Cricket is full of sacred things: WG's beard, Henry Blofeld's bow-tie, Bob Willis's death stare ... and the Lord's honours board. But for how much longer? A stat emerged in the media centre yesterday which the Spin's small battalion of researchers under the stairs is trying to verify at this very moment and which bears tentative repetition here: six draws in a row at Lord's equals what is believed to be the record for a single venue, previously held by the National Stadium in Karachi between 1969 and 1978.
It's a dubious kind of history (think most consecutive piss-ups in a brewery or most delayed trains on the trot on the Jubilee Line). Yet, on what may be the flattest pitch possible on a damp island in the north Atlantic, a diligent man still etches Lord's centurions into eternity as if they have just conquered Carthage rather than blocked the hell out of it for two days against an attack that may have wondered whether it really was all that wise to enforce the follow-on.
This is not to denigrate the South African batsmen, who have the guts of the New Zealanders plus a lot more skill and who lived up to their pre-series form in the second innings after their team had played like "tourists" (the words of their coach, not this column's) for the first half of the game. Neither is it to slag off the England attack, which has traditionally failed to take 20 wickets on flat tracks because it doesn't do leggies or more than a handful of genuine quicks.
One or two may dredge up the schoolmasterly line about Test cricket being so-called because it's a, er, test - so you'd better get used to taking your wickets on a strip of concrete, sonny. But anyone who snoozed through the worthy efforts of Graeme Smith, Neil McKenzie and Hashim Amla on Sunday and Monday - and even those who stayed awake - must surely be wondering: aren't we in danger of losing something special here?
In the 1970s, English batsmen hit eight Test hundreds at Lord's. In the 1980s, they made 12; in the 1990s, 10; and in the 2000s, a whopping 32, with Sri Lanka and Australia next year still to come. The Brian Johnston Film Theatre at the back of the Lord's museum contains a replica honours board and hosts press conferences on match days. As we were waiting to record our gems on Thursday evening, a South African journalist almost choked as he surveyed the records. "How many did England score against West Indies last year?" The answer was 837 for 13, with five individual centuries, one more than visiting batsmen to Lord's managed in the whole of the 1960s alone.
Part of the transformation can be attributed to Duncan Fletcher, who recognised when he took over in late 1999 that Lord's inspired others and oppressed England, and whose technical expertise turned a side that had hit three Lord's hundreds between 1992 and 1999 into one that knew how to construct innings.
If you think that's giving Fletcher too much credit, then consider this: visiting sides have been outscored by more than two hundreds to one at Lord's in the 2000s - and only some of that can be ascribed to the fact that the Lord's Test is generally the first of a series, when tourists are most at risk of being undercooked. It's no surprise that Smith, McKenzie and Amla all settled in second time round rather than first: once Ashwell Prince had shown them that the first innings was all in the mind, a side as technically adept as the South Africans was more likely than not to survive (The Spin is not being retrospective here: it proclaimed with indecent volume an hour into Sunday morning that the game was destined for a draw.)
So, until the Lord's groundsman Mick Hunt and the MCC contrive to inject a bit more life into a pitch we still love enough to call "HQ" without blushing, perhaps we need a reassessment of a board that is honouring fewer bowlers now than it did 40 years ago and far more batsmen. How about changing the criteria to 150 and four wickets? You'd spare time, chisels, wood - and the dangerous assumption than when Andrew Flintoff returns on Friday, everything will be rosy again.
Extract taken from the Spin, theguardian.com/sport's weekly take on the world of cricket.
