Too early to say: day two at Lord’s

Stumps: Sri Lanka 140-1. England 575-9

Whatever happens in this test – and England can’t now lose – we need to be careful not to draw too many conclusions.

Both the England cricket team and its supporter base remain in the grip of a nuclear winter – the aftermath of the twin atomic detonations of a 5-0 Ashes catastrophe and the sacking of Kevin Pietersen.

Roughy speaking, fans are divided into three attitudinal groups, whose feelings are best summarised thus:

– Move on, move on. This is an exiting new era, so let’s get behind our boys 100%.

– We’re battered, bruised, and distrustful, but this is still our team and we should look for positives.

– We’ve been betrayed and disenfranchised and hope the Cook/Downton axis collapses through on-field failure.

So febrile is at the atmosphere that spectators and pundits from all points of the spectrum will be tempted to seize on any detail from this test as evidence in support of the pattern or tendency they wish to prevail.

I think we should try to resist doing so.

Realistically we won’t know until the end of next year’s Ashes whether this rebuilding job, Peter Moores’s influence, and the efforts to reboot Cook’s captaincy, have been successful.

For the first few matches at least, England’s performances will be determined by the form both of individual players and the opposition. The influence of Moores, and also Cook –  if he’s actually exerting any – will take months to filter through to the middle. KP’s absence in the middle may be felt more quickly, but the alleged benefits of his banishment from the dressing room are hardly likely to effect an overnight transformation.

So all in all, let’s not confuse the micro for the macro.

The first two days of this test have followed the traditional narrative arcs of England v Sri Lanka at Lord’s in early season: the hosts have made good runs, but then struggled to take twenty wickets.

Sri Lanka’s bowling isn’t very good. That’s not England’s fault, and it doesn’t devalue their runs, but a total of 575-9 in this context tells you little about their prospects against relentlessly hostile and accurate bowling under pressure.

What it does tell you is that Joe Root and Matt “telltale” Prior have recovered mentally from their recent travails. I’m not saying Root’s double century wasn’t significant and notable in its own right – of course it was – but you can read better analyses of his innings elsewhere. What he did underscore, though, is a priceless ability to re-start an innings on a second morning and plough on – in fact, nearly doubling his total. Few Englishmen are good at that.

Equally, if England had failed with the bat, bad luck, debutant nerves, and inexperience, would have been the fairest explanations.

Neither will this match tell us everything about the bowling, which at any rate in Australia performed much more creditably than the batting. Our bowling is not in a crisis, and our opening bowlers are the same as before, but as in this match they have major scoreboard pressure to work with, for the first time in at least two years, they are in an easier – and therefore less instructive – position.

The exception comes with Jordan and Plunkett – today promises to be quite a slog, and how they approach it will reveal aspects of their characters and skills.

Changing tack – I couldn’t finish without flagging up this bizarre piece of Alastair Cook hagiography from Derek Pringle. According to the Telegraph’s cricket correspondent, Cook – who to me seems an insipid weasel – deserves to be skipper on the basis that (a) he is privately educated and (b) his, er, sex appeal.

“Leaders come in all shapes and sizes but being tall and handsome (one female TV reporter was seen swooning shortly after interviewing him when he first became captain), he certainly wins nature’s vote as an alpha male. 

“One criticism that has stung is that Cook is soft, a perception perhaps given by his doe-eyed and occasionally faltering performances in press conferences. Such a claim is nonsense and quite apart from him leaving home at a young age to go to boarding school, a process that breaks many, you don’t score over 8,000 Test runs at 46 by being a pushover”

As TFT contributor Tregaskis put it – I think he’s in love.