The revival of Test cricket is a fine thing – but ODIs would like a word

I got a little teary the other night. It’s a really stupid story. You know that famous scene in Coronation Street when Hilda Ogden comes home from the funeral and there’s a parcel of Stan’s belongings on the table, and she opens Stan’s glasses case and suddenly, despite herself, she starts to weep uncontrollably? Well, it was like that, except rather than a dead husband I was mourning an era of English Test cricket. And instead of a pair of glasses, it was an interview with Graeme Swann on the Rig Biz sports comedy podcast.

The bulk of Swann’s interview is not, admittedly, an abundant source of pathos. But among the many anecdotes on Andrew Flintoff’s drinking and Paul Collingwood’s sexual prowess is a segment where Swann recounts his time playing with Kevin Pietersen for England. And for all they achieved together, there is not a great deal of residual affection there. “Me and Kev always hated each other,” Swann remembers. Pietersen is described as “a bit of a dickhead”. This is good content, no notes.

But then Swann starts talking about the 2012 text-message scandal involving Pietersen and Andrew Strauss, and that got me. I can’t explain it. “A bit of a soap opera,” is how Swann described it, and with the benefit of distance it is weirdly poignant to recall how big this silly little tiff seemed at the time. For a week the front pages were consumed with tales of slurs, rumours, crisis summits, YouTube disses. It mattered. I mean, it didn’t matter. But it felt like it did. And to hear it being repackaged as bog-brush banter on a second-rate podcast: on some level, something important has been lost here.

The sacking of Pietersen in 2014 was a genuine national news story. By way of tangent, I tried to recall if the