Cricket needs to grow, but is this really a price worth paying?

Let us commend, therefore, the players who have given us so spirited a series, whichever way it falls. Five draining matches in seven weeks brings to mind that old beer ad about quarts and pint pots. Little wonder the mercury is rising.

On the second day of this final Test two adversaries even enacted a tribute to the late, great Tom Lehrer. His National Brotherhood Week, no less, “where Akash Deep and Ben Duckett go dancing cheek to cheek”. What sauce!

To Deep, the spoils. He enjoyed that frisky pas-de-deux rather more than a grumpy Duckett, and greedily exploited the helpful conditions. Had the previous four matches been played on so sporting a surface the balance of bat and ball would have been more finely calibrated, and the character of this series would have been different. An outcome of two wins apiece would be just. Victory would flatter England.

Yet the five-day goose, however plump, cannot lay golden eggs for ever. This Test was one that Ben Stokes missed. And Jofra Archer. And Jasprit Bumrah. And Rishabh Pant. They all had reasons not to join their pals, except perhaps Archer, who must be handled as carefully as a Meissen teapot, but still. Then there is the sad case of Chris Woakes and his dislocated shoulder. He may never again play Test cricket.

The cumulative effects of wear and tear means that key players will increasingly be unavailable for games that truly matter, and Test cricket will lose value. There is a direct line between this Hundred obsession and Stokes’s absence. Is it a price worth paying?

Undoubtedly, says the king in his counting house. The spondulicks that mock-cricket brings in will enable the counties to pay off all debts and, properly invested, help to produce cricketers of both sexes, who may in time furnish the national teams. In the inelegant language favoured by people who run top-level sport the money will “grow” the game.

And the game needs to grow. No fewer than eight members of the England team at the Oval attended private schools, even if two of them, Joe Root and Harry Brook, received sixth-form scholarships to Worksop College and Sedbergh.

There will be more endowments of that kind, because private schools have the means and, more important, the facilities. So the process becomes self-perpetuating, as it does in so many other aspects of education, and cricket becomes a sport for the children of the comfortably off. Or so it is perceived.

The absence of Stokes and Archer was a boon for Surrey, who supplied four players: Ollie Pope, Jamie Smith, Gus Atkinson and Jamie Overton. There are plenty of cricket-playing schools in Surrey, of course, and a tradition of good club cricket. But they deserve praise, because they continue to find and develop talented young men. “Ich dien” is the club motto: I serve. And they do.

Pope led England on his home ground, and Atkinson returned to spark up the bowling attack. He may look like a dreamer, who spends his idle hours in an attic, writing sonnets to the moon, but he’s a handful with a ball in his mitt, and five first-innings wickets (and the direct hit that ran out Shubman Gill) was a fair reward.

After missing the first four matches with a hamstring injury he needed a trot, and he has justified his recall, bowling at a decent lick, and obliging the batsmen to play. He had to think for two, as well, and sometimes three. Overton’s selection has looked as puzzling in flesh as it did on paper, and Josh Tongue found it difficult to land the ball on the cut bit. When he did he discovered what a little movement can do-oo-oo.

Should England fail to win this match they will reflect on the hectic events of the second afternoon at the Oval. After Duckett and Zak Crawley had put on 92 for the first wicket, walloping along at seven runs an over, they threw away the advantage with a glad hand. Well though the Indians bowled, a score of 247 was small beer.

The sun never sets on Crawley’s promise, and so long as “Uncle Bobby” sits in judgment he will always receive the (Robert) Key to the Highway. His innings of 64 told us nothing we have not known since Trafalgar: he is a lovely driver of the ball when the mood suits. But 64 runs, however finely chiselled, win few matches, and we have been told countless times that when this chap gets in he wins matches.

England’s fevered batting was put into some kind of perspective by Deep, who observed the nightwatch as carefully as any of the Dutch militiamen who caught Rembrandt’s eye. Toil as they did, the bowlers could not prevent the fast bowler from reaching an important half-century, greatly enjoyed by hooting team-mates on the dressing-room balcony after.

Cheerful runs for tailenders always buck up spirits, and there were 66 before he was out 10 minutes before lunch. He ought to have gone 46 runs earlier but Crawley, diving to his left at third slip, had buttered his fingers, and Tongue was a disappointed bowler. Catches tend to win the matches more frequently than expansive cover drives.

As the players withdraw, and leave the stage bare, we should say well done to the Oval. All things considered – pitch, facilities, atmosphere, and that funny thing called history – it is the best ground in England, and it always puts on a good Test. The Oval is a stadium. That much is clear. It also remains a cricket ground, and as the home of Surrey it’s a significant part of south London social history.

Now for The Hundred, and its colourful cast of troubadours. The players will mouth perfumed banalities, to keep their paymasters happy, and commentators who know full well the stuff they are paid to peddle is muck will try to persuade us that three threes make 10. The wheels of necessity go round and round, and the fragmentation of summer continues apace.

Rejoice! August for the people! As a cricket-loving poet wrote in a different context, all we can hope to leave them now is money.