CRICKET’S rich vocabulary does not as yet include a term for the kind of event taking place at Lord’s. Billed as a Test match, it is actually neither. It is not a Test: for one side it is a walk in the park, for the other it is a scramble up the north face of an impossible peak. It is not a match, either: well before lunch on the first day, one team were out of contention. But it is not the farce you may have feared. Against all odds — 250-1 on, apparently — it has been an occasion.

Outside the North Gate at 10.30 yesterday morning, the queues were a hundred deep. The touts, who might have been expected to be giving tickets away, were keen to buy. It took 15 minutes to get into the ground, long enough to get to know your neighbours. Mine were three men aged about 20 with spiky hair. I wondered what had brought them here.

“Well, we’re students,” one said, “so we don’t have much else to do. And it’s a nice day. And it’s a Lord’s Test, even if it is only Bangladesh. And it’s a chance to see this England team who’ve done really well. Should see some runs, Trescothick, Vaughan, maybe Freddie . . .” Good enough reasons. They may not go to lectures but they have a reasonable grasp of causation.

The buzz in the queue carried through to the Grand Stand Lower, the only part of the ground on offer — perhaps because it was the only one not already colonised by school parties. When Marcus Trescothick reached his hundred, he received a medium-sized standing ovation. Nobody cared that it was the cheapest of all his Test hundreds, and probably the scrappiest.

He reacted by raising both arms to the heavens. His body language was the same as Geoff Boycott’s in 1977 when he made his hundredth hundred, against Australia, in front of his home crowd, soon after ending a three-year exile. Trescothick is too young to remember that, but he might still have seen fit to mix his triumphalism with a tinge of sheepishness. He played far less well than Vaughan and finished with England’s worst innings of 190-odd. To be fair, though, Grand Stand Lower did not see it this way.

This game has been like a controlled experiment, set up to establish what Test cricket would be like if you removed all the tension. The answer so far is: not riveting, but quite fun in a bland sort of way. The crowd enjoyed the sunshine, the strokeplay, the beer, the banter, the greenness, the beer, the ice-creams, the misfields and the beer.

They enjoyed their lunch: the catering at Lord’s, which traditionally lies somewhere between a letdown and a dice with death, has suddenly rocketed upmarket. It is still fast and laddish, but there are flickers of nutrition and even ethics amid the grease: organic bacon sandwiches, Aberdeen Angus burgers, Fairtrade coffee — Lord’s in decent nosh shock.

They enjoyed the shopping. For anyone under 16, sport is now primarily a retail experience. Packs of schoolkids came through the turnstiles on St John’s Wood Road and made straight for the Lord’s Shop. Over the past 20 years, the shop has tripled in size and scope; over the next 20, it will surely triple again, and get a few TV screens so that punters with a vague interest in the cricket are not forced to trudge back to their seats with their plastic bags.

All the day lacked was a memorable moment. The only picture that will stick in my mind from this game was something that happened on Thursday, largely unnoticed. Stephen Harmison was running in and bowling his fastest, a huge man hurling a hard ball at the heads and ribs of several much smaller men, who were ill-equipped to cope. And he was wearing a blue anti-bullying wristband. No tension, then, but a certain amount of irony.

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