Immediately the destructive and extended spell of pace bowling from Pakistan’s speedsters, Shoaib and Sami produced that brand of excitement that only test match cricket can produce. To hear on a quiet radio that Autralia were 5 down for 70 odd, all wickets falling to the two fast guys, certainly stirred the cockles of anticipation. One could only try one’s hardest to stay on at work for another 3 or 4 hours before dashing home to watch the cricket, forgetting about dinner, and all the demands a disgustingly untidy flat makes. By then the match had reached that beautiful point in the evenings play where tiredness has well and truly set in and things start to lazily float along like a cloud, at any moment you expect the players to lie down on the turf with a beer and start sharing anecdotes and inattentively rolled cigarettes. But the gentle toil continued, Langer lethargically lifted Sami back over his head for six and automatically – as though he was already in some sort of state of recurring dream – pulled almost every other delivery to the leg and laconically walked up the pitch to complete his runs. Dizzy was a rock again for a while, a continuing geological process – Dizzy rocks so much. The Pakistani bowlers pushed on, the field spread wide and everyone just waited for the end of the day and the chance to roll out their happily drowsy anecdotes.

It was delightful. Sami and Shoaib looked great. Inzamam looks absolutely fantastic. Langer is very special. He is now in the top ten list of Australia’s all time run scorers, and has equalled David Boon for number of test centuries. There is something very architectural about his inningses. They are very constructed. He inserts blocks of various styles of play alongside or on top of one another in a very calculated way. Understanding the forces acting on his construction and precisely what is needed to prop its dense mass to prevent collapse and to enable continued building. A period of stoic, scratchy defence, having formed itself into a perfect segment of space will be suddenly adjacent to a segment of outright violent attack – timed and situated so perfectly that the segments become one seamless and spreading tower. I don’t know enough about architecture and the engineering that goes into the construction of monuments – i know that the sydney harbour bridge is based on a round of lemon floating on its edge in a glass of schweppes lemonade and that is a lovely thing to think about – but i can’t say too much more about the inspiration, or the influences that Langer draws on. I need an architectural correspondent, to go with my Geology guy.

It was interesting to watch the Dizzy/Langer partnership. Dizzy being formed out of the natural processes of the ages, contrasting Langers overcoding of the natural forces and his application of very precisely determined rules to direct them into a form – the partnership displayed an intensive variation between the way the two batsmen operate and between the two great strata that form the world. Justin constructs a spectacular monument in only a matter of years while Dizzy’s spectacle is built over aeons.