I had to reach my allotted span (indeed, pass it by a year or two: I’m now well into the years of labour and sorrow) before I discovered the great human drama that is test cricket (and above all, that is Ashes cricket). Not county cricket, or one day cricket or 20-20 cricket (smash bang wallop, as Sir Geoffrey Boycott contemptuously called it the other day), but test cricket, especially as explained to those of us whose technical knowledge and experience of cricket as a game is as limited as mine is, by that great triumph of modern programming (one of the few things worth possessing a DAB radio for; it’s the only way you will hear it) Test Match Special or TMS (blest vocables). The trick is to watch the cricket on Sky with the volume muted, and on your earphones listen to TMS, which will describe to you, with learning and humour, what it is that you are watching and instruct you in a great deal more besides. Test cricket, it now seems to me — as a mirror of the drama of human life; of its uncertainties; its failures; its triumphs; its moral quandaries; the way it can call forth exceptional achievements when they are needed, not for self-glorification, but for the common good, the needs of the team (Bell’s three centuries); the understanding a Test match slowly engenders that nothing can be achieved without imagination, courage and persistence and that we have always to be prepared for defeat and failure — Test cricket approaches the profundities otherwise attained only by great literature, even, at times, by religion itself. Its afficionados are seized by the dramatic nature of this endlessly complex and poetic game as much as a Wagner devotee in the throes of a full Ring cycle. Great cricket writing is full of poetry and passion. Consider the following lyrical, almost numinous, passage, by Jim White, in Wednesday’s Telegraph: