Tired of forecasts? Me too. The Ashes phoney war of 2009 hasn’t been quite as protracted as four years ago, when it perforce spread the length of two one-day series, but it already seems long enough, and to have done little more than repeat an obvious truth: here are two workmanlike cricket teams without much to separate them.

Some other obvious truths warrant elucidation too. For one thing, don’t expect a repeat of 2005, that unforgettable mixture of drama, thriller and panto, with England playing Jack to Australia’s giant on a five-Test beanstalk. Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist, Ponting: their failing to keep the Ashes proved even more compelling than their obtaining them, because it ran so much against the long-established grain.  This Australian team lacks the pre-existing personalities.

There can be no repeat of the sense four years ago of nationwide involvement in this Ashes series either. How it advanced cricket in England four years ago that anyone and everyone could watch the sphincter-tightening final morning of the Edgbaston Test. Today, into the fourth year of BSkyB’s control of broadcast rights, in a country where the venue of the First Test holds just 16,000, cricket seems actually to have narrowed the niche it occupies in national life. If Sherlock Holmes were to investigate, the result might be called ‘The Adventure of the Disappearing Game’.

Yet let’s not be too downbeat. Five years ago it seemed too much to hope for the Ashes ever being more than a periodic recertification of Australian superiority. Five weeks ago it was almost possible to forget that Test cricket existed, so successfully was Twenty20 hogging the limelight. And the forecasts, the endless cogitation over what ‘might’ be important, what ‘could’ be a factor, is not only a kind of tribute to Test cricket’s myriad varieties and potentialities, but to the idea that it is susceptible to the interrogation of a thoughtful mind, and over the course of a series will genuinely demonstrate which is the better cricket side, rather than merely the better cricket side on the day.

The weather seems full of hope too. It pelted in Cardiff this morning, but the skies this afternoon are full of blue, and the outlook for the five scheduled days is favourable – something not to be taken for granted in South Wales. That forecast may prove more important than anything we journalists have written.