Jonathan Trott today became the eighteenth batsman for England – it is still a little difficult to call him an ‘Englishman’ – to score a hundred on Test debut, and the fourth in his own team, Andrew Strauss, Alastair Cook and Matt Prior having come the same way. At the press conference tonight, Trott also suggested he would be a snug fit with the culture: ‘It’s quite hard to describe now to be honest. I’ll probably have to sit down and think about it and reflect on it…Hopefully there will be a successful result for us and it will be even more special….Obviously the selectors showed huge faith in me and I’m pleased to be able to reward them.’ A ‘to be honest’, a ‘sit down and think about it’, a ‘hopefully’ and an ‘obviously’: why, the man’s a prodigy, already a master of the most mind-deadening maxims in cricket’s lexicon. Fortunately, it was his bat that had earlier done the talking, and most eloquently. If he continues exuding such aplomb at the crease, he is welcome to as many clichés as he likes afterwards.

News Ltd’s Australian representatives here are in panting pursuit of Oval curator Bill Gordon, whom they call an ‘eccentric recluse’, apparently because he won’t speak to them, even if it’s not quite clear what he might gain from doing so. ‘Gordon is likely to stay in hiding as the state of his pitch becomes even more of a talking point with the Ashes on the line,’ they report. ‘He is under heavy fire for producing a controversial pitch where balls were already going through the top of the surface after day one, bringing up explosions of dust and bouncing randomly.’ The hapless groundman is painted as a combination of Howard Hughes and Bert Lock, the Old Trafford retainer who who prepared the pitch in 1956 on which Jim Laker made such mischief. The latter remained eternally thankful to Nasser – Gamal rather than Hussain – for engineering the Suez Crisis, thereby wiping the controversy about his surface from the front pages.

Unfortunately for the media, this looks a little like a story that may answer itself. On the ‘controversial pitch’ today, almost 400 runs were scored. The odd ball kept low – Peter Siddle gave Matt Prior an amiable smile after one bounced twice on the way to the keeper after lunch. But nothing stayed down on the line of the stumps, and while clearly dusting up, the surface has not cracked. It’s what players sometimes call a ‘one brings three’ pitch, insofar as batsmen are most vulnerable on coming in, but time spent in the middle is repaid. Players, in fact, have so far shied even from criticism, let alone condemnation. So why are we in the press so paranoid about pitches that do other than play straight up and down, and at even heights? Bowlers complain that cricket administrators are always batsmen. Might be time for journalists to fess up. Are we impartial arbiters of the game, or just batsmen in disguise?