The Indian Premier League is a brilliant thing – but is killing Test cricket

T his is not the beginning. Well, it is. Although, it never really feels like it. The County Championship eased into gear this week in a way that always seems startling, that for all its buds of life, always feels a bit like death.

Here it comes now out of the half-yearly gloom, that familiar tableau of white on mulchy green, the long spring shadows, with a sense from Old Trafford to Cardiff to Chester-Le-Street of something happening just below the daily noise, of scorecards to pore over, skittish runs, gallows humour, newspaper shots of triple-sweatered shapes against clanky steel and plastic stands.

This is nothing new. Everyone knows county cricket turned into a Larkin poem some time ago; all shadows, meadows, carved choirs, and that sense of a very English kind of dwindling, cut through with throbs of vibrant life. Yorkshire are in turmoil. Yorkshire are on the verge of liquidation. But Yorkshire are also 283 for three and a 20-year-old from York is flipping gliding and skimming the ball around Headingley in the April sun because life will still continue to happen.

Talking of which, on the same day Somerset versus Warwickshire was being washed out without a ball bowled (damp outfield) something else was happening 5,000 miles away. There has never been anything in cricket quite like an IPL daytime match. Kolkata Knight Riders versus Royal Challengers Bangalore was the ninth game of 74 at this year’s expanded tournament, just another note in the schedule. In the event it was one of those occasions that just seems to drip with event glamour, colours bleeding into one another, the air thick with a constant static.

Early on David Willey floated a pitch-kissing in-nipper on to Venkatesh Iyer’s middle stump and then