Concrete Pencil: A rum day for test cricket

There are those who say cricket is endless, tedious, bereft of incident and an inexplicable waste of time. And there are others who think that is precisely the point of it. It's what annual leave was made for.

Men are very good at inventing ways to bumble around outdoors to some intrinsically pointless end.

That's not to say women can't or don't enjoy cricket, but they wouldn't have come up with it if left to their own devices. What would be the point, they would reasonably ask, of 22 of us standing about in a field whacking a ball about, occasionally catching it and occasionally shouting loudly at that other woman who is wearing everybody else's jumpers.

Too practical for that, the ladies.

But men, in being very serious about their leisure, have managed to legitimise loafing to a quite extraordinary degree. And that loafing reaches its peak in the five-day game, which is perhaps my gender's greatest gift to the world.

On the minus side of the balance sheet: war, climate change, the whole money thing, anger, rage, the Scottish pony-tailed tosspot from Coast. On the plus side: Test cricket.

What's more, in other leisure tasks men normally conspire to make the loafing unpleasant by taking it seriously in some way - by really hating opposing supporters, say, or by cheating and whatnot.

That sort of thing though, in that wonderful phrase, is just not cricket.

Which is why it's such a shame when non-cricketness creeps into the game.

I was in Cardiff for one day (I didn't watch it all from bed), and some of the England fans were a bit, well, rude.

Don't get me wrong, leisure wouldn't be leisure without the old banter-ometer flickering over the red line. Wanting to see Australia lose is part and parcel of an Ashes summer. And with just a hint of niceness, it's a very funny thing to sing "get your s*** stars, off our flag". But these blokes, they were angry. Hostile even.

Steady on, old boy. If you can't watch your team be bettered for five days and not still really enjoy every ball then you are watching the wrong sport, sport.

And that wasn't the only uncricketness on show. This business of sending the man out with the water to run down the clock. It's a sort of thing a footballer would do, no? Rum. Quite rum.

OK - I'm sure someone more expert in the game than me could point to instances when Ricky Ponting and Australia have done something the same or worse - but that's not the point. The little hairy big-eared one was right to say England weren't acting in the spirit of the game.

So the sooner we can get back to the strolling about and the clapping, the better.
It's better than work - and pretty much everything else.

See also mirror.co.uk/dan-bourke