47 for 5 to 346 for 7, or, Draco can bat

I don't know if I've sparked anyone's curiosity about cricket, but if you have even the faintest interest, the Test match between England and Pakistan that's going on right now at Lord's, here in London, is about as good as it gets.

Today's play was just astonishing: in the first 15 minutes, Pakistani bowler Mohammad Amir ripped through England's batting line-up, taking four wickets in eight balls without allowing any runs.  England had scored 47 runs and lost five wickets.  To baseball fans, 47 runs sounds like a lot.  But in cricket, when many matches have at least one player who scores 100 runs by himself, 47 runs is practically nothing.

At this point, I predicted that England would struggle to get to 80 runs.

They promptly went on to get to 346, with three wickets still to go.  To put this into perspective, at 11:30 this morning, it looked as if Pakistan would roll to victory in this match, possibly by Sunday evening.  By the time play ended, the chances of England losing are minimal, with victory very much theirs for the taking.

And that captures what I love about Test cricket: the possibility that, until the very end of the game, either team can win.  In most sports, when you have a big lead, you can just run out the clock.  In Test cricket, you can't win that way.  You need to bowl out the opposition (twice, in fact), and until you do that, they still have a chance to win, no matter how slim.  Today, England took full advantage of that chance.  Still a long way to go, of course, but if you were following today's action, you may have witnessed one of the greatest reversals in Test history.  Not quite Headingley in 1981, but not far off.

England's really hero of the day (Jonathan Trott's stubbornness at the crease notwithstanding) was Stuart Broad, who struck his first first Test century.  Batting in the ninth spot in the line-up (i.e. way down), Broad came to the crease just after lunch with England at a precarious position: 102 runs on the board with 7 wickets down.  He was still there at the end of the day, having scored 125 runs, 49 more than his previous best.  He's a bowler, first and foremost, but there's always been talk of his batting potential.  Today, that potential was fulfilled, and under the most pressure imaginable.  Call it heresy, but I've got a feeling he's going to end up a better allrounder than Andrew Flintoff. 

So if you've got some spare time tomorrow, give a listen to Test Match Special online.  Even if you can't really follow the details of the match, the commentary is charming and you'll get a sense of the flow of the game.  Also, a great collection of English accents, from the plummy Henry Blofeld to Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott.  Seriously, give it a try - this is the time.

Update: Jonathan Agnew got it exactly right in his column on today's play: "But days like this can only happen in one sport, and the 26,000 or so here will never forget it."