A man with a sense of metaphor, poetry and even grammar has joined TV's cricket commentators - but can the old pros cope with him?

The fantastic one-day cricket final between England and India at Lord's, when two vibrant teams shared 650 runs and India won with three balls to spare, almost had the pundits throwing aside the aspersions they usually cast at one-day cricket. Almost, but not quite. Most one-day internationals are turgid affairs, went the typical grudging summary, but this one was a bit special.

There remains a deep schism between cricket's professionals - players and commentators - and its fans, who flock boisterously into one-day games while leaving huge spaces at Test matches. The reason is obvious: to most fans, one-day cricket is cricket - the game played at school or on Saturday afternoons. But to the purists, one-day cricket's success in filling stadiums is in itself proof that it is inane.

This is chiefly a protest against vulgar commercialisation, but there is a genuine cricketing mystery here: how come a side that routinely struggles to score 250 in a 90-over day of Test cricket can career past 300 in half that time in the one-day atmosphere? And if an intimidating array of close fielders can restrain batsmen in Test matches, why doesn't it work in 50-over games?

It was tempting, as the ball scorched around Lord's, to wonder how the day might have unfolded had it been the first of five. It was doing a bit early on, as they say, so there would have been lots of exemplary leaving of the bad ball, and a fair amount of playing and missing. Trescothick would have been marooned on 9 for 40 minutes, would then have angled one to fourth slip; Hussain would have been picked up at bat-pad, shaking his head disgustedly as he marched off. Thorpe would probably have calmed things down with an adroit half-century in the late afternoon, as the pitch settled down and batting became easier. England would have ended on 219 for 5. Everyone would have agreed that it was good, tense stuff, all nicely set up for tomorrow.

This being a one-day match, however, Thorpe wasn't playing. England's best batsman of recent years announced that he is retiring from one-day cricket to keep himself fresh for Test matches. It's a sad if understandable decision, a gloss on the hazards of cricket's never-ending season, on which the sun never sets. Richie Benaud admitted, in a recent interview, that he hadn't seen winter for 40 years - his entire adult life has been spent in hemisphere-straddling summer. No one can be surprised if the monotony claims a few victims, though whether one-day cricket is the villain is another matter. The whole point is that it is short and sweet.

Thorpe isn't the only one who's jaded. Many of the commentators, happy though they are with their enviable jobs, sound as though they have a tough job getting out of bed. The England-India final, however, saw the arrival of a very promising new voice, the former opening batsman Navjot Sidhu. New to English airwaves, at least - he is something of a cult figure in India, where fans collect and circulate his spicier improvisations. He couldn't have come along at a better time: cricket's rhetorical level has been flat for a while now, choked by a tired layer of ex-pro jargon that provides an alarming window on to the low-wattage thought processes of previous England dressing rooms. Sidhu arrived at the microphone and proceeded to hit himself out of trouble with a rapid-fire sequence of proverbs and epigrams.

"The fielders have spread like missionaries . . ." he began. "In the orchard of opportunity, you've got to pick the fruit." Nor was it just his figures of speech: he spoke with antique grammatical precision ("He dances well on whom fortune pipes" - when did you last hear a commentator use the word "whom"?) but also with unaffected relish - there was none of the mournful, here-we-go-again cadence we have grown so used to. It helped that his flourishes had an Oriental flavour. "If fate throws you a lemon, make lemonade," he urged. "If fate throws you a date, open your mouth." But he was also willing to be tart. Discussing India's chop-and-change tactics, he observed that the selectors followed a time-honoured strategy. "If it ain't broke . . ." he said. "Break it."

In this, he was speaking from experience. Legend has it that he was once strapping his pads on and preparing to open the innings when he learnt - his teammates burst out laughing - that he'd been dropped. He wasn't happy then, and he bears a grudge still, it seems. Anyway, it was all a bit much for poor old Paul Allott, his on-air colleague. "Fortune comes on horseback and leaves on foot," cried Sidhu, after Hussain had chipped the ball just out of reach of a fielder. "Er, I don't see too many horses out there," said his confused companion, fumbling for the ball like a sun-dazzled slip. "Er, England still going on at around a run a ball."

There: let's keep our eyes on the over rate. That should shut him up.

Hunter Davies returns in the autumn

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