusiastic girthwork, we feel it would be hypocritical to select you.

We will keep your details on file, and should a similar vacancy arise in the future, please feel free to apply again. In the meantime, we recommend that you attempt to gain some work experience as a first-class cricketer, and cut down on fatty snacks between meals, to assist your future applications.

Regards, G Miller, National Selector.