While few Australians look like recalling this Edgbaston Test with much pleasure, four who might obtain a slight degree of satisfaction will be Australia’s selectors. For much of this tour, wise judges have deplored a squad containing as many specialist keepers as openers. Within two hours on the first day, both strategies were if not vindicated at least proven defensible.

The presence of a second keeper on tour is today seen as analogous to wearing belt and braces – a needless precaution. The reasoning goes that a replacement stumper is only ever an air ticket away. Until the matter transference beam of Star Trek becomes reality, however, injuries like Brad Haddin’s will require the presence of understudies like Graham Manou. One tick for the selectors – or what Cricket Australia, in these corporatist days, calls the NSP (National Selection Panel).

The other, more qualified, tick, was the replacement of Phillip Hughes by Shane Watson at the top of the order, who ended up Australia’s top scorer at number one – you’d have obtained good odds on that a week ago.

Watson’s name on the team sheet for the touring party a few months ago was asterixed ‘subject to fitness’. It hardly needed saying; his entire career has been shadowed by the same caveat. Had he been a player even twenty years ago, it’s doubtful he would have made it this far. There would not have been the medical resources and/or professional rewards available to maintain his involvement in the game. Even now, there’s a sense that he’s been persevered with as a pet project, that too much has been invested with him in order for it simply to be written off. Better players have had poorer deals.

The ratio of downtime to playing time has also left its mark on his cricket. His autograph is a rather painstaking imprint which dwells on the Ss in his Christian and surnames, suggesting something he has sweated over at length. Likewise his cricket. You sometimes sense when he is bowling that he has been given too much to remember; that, as he returns to his mark, he is ticking off a mental checklist. Nonetheless, he has always looked a gifted and natural striker with a touch of Virender Sehwag’s ‘see ball, hit ball’ philosophy.

Which is not to say that Watson has ever looked the stuff of which opening batsmen are routinely made. In fact, the decision to leave Hughes out looks very much like one taken in Australia rather than at Edgbaston, reflecting the change in the process of Australian tour selection over the last decade or so.

When Mark Taylor led the Australians in 1997, he was one of the selectors, alongside vice-captain Steve Waugh and coach Geoff Marsh – a none-too-happy triangle given the tensions over Taylor’s form. Two years later at Antigua, with Australia unexpectedly trailing 1-2, it was Steve Waugh in the hot seat with Marsh and their then out-of-form vice-captain Shane Warne in the ejector seat – an arrangement even more tense, requiring the co-opting for Warne’s omission of selector Allan Border, who happened to be on the scene chaperoning a group of tourists.

By 2001, the coach, then John Buchanan, had lost his vote, and captain and vice-captain were liaising with the chairman of selectors, then Trevor Hohns, back in Australia, although that still left Waugh with the unpleasant task of effectively ending Michael Slater’s Test career. The system since has been for Australian teams abroad to be accompanied by a duty selector, who consults with captain and coach, but reaches his own conclusions with colleagues in Australia.

That has some curious consequences, in that captain and coach are quizzed about selections on tour when they are involved only in a consultative capacity, the members of the NSP being the only figures who vote. Thus, one suspects, unintentionally misleading messages from Ponting and Neilsen this last week.

In his column for Australian readers on 25 July, Ponting spoke glowingly of Hughes and his immediate prospects: ‘There is a big challenge ahead of him, but he is a young kid who is willing to learn and to try different things. In view of the talent he’s got, and the hunger he has for runs, I feel that he only needs half an hour in the middle and everything will click back into place.’

Nielsen’s last tour blog post, dated 30 July, gives no hint of a change of policy; on the contrary, it advocates continuity: ‘I believe he [Hughes] must refrain from drastically changing his technique or the way he goes about playing, rather ensure he does that things that he knows he can do well for as long as required…I believe it’s important that he goes back to those things he’s had success with in the past, plays with a positive mindset and body language and displays a real hunger for the challenge being thrown at him in this series.’

No sense from Ponting that he lacked confidence Hughes could withstand half an hour in the middle, or that Hughes would be practicing his positive mindset and body language in the nets, presumably working on his front-foot aura. Jamie Cox’s view as duty selector, however, must have proven more persuasive, and Nielsen’s press comments after day one – ‘He does need to go away and work at his game’ – smacked of a subtle act of selectorial ventriloquism.

Unfortunately for Australia, the selectors are having a better match than their team. Once perished Hussey – the subject of my Times column tomorrow – dominoes have shown more resistance than Australia’s middle order. Haddin’s exuberant strokes were sorely missed, even if Manou claimed a catch he would on current form have floored. Australians thinking of Birmingham as a dingy town must now be thinking the dingier the better.

Teams warmed up twice at Edgbaston today, once in the morning, then in the afternoon, by which time they should have been red hot – Brad Haddin, in fact, was overcooked. An international cricketer for almost a decade, he has waited long for a prolonged opportunity at the top, and seen off some classy rivals: Wade Seccombe, Darren Berry, Ryan Campbell. Much like Wally Grout, who chose to play through his first series with a broken finger rather than let anyone else squeeze past, Haddin soldiered on through his first four Tests in the West Indies last year in considerable discomfort from a fractured ring finger in his right hand. He might well have ignored this suspected fracture in the corresponding finger of his other hand and played as a batsman here – he is Australia’s highest scorer this summer, and the fastest accumulator in their top seven. But if he is like Adam Gilchrist, who professed to feeling ‘naked’ without the gloves, he would have thought himself half a cricketer. Australia certainly look underdressed without him. If his glovework has been insecure this summer, an international batsman with 57 sixes is a force to be reckoned with.

JB Morton, aka Beachcomber, originated the classic definition of ‘bombshell’ as “the exclusion of the cricketer” from a team. Except that the bombshell of the omission of Phillip Hughes from the Australian team detonated prematurely last night when the cricketer texted family and friends at home, perhaps including the publican of the Nambucca Hotel, aka Bonzer’s, where his local fan club have gathered to cheer him on. Word got out, as it’s inclined to; Hughes confirmed the worst when he Tweeted at PH408 at about 7.30am: “Disappointed not to be on the field with the lads today, will be supporting the guys, it’s a BIG test match 4 us. Thanks 4 all the support!” Given that Hughes has 1257 Twitter followers (only followers? Twits, surely), the secret that Shane Watson would be making his return to the colours as an opening batsman became hard to keep.

Recriminations are bound to follow. Remember the good old days when Australian cricketers only texted in relation to potential sexual assignations? As for Twitter, it’s best left to Bumble. In the meantime, it looks a curious decision for all sorts of reasons. Australia’s selection panel contains three distinguished opening batsmen (Andrew Hilditch, David Boon and Jamie Cox) and they are choosing an opening pair of one reconfigured middle-order batsman (Simon Katich) and an all-rounder with a Test average under 20 from eight Tests over four and a half years.

The inconsistency is obvious. Hughes fell victim to a leg-side strangle and a poor decision at Lord’s; Mitchell Johnson bowled 39 of the most shambolic overs imaginable. Yet it is the latter who has made the cut. Ponting has been talking Hughes up through the last week, arguing that runs were just around the corner for the 21-year-old: “There is a big challenge ahead of him, but he is a young kid who is willing to learn and to try different things. In view of the talent he’s got, and the hunger he has for runs, I feel that he only needs half an hour in the middle and everything will click back into place.” For the sake of half an hour’s settling in, his exclusion now seems a startling sacrifice.

Hughes will bounce back. It can be a tough tour when you lose a previously unquestioned place: just ask Justin Langer. But things can also turn quickly: just ask Justin Langer. It has at least given us something to write about – there may not be much else. We should be thankful for small bombshells.

‘Ashes Countdown, 4 Pages of Previews,’ reads the banner above the fold on the front page of today’s Birmingham Post. ‘Plus Edgbaston Weather.’ From where I sit, the halves of this headline seem on a collision course. When I paused to examine a weather map of Europe just now, England could actually not be seen at all beneath the cloudy pall. And even if the rain remits, the water table beneath Edgbaston will not fall in a hurry. The only cheerful sight at the ground today was a sign reading ‘Caution: Ramps’. But then I remembered that England had picked Ian Bell.

Under the headline ‘Let’s Keep Tests in Brum’, the Post also carries details of a mooted £32 million redevelopment of Edgbaston, increasing its capacity from 21,000 to 25,000 with a rebuilding of the southern side of the arena and the installation of floodlights. Not before time – although any ground would appear dour on a day like today. Edgbaston looks increasingly ramshackle, a drab and motley collection of stands, and a media centre that seats only 80 compared to almost a third more at Lord’s. At Edgbaston, in fact, they still call it the ‘press box’ – an archaism that would be charming were a seat still reserved for that charming Sir Neville Cardus.

The scheme has been resisted, the Post reports, by local ‘campaigners’, including the ‘vocal’ Selly Oak MP Lynn Jones, who complains: “The problem is Warwickshire County Cricket Club has failed to adequately engage in dialogue with residents.” Heaven forfend that Warwickshire should fail to adequately engage in dialogue; it may lead to an insufficiency of satisfactory interface. It sounds like bollocks anyway: as I’ve found it, the ground is simply badly served by public transport. Birmingham, England’s second most populous city, aspires to host the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Yet its cricket ground has palpably failed to keep pace with the legitimate expectations of patrons.

Bleak as it is at the best of times, Edgbaston will probably be bleaker these next few days. It is hard to forsee more than half a Test, which favours England, not just defending a series lead but keeping Andrew Flintoff in cotton wool. The sight of a rainy, windswept cricket ground will not entirely displease Andrew Strauss. For the rest of us, it’s looking like a very long week.

Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains – in Birmingham anyway, whose city centre has been devoured over the last four years by the all-encompassing Bullring, a super concentration of chain store outlets and franchises in which all sense of locality deserts you. From Debenhams and Tesco to Phone4U and Foot Locker, with a starburst of Starbucks, a cluster of Costas, and the inevitable Subways and sub-Subways: Baguette World, Baguette Du Monde, Baguette Delicieux, Baguette Cetera (actually, I made that one up, but it has a nice ring). You could be anywhere in the world. It’s possible that some visitors welcome the distraction from being in Birmingham; I’d never be so unkind.

At the Art Gallery, there is an excellent exhibition of the life and works of Martin Boulton, Enlightenment entrepreneur and industrial revolutionary, sometime associate of James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood, to remind the visitor that Birmingham on his death 200 years ago was a workshop to the world. Today the chief form of employment seems to be standing in the street holding signs pointing to the nearest Subway, the dark satanic sandwich mill of its day.

From Edgbaston, meanwhile, which has hosted 16 draws in its last 20 first-class matches, the news is much the same: another regulation ECB belter, shorn of grass, coloured to a nice tint of straw, interchangeable with every other Test pitch in the country. Steve Rouse has described it as ‘low and slow’, forecast ‘bloody hard work for the bowlers’, and described the resistance of the county’s cricket director Ashley Giles to preparations that might have encouraged the bowlers further. Neither this nor the forecast rain bode well.

Recent evidence is in. How much more interesting was the Lord’s Test on the second day when the pitch, lightly dappled with rain, suddenly started giving the bowlers some assistance? Yet administrators, it seems, would much rather a five-day draw than a three-day shoot-out in which the bowlers hold the upper hand; they would sooner risk resentful boredom than refund. Trouble is that this hardly makes Test matches what is claimed for them: that they are the most complete and thorough examination of the technique and temperament of a cricketer.

If you produce chain store pitches, of uniform quality and character, then don’t be surprised if they breed formulaic and mundane chain store Tests.

Those at a loose end this weekend might be interested in this, the text of the paper I delivered at Oxford, trying to make sense of the brief ‘Cricket and the Media’ – always good for a bit of black humor….

Cricket and the media….the topic has haunted me since Boria suggested it, for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly this – that it’s often hard to think of one without the other. Unless we happen to play cricket at the very highest level, the bulk of the cricket we experience will be mediated, accompanied with a readymade expert narrative; we will recollect it in terms of the voice of the commentators, the words of the writers, the immediate explications of the replays, the lasting imagery of photography, and more recently the competing, clamouring voices of the chat room, the blog and Twitter, each informing and influencing the other. Our conversations about the game are composites of abiding views, received opinions, instant impressions, borrowed prejudices that nonetheless have a capacity to endure.

The best example of that endurance is on show this summer, the Ashes originating in a jeu d’esprit of the Sporting Times 127 years ago. Technology has played its part from the first, too. The first great five-Test series, 1894-95, was partly so because the Pall Mall Gazette’s decision to take advantage of the new telegraphic cable from Australia, allowing the English public to partake of events within a day of their occurring – an extraordinary novelty. Of course, it was originally words that had power. It was on the basis of words that Englishmen dug in to defend Bodyline 77 years ago; on the basis of words that Australians complained of their team being dudded at Old Trafford in 1956. Now it is images that matter, and television’s economics have become cricket’s – cricket must be sold in order to be played.

That changing relationship between cricket and the media, indeed, now puts me in mind of two theatrical images. Once the relationship was that between a ham and his dresser, cricket being costumed and made-up for the stage by a media that maintained fairly obsequious and deferential relations in return for a privileged acquaintance. Now cricket and the media seem more like the front and back halves of a pantomime horse – one, furthermore, where the actual division of responsibilities is unclear: that is, which of cricket and the media is the half that gets to stand up straight and peer out, and which half has to spend its time bent over with its nose in its partners’ backside. Whatever the case, it’s a relationship of some delicacy and mutual dependence.

The relationships between the different parts of the media is also evolving. When I began writing about cricket about 20 years ago, I recall the very decided demarcation between the print and electronic spheres. Ink-stained wretches were crammed together like steerage passengers on the Titanic; the radio and television boys, meanwhile, dressed for dinner in the first-class saloon. There’s now a bloody great tear along the waterline, and everyone’s flooding into one another’s areas. Cricket can be watched on free-to-air television, cable, the internet, the phone. Newspaper and agency websites are running video; cable has invested in the web. Television entrepreneurs have taken to promoting their own independent cricket enterprises; national cricket boards are producing their own online content. Bloggers link to YouTube; intellectual property lawyers run after everyone with a big litigation stick. There’s an air of excitement, leavened with Titanic-style panic, because of a feeling, particularly among my print colleagues, that there may not be quite enough lifeboats.

Media, moreover, spends only part of the time with its eye on the cricket. Much of its exertion is expended reporting on what has already been reported, which way the journalistic herd is stampeding, whether it is to a press conference announcing a sudden outbreak of unity in the Indian team, or to decrypting the enciphered utterances of Fake IPL Player. Lately, too, the commentary box has been swept up directly in the sales and marketing tsunami, with DLF Maximums and Citi Moments of Success bound to lead onto the Google googly, the Play Station Play-and-Miss, the Dillards Dilscoop and the Three 3.

I could discuss many aspects of this, but it’s this increasing coalescence of cricket and media that intrigues me – the sense that, as Eric Morecambe used to say of Ernie Wise’s toupee, ‘You can’t see the join.’ That is, the tendency over time for those involved in the description and interpretation of the game to become simply the handmaidens of corporate interests.

This is not, of course, a new challenge. Perhaps you can date it to 1977, when Kerry Packer launched his World Series Cricket venture. At the time of Packer’s irruption, of course, the coverage of cricket was generally the preserve of public broadcasters, BBC, ABC, Doordashan and others, watching cricket from a suitable discreet distance and stationary aspect.

Packer’s broadcasting package was unprecedentedly lavish and spectacular: it involved both the coverage of the game and its promotion. It made ordinary players into stars, and stars into gods, so the limelight they reflected might also impart a shimmer to the goods and services being advertised between overs.

Commentators went from being impartial imparters of cricket’s eternal verities to commercial courtiers of an entrepreneur promoting the game as a media property. But the key figure in that change was the one who belied that there was a change taking place at all. Richie Benaud was the face of cricket at the BBC, primus inter pares among public broadcasters; to what might at Channel Nine have been a crass and raucous affair, he brought a deft and discriminating touch, an air of rectitude, a sense of being above the fray.

Historians have been apt to celebrate the contributions to Packer’s progress of Ian Chappell and Tony Greig, or Austin Robertson and John Cornell; but Richie Benaud is the man who really made it credible. You bought what he was selling almost before you knew it was for sale; and, as with the best salesmen, the transaction left you feeling enriched.

Benaud had played cricket, we all of us knew, yet his commentary seldom betrayed this directly. The general but unspecific cognisance of his playing career acted instead as a form of quality certification: his was a warming but weightless past. Instead of banging on about how things were better in his day, he endorsed the present and blessed the future; he was the Pangloss of the pitch, who assured us, over and over again, that all was for the best in this best of possible cricket worlds.

Over time, of course, cricket lurched from disaster to disaster: rebel tours, illegal actions, ball tampering, match-fixing, racial squabbles, aggression that trembled on the brink of cheating, commercial chicanery that skirted the bounds of legality. Yet nothing threatened the serene majesty of Benaud’s commentary, as interested and engaged by his hundredth one-day international as by his first. Over the years, one waited for Benaud to take a firm position of any of the game’s major issues, while knowing also that nothing would ever endanger that stance of magisterial disinterest, and that unstated but unswerving commitment to the product.

Benaud still commentates – what purports to be his last summer lies ahead in Australia later this year. But we’re starting to see the strains underlying his position that Benaud’s silky skills so successfully disguised – strains laid entirely bear during the IPL in South Africa, where commentary was reduced to the level of infomercial.

The subtle thrall exerted by the commentary voice, in fact, has been integral to the diffusion of Twenty20. Because so much money rides on its success, there has been a competition in who can praise it and its participants more lavishly – every game is thrilling, every player a star, the whole concept the most exciting innovation since the incandescent lightbulb, and, of course, Lalith Modi a modern-day Moses, to the extent that the commentators have almost drowned themselves out, becoming indistinguishable from the advertisements between overs. But great rewards and honours await those who can endear themselves to the right people.

One of my most vivid recollections of the Twenty20 revolution is the game in Melbourne in February last year between Australia and India – quite possibly the worst international cricket match I have ever seen, over in two hours and 28 overs, India capitulating for 74. Yet afterwards, Channel 9’s finest prowled the outfield for almost as long as Australia batted, interviewing players about the non-stop excitement that nobody had just seen. It was as credible as a Chinese government press release that the tanks in Tianenmen Square were simply participating in a segment of Top Gear. Who did these commentators think they were fooling – apart, obviously, from themselves?

The print media has always occupied a subtly different niche to the electronic. The television is there because cricket is entertainment on the basis of money spent on acquiring rights; newspapers are there because cricket is regarded as news, and enjoy access on a grace and favour basis, while the roles of those who straddle both forms are confused and confusing, like Ian Botham, an aura-for-hire, whether by Sky, the Mirror or Allen Stanford.

But, as I said earlier, the fissuring boundaries between technologies are further collapsing news into entertainment and vice versa, with inevitable implications for what we say in the print media and how freely we can say it.

My trade has always been a mixture of the superficially sensational and squalid and the thoroughly tame and incurious. ‘We do not need censorship of the press,’ noted Chesterton. ‘We have censorship by the press.’ Yet how is it that, in a period of such convulsive change, change that will define the direction of the game for decades to come, there is such limited interest in the relevant institutions: BCCI, ICC, ECB, Cricket Australia, Sony, ESPN? How was it, for example, that Stanford had to go broke before anyone sussed that he was a fraud? Why the rapt fascination with the prices paid for players at the IPL auction, and such indifference to whom else cricket is making hugely wealthier?

I wonder now if we are not avoiding evidences of corruption in cricket, as indeed we did in the 1990s, so heavily implicated have we become in this sporting-industrial complex. I’m not sure I can offer a definitive answer to that here today, and there will certainly always be exceptions – some of them in this room. But I do know that a lot of the toughest, cleverest, funniest and best informed writing about cricket these days is to be found in the blogosphere, where the writers are without fear or favour, and also, of course, money. Alas, number of bloggers accredited by the ECB this summer: zero. Can’t we do better? Avid viewers, curious readers, discriminating consumers – they are out there in vast numbers, and it is up to cricket and the media to deserve them.

KP or not KP: that was a question as this series began, and now it has been answered. On the ground he took by storm four years ago, prancing like Whistlejacket, Kevin Pietersen cut a forlorn figure at Lord’s, hobbling after the ball as would a particularly gouty laird, while his 32 and 44 were a lot of very hard yakka. All the same, he burnishes England’s batting with a sheen of class they would lack without him, and his loss will be felt.

It is hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Pietersen at times. He is a magnet for criticism because his talent is so abundant, and because from this is imputed a messianic self-belief. In fact, Pietersen always sounds a little insecure to me, urgently in need of praise. In his autobiography, Marcus Trescothick described how England in his time encouraged Pietersen ‘to feel there was nothing he could not do’. Trescothick would sit with him as Pietersen waited to bat ‘and talk about the great innings he had played on previous occasions; that he was the only player alive who could play some of the shots he did’.

Five years into his Test career, Pietersen’s replacement Ian Bell has flattered so far only to deceive. The batsmen whom I would have preferred, in complete confidence that no selection so heretical would ever be permitted, is Mark Ramprakash, not only because his Ashes average is 42 versus Bell’s 25, but because he is not such a known quantity to Ponting’s team. A hundred first-class hundreds deserves a final chance for fulfilment; it would get the dancing crowd in too.

Greetings from Oxford, where I’m attending a conference on the history of the International Cricket Council, ably organised by that splendid historian Boria Majumdar, and attended not only by Haroon Lorgat and David Morgan, but also by Bishan Bedi, Clive Lloyd, Sourav Ganguly, Bob Willis, Gus Fraser – historians trying very hard not to be starstruck by the assembly. As I write from a park bench at St Anthony’s College, Giles Clarke stalks the lawn animatedly, running the world via his mobile phone. This, meanwhile, is a piece I have written on the future of the game for Tehelka, whose business editor Shantanu Guha Ray gave a punchy paper today about cricket coverage in the Indian mass media. Warning: it’s really rather depressing…..

The first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, put it best. ‘Yesterday the Ukraine stood poised on the brink of a great abyss,’ he said in his inaugural parliamentary address. ‘Today we have taken a great step forward.’ Thus the state of international cricket, poised to do away with structures a century and more in the making, but rendered helpless to do otherwise by the ineluctable momentums of commerce. Which is not to say that parts of that system aren’t ripe for some creative destruction. But there are aspects of cricket’s new dispensation which lie disconcertingly unexamined, in the excitements of the moment, and the confusions of personal and national ambitions.

Consider one modern lamentation common among traditionalists – of which, I might say, I am generally to be counted. It is: ‘Cricket is run too much like a business.’ This is misconceived. The International Cricket Council looks nothing like the standard organization unit of modern business, the publicly listed corporation. Its shareholders are not dispersed and mainly voiceless; they are concentrated and inclined to vociferous rivalries. It has no power over who sits on its executive board, having to cop whomever is sent by the sovereign national associations that control it; its presidency rotates on a fixed-term basis, and incompetence is no bar to appointment.

The ICC’s biggest and most historic enterprise, Test matches, generates losses for the majority of its shareholders. In return for absorbing these losses, those shareholders receive dividends derived from the ICC’s other commercial properties, including World Cups and Champions Trophies. Over the use of these dividends, the ICC exerts no control, and nobody knows exactly how they are spent, whether they genuinely contribute to the beneficiation of the game, or of certain sticky-fingered individuals.

The shareholders are wracked with their own problems. One, India, provides the lion’s share of the cash, and others are loath to cross it. At least three, meanwhile, are on a Ukraine-style financial brink – Pakistan, Sri Lanka and West Indies. But neither the ICC nor its member boards have any authority over the most lucrative properties so far conceived in global cricket, the ostensibly ‘domestic’ Twenty20 competitions conceived in India: the Indian Premier League and the Champions League. This is despite the players these boards have developed and groomed being the feature that makes those properties work.

I could go on, but you get the picture. You could argue that cricket’s problem is not that it is run too much like a business, but that it isn’t run like a business enough. There are good cultural reasons for this, emanating from the way cricket control boards were originally structured to run domestic first-class competitions, with representation based on the local and regional teams composing them. But even at country level, those arrangements are looking anachronistic. Does anyone really understand how the Board of Control for Cricket in India is elected? Is anyone prepared to swear hand on heart that it is a transparent democratic process in which the ablest candidates are always chosen? Not that an Australian should necessarily point the finger, when Cricket Australia recently overlooked the obvious choice for its own chairmanship, Mark Taylor, in favour of an Adelaide solicitor, Jack Clarke, for the sake of interstate harmony. Jack’s a genial old hearty, but if ever there was a time when a smart ex-player with worldwide respect would have been useful as chairman it is today.

In one respect, however, the traditionalists have it right. Cricket is tightly in the grip of commerce in the sense that it has lost the sense of existing for any other purpose. The priorities of business can be witnessed in the supersaturation point reached by international competition: television demands a constant supply of new, live product, good or not. Turn on your television, flick idly between the Test match here, the IPL game there and the one-day international everywhere, and one sees not competition but content, created simply to be sold to the highest bidder. ‘Sport is business,’ warned Lamar Hunt, progenitor of World Championship Tennis. ‘And business is business.’

This invites an always useful question: cui bono? To whose benefit? The answer has never been straightforward where cricket is concerned. For all that the game’s past provided for the enjoyment of fans, the ambitions of players and the pride of patriots, it also shored up old imperial structures and political prejudices. But there is a sense that the game’s present has become so thoroughly subverted by economic objectives, the interests of broadcasters, advertisers, a group of entrepreneurial administrators and an elite of international players, that the rest of us must accept our lot as simple customers at the end of the assembly line.

What we’re watching, then is akin to a process of privatisation – that is, we are being sold something we thought we owned. The game, which administrators once held in kind of public trust, is becoming a private sector product – the same kind of transfiguration that occurs in the bottling of water. During the Boxing Day Test, I attended a lunch of Cricket Australia where the chief executive, James Sutherland, referred incessantly to me and others like me who love cricket, as ‘cricket consumers’. Is that all we do? We do, bollocks, I thought. It was then that I started thinking about Leonid Kravchuk.

Cricketers are often thought to be ‘making history’ when all they are doing is creating statistics. England’s Lord’s coup d’etat after Australia’s 75-year occupation, however, was genuine history, and the press conferences afterwards were held, suitably, in the theatrette of the Lord’s Museum – with emphasis on the ‘ette’ because that was no room to swing a bat. Ricky Ponting wore whites and his baggy green, a nice touch; Andrews Flintoff and Strauss preferred something a little more corporate casual, with sponsors’ hats prominent. Having not seen Flintoff for four years in such a pose – relaxed in victory mode – it was a reminder both of his physical presence and the acute deference towards him of the English media. Even they, red in tabloid tooth and claw, seemed abashed by his accomplishments in this game, or at least his ability to come up to the mark so soon after announcing that he would shortly be leaving marks behind altogether. Likewise the man of the match adjudicators, who must have swung their votes late away from Strauss despite his being the defining innings of the game.

What was obvious overlooking Lord’s on the last day was how important England’s victory is in the context of a series trying to recapture the glories of 2005 without quite the same talent or star quality available, and with no free-to-air television audience. Already can be heard the ominous rumblings of the oncoming Premier League season. The opportunity in this context to celebrate Flintoff is a tonic for cricket here, and in particular for Test cricket, which the worthies of the Marylebone Cricket Club world cricket committee warned just before the game was in danger of perishing from neglect.

The problem for English cricket, of course, is the lack of a replacement for Flintoff, now known, as it were, to be on his farewell tour. Not merely on the field but off, he will leave a capacious hole. Stuart Broad has as yet neither the cricket smarts nor the capacity to cultivate stubble. It’s hard to believe now, but there will be cricket after the Ashes, and the eventual winner may not be the one best placed for the future.

Three times in this Test, Rudi Koertzen and Billy Doctrove have put their heads together for a decision, with lifetimes of experience behind them, and world-beating technology at their disposal. It has been as futile as a conversation between Vladimir and Estragon, and in each case has led to a complete balls-up. Today’s involved Phillip Hughes, who suffered today perhaps the only fate worse than his first-innings leg-side strangle: a first-slip catch that involved such a degree of doubt that no umpire should really have endorsed it, least of all the same officials who could not decide if Nathan Hauritz had yesterday pouched Ravi Bopara. Never mind Mitchell Johnson: Doctrove has the yips, and Koertzen yips on his yips, having failed also to spot the big Flintoff no-ball that accounted for Katich. I’ve had a pop at Ponting on previous occasions about his truculence where umpires are concerned. I dips me lid to him in this match: he displayed an existential resignation that suited the circumstances.

Others can debate the fairness or otherwise of the catch – and I’m sure will. One comment worth reiterating, which I also made at Cardiff, is that umpiring is influenced by the momentum of the match. Teams on top create more wicket-taking opportunities. They appeal with more confidence, a greater sense of entitlement, and with a home crowd behind them baying for justice must take a heart of stone to deny. Umpires have not the advantage of a hermetically sealed chamber in a secret location in which to pass their judgements – they are human beings susceptible to environmental influences. In Australia 30 months ago, Andrew Strauss was the hunted, Koertzen memorably firing him out twice at Perth. Now he is the hunter. Or at least, he will be until he faces the Australian media at the post-match press conference.

As for the umpires, how an Ashes Test at Lord’s came to be adjudicated by Koertzen, who brought us the fiasco at the conclusion of the 2007 World Cup, and Doctrove, the teflon man of the Oval Test of 2006, is a mystery not even Ajantha Mendis could have conjured.