I am proposing a knighthood for services to cricket. Arise Sir Harmy. Stephen Harmison is not only president for life of the Sensitive Fast Bowlers Union, he has also done a fine thing by giving a name to the greatest malaise in modern cricket. He called it the Chief Executive’s Wicket. This phrase will go into the annals of cricket, along with flat-track bully, degree in people and Geoffrey Boycott’s old mum.

A Chief Executive’s Wicket is one designed to last all five days of a Test match. The reason it must do so is to maximise income. You want to fill the ground — and the television schedules — for all five days; if you don’t, you lose revenue. At least, you do if you have already sold the seats. And if sport is not all about trying to make as much money as possible — if sport is not about making the most of every single commercial opportunity that presents itself — then what on earth is it for?

That, by the way, is a Chief Executive’s Question. We all know different, of course, but we are only the customers, only the punters, so what right have we to comment on anything? (That’s another CEQ, obviously.) If your priority in preparing a cricketing surface is to make the game last five days, you must create a surface that is flat. Perfect for flat-track bullies for at least three, preferably four, days. The one thing you don’t want, of course, is for bowlers to take wickets. That buggers up everything. So go for a surface on which bowlers have very little chance of taking them, one on which wickets generally fall through a batsman’s failure rather than a bowler’s excellence.

That’s the sort of wicket we have had here in Cardiff. Disregard the freakish excitements of the last couple of sessions, this was a surface that gave absolutely nothing to any of the quick bowlers on all five days and resulted in a game with far too many runs and far too few wickets. A total of 674 for six declared does, it is true, represent some very good Australian batting and some rather poorish English bowling. But really, four centuries in an innings: the runs have come too cheap. Endless hours of cricket in which the bowler has no chance of taking a wicket, this is not competition. This is not real sport.

Cricket depends for its meaning on the ever-shifting balance between bat and ball. Tilt the whole thing too far one way and the contest becomes less vivid, less intriguing. Less worth watching, in short.

The people who run cricket are always telling us about the primacy of Test cricket. It is, without doubt, the most exalted form of the game, whether you are looking for subtlety, tension, excellence or drama. But if you constantly produce run-fest wickets, then you are actually destroying Test cricket.

People want to watch Test cricket because it is wonderful. So the master plan has been to make it less wonderful — because the silly bastard punters will turn up no matter what we do, won’t they? But they won’t, you see.

The Chief Executive’s Wicket is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Four years ago, they played a match at Edgbaston that was reckoned by just about everyone to be the greatest Test ever played. It ended in the first session of the fourth day. Five sessions of the game went unplayed, but it was the sort of match you watch cricket for. Think on, you executives, think on.

But at least we have a term for this phenomenon of the five-day money-spinning pitch, a derisive term that cuts right to the heart of the matter. We must use it as a stick to beat some sense into the heads of chief executives across cricket. In sport — perhaps in anything worth doing — money is a bonus, and a highly acceptable one. But put money any higher on the agenda and you destroy the thing you are making money from.

Poulter’s style leaves precious little to applaud

As we brace ourselves for the incomparable thrills of the Open Championship this week, I have only two words to speak to those who wish to convince me that I could learn to love golf, if only I tried. These words are, of course, Ian Poulter.

How can anyone take any sport seriously while one of its prominent players dresses like an extra in an Abba video?