For a non-Olympic, although International Olympic Committee (IOC)-recognised, sport, it is probably fair to say that cricket enjoys a disproportionate amount of coverage in our blogs section, for which myself and colleagues David Owen and Philip Barker are largely to blame.

But as has been said before there a few sports like it; which others could last for five days and still end in a draw, for example? With its focus essentially on the individual acts of batting, bowling and fielding within a team environment, the sport contains an almost unique wealth of statistics, averages and anecdotes.

Baseball, from what I am told, is perhaps the only other which comes close to having a similar identity, attracting the same sort of fans in United States, Japan and elsewhere as are so enraptured by cricket across vast swathes of the rest of the English-speaking world.

In recent years there has been a trend toward a shorter more dynamic form of the game, with the arrival of the Twenty20 format showcased at last October’s Asian Games in Incheon. It is this form by which many new fans of the game will be attracted, particularly by the annual Indian Premier League won yesterday by Mumbai Indians, and it is 20-over-a-side cricket which could, perhaps, one day feature on the Olympic stage.

But for purists, five-day Test cricket will always reign supreme, where instead of having a limited number of balls by which to manufacture a score, each side bats twice and has five days to win by bowling out the opposition twice for fewer runs than they have managed.

Action, as it has in the ongoing match this weekend, can explode into life at a lightening pace, with the game set up to allow teams who were seemingly in an unwinnable opposition to claw their way back. Yet at the same time, there are long periods of relatively little action, where the game ebbs and flows at a slow pace as players size each other up and work towards an opening.

Nowhere is this better encapsulated than by cricket on the radio, the main platform for following the sport in Britain for many people since it stopped being broadcast on terrestrial television in 2005. The BBC’s Test Match Special has existed in some form since the 1930s, and its current form since 1957, and many of the same commentators have remained for most of the period since. Listening to it this weekend, you feel almost transported back to a time gone by, where most of the trappings of modern life are either ignored or noiselessly absorbed in, and many of the same conversations took place as could have happened 20, 40 or even 60 years ago.

In no other sports, for instance, could there be a long and vibrant discussion about whether a player’s style reminds the commentators of a certain mid-level country player they remember from the 1970s, only for another pundit to interject with the claim that the player is actually more like one that retired some 30 years before that. Yet that is part and parcel of a standard days commentary, as they meander from one mundane topic to the next, some of which have little to do with the game or even the sport in front of them, with only a cursory mention of the score at infrequent intervals.

In a British world governed by political correctness and modern values, it is somewhat refreshing that some of the commentators on Test Match Special are still going. At one end of the spectrum you have Henry Blofeld, a 75-year-old Old Etonian whose promising schoolboy career was ended when he was hit by a bus when riding a bike, rendering him unconscious for 28 days, and meaning he was subsequently confined to a commentary box rather than a dressing room.

Blessed with the old-fashioned plummy accent that caused our managing director to ask yesterday - not without reason - whether Prince Charles was commentating, an interesting fact about him is that his father, who attended school with the author Ian Fleming, was apparently the inspiration for the James Bond villain, Blofeld.

At the other end there is Geoffrey Boycott, a Yorkshire and England ex-pro who encapsulates an almost extinct working-class identity, both in his accent and blunt forthrightness.

A player famed for his boring and selfish nature, never letting the team’s ambition getting in the way of his aim to improve his batting average, he is famed for criticising those who fail to match the standards he and other players of his day supposedly demonstrated, with his favourite put downs being how his mum “could have caught that in her pinny” or “hit that with a stick of rhubarb”.

Yet he also knows the game like few others and his criticisms are rarely without justification.

Somewhere in the middle there is Jonathan Agnew, the middle-class, middle-brow lead commentator who effortlessly represents the Middle England audience from which cricket’s core fan-base derives. He is best known for an incident during his first summer commentating in 1991 when he joked about how England’s Ian Botham “couldn’t quite get his leg over” when trying to get out the way of the stumps, something that reduced him and his co-commentator to five minutes of senseless guffawing, forcing many listeners to stop their cars because they were laughing too hard to drive.

There were no moments quite like this over the weekend but, having not listened to Test Match Special for months, enough to make me nostalgic about a childhood largely spend listening to it. “Oh I wouldn’t be sure about taking a job with the English Cricket Board,” said Boycott at one point, with stunning bluntness, before outlining his lack of confidence in anyone working there ever receiving a pay cheque. 

England are ahead by a nose-length at this stage, he said, at another point, but there’s still nothing between them. “My nose rather than yours then,” quipped Agnew.

And as England staged a remarkable comeback crowned with victory in the last few moments, it made me think that, as we busy ourselves with all that is complex and concerning about the professional world of sport today - a world that cricket is by no means exempt from - we must be thankful for relics like Test Match Special and five-day cricket which remind us that, in some ways, little has changed.