Testing times

Blossom by blossom, the season changes. So should the headlines. Fat chance. Weird times: roll up, roll up for a Lord’s cricket Test even before the mudlarks of winter have picked the teams for their end-of-term deciders. The hanging-baskets and bunting (and the boaters and blazers) might be in colourful place for the opening overs at Lord’s on Thursday morning, but both soccer and rugby still have an awesome amount of unfinished business. There has not been an earlier Lord’s Test in my lifetime. More than likely, alas, all will be grey and monochrome as an ‘unsettled’ weather system lumpenly sits over Marylebone to make the poor, palely shivering Sri Lankan cricketers unidentifiable under their four-sweater swaths of cream cable-stitch.
Even in a heatwave cricket would not be topping the bill. Not till all the football’s done and that, in 2006, will be on 9 July when the World Cup concludes its business in Berlin. As well as the potential loss of Rooney, the selection of England’s new soccer coach has been a drawn-out mess. I was surprised the FA did not bust the bank to persuade Arsenal’s Wenger to have a go — especially if the mighty ambitious fellow accomplishes the ultimate with his club in Paris on Wednesday week. Unexpected, too, was that Ulsterman O’Neill gave the Brazilian Scolari no sort of run for his money on the shortlist. The three Englishmen so many backed, in truth, never cut the Colman’s at all: each excellent bricks-without-straw blokes in their ways, but with direly parochial CVs; like marathon running these days, Curbishley, Allardyce and McClaren are comparative plodders, back in the rump of the field among the perspiring hoofers and charity jokers; while the seriously fast knot of elite operators daintily stride on ahead without a blister: same distance but a totally different race.