Better read than watched

In the latest twist to the cheating row, South Africa have asked the match referee to conduct an examination of the England team's teeth in order to determine whether the skin of the said gnashers has been artificially enhanced with Velcro, superglue or some similar substance which allows England to unfairly save Test matches. Paul Collingwood will be first into the dentist's chair, since he is serially implicated in these draws by one wicket which England are specialising in. Following him will be Graham Onions, whose nickname of Bunny is allegedly short for “bunions” but actually describes his batting pretty well, so how he survived demands closer investigation.

Collingwood's chief accomplice on this occasion was Ian Bell, playing the kind of innings we have not come to expect from him. I have always loved his hundreds, even if they have always surfed a wave started by someone else, but I had grown impatient with his repeated failures when the side was in trouble. This innings on its own would not have convinced me to stop doubting his temperament, but taken with his ugly 72 at The Oval in the Ashes decider, the evidence is now there: he will never be as good at grafting as Alastair Cook or Jonathan Trott or Collingwood, but he is now, at least adequate.

As in Centurion, the Newlands Test was hardly a feast for the eyes until the final hour. Both matches featured one really forceful innings by a batsman – Graeme Swann at Centurion; Graeme Smith at Newlands – and one woefully unrewarded spell of superb bowling – Onions at Centurion, Dale Steyn at Newlands – and there has been the odd successful spell from Morne Morkel, James Anderson, Swann or Paul Harris, but mostly what we have had to watch have been Jacques Kallis and Collingwood in 'they-shall-not-pass mode'. I greatly appreciate the batting slowcoach – and wrote a piece before Christmas extolling the breed to prove it – but those two are so dull while standing firm that enjoyment of the match for those watching migrates to the abstract plane.

Whole books are regularly written about Test series. If they weren't filed under “sport”, they would appear on the thriller shelves alongside the Ian Flemings and Robert Ludlums.

A Fleming or a Ludlum writes thrillers which make superb movies. In a Bond or a Bourne film, action dominates over character and people do not spend their time musing over the difficulties of life or the moralities of conflict; there is plenty to hold the eye's attention but not much need to engage brain.

This series for the D'Oliveira Trophy, though, seems to have been written by John le Carre. Little actually happens in his novels; events move slowly - the course of the narrative changed by small incidents whose significance emerges only later. They are novels about character and motivation, about choices made and unmade by imperfect people with imperfect information. The clashes are of wills rather than forces, since the forces are largely fairly ordinary people – how effective they are depends on how well they are organised and how they co-operate rather than on superhuman derring-do.

In the 1970s, the BBC did a marvellous TV version of le Carre's “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” for which they hired a cast of outstanding actors who could convey many of the novel's subtleties and nuances, so that a couple of old men having a quiet conversation was riveting. Most other screen adaptations of le Carre novels have been less successful as visual events: you'd always be advised to read the book rather than watch the movie.

With only two or three really high-class players on each side, and most of even those showing only sporadic form, I'm afraid that I'm finding this series a bit wearing to sit through. I'm really looking forward to when the book comes out, though, because that should be a humdinger.