Is it ungrateful to compare a cricket tour of the West Indies to a dilapidated funfair, to suggest that the cricket on display is the equivalent of empty shopping packets and old ticket stubs fluttering sadly on tangled barbed wire? Surely any Test series is an occasion, especially one spread across the tarnished jewels of the beautiful, poor West Indian islands?

Max Ebrahim, the convenor of Zimbabwe’s cricket selectors, believes his country’s Test status is irrevocable. Given that his livelihood depends on that status, he’d be forgiven for defiant rhetoric, even rhetoric not necessarily based on facts. ”It took New Zealand 45 years before they had their first win,” he told Sapa earlier this week.

If the world were a just place, Wednesday night’s emphatic victory by South Africa would have come as an immense relief to United Cricket Board boss Gerald Majola. Indeed, in a utopian society where merit was rewarded and ineptitude censured, Majola would have trundled down on to the Buffalo Park turf and given Graeme Smith a hug.

A curious thing happened in Bloemfontein on Wednesday night, just as Herschelle Gibbs was caught at short fine leg. Of course it was obscured in the excitement that followed — excitement first created, and then drowned in, by Justin Kemp. But it remained, nagging and only half-recognised, as Kemp preempted the wrong shot (Who’d have thought Darren Gough would bowl a yorker at the death? Fiend!)

Having fought each other to a standstill at the Wanderers, England and South Africa are at it again. Like two prizefighters, too battered to land the final blow but too proud to let their knees buckle, the rivals have reeled into Centurion, leaning forehead to forehead, their eyes swollen shut.

There are nine days of Test cricket left in England’s tour of South Africa, but only bright-eyed optimists and Centurion tourism officials can believe we will see more than six of those days unaffected by rain. Given the meteorological history of the pretty venue south of Pretoria, the fourth Test at the Wanderers is suddenly looking like a soggy decider.

Scorecards, compactly final, insist that cricket matches are singular events. Results imply a beginning, a middle and an end. Match reports enforce closure. Test matches begin (the dailies imply) in order to finish. But the weekly commentator, cut adrift from this headlong rush, has the opportunity to play truant.

The English cricket team’s media entourage has turned the tourists’ loss to South Africa A in Potchefstroom into some sort of cricketing Isandlwana. As flashbulbs popped under the bed this week, the subtexts screamed from between the lines of English broadsheets and websites.

To those who cheered the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) decision to ban the insufferably unsporting Sourav Ganguly for two Tests after his shenanigans with over rates in a one-day game against Pakistan, the inexplicable overturning of that decision before South Africa’s tour was simply more depressing confirmation of the extent to which Indian television money has a chokehold on the game.