Glastonbury without drugs

There is something so revitalising in the way Australia goes about Test cricket, and not just on the field. They care deeply about it and it is as woven into the country's social fabric as it is in India and Pakistan - though in a very different way.

The Boxing Day Test is an instructive experience. To call it an institution might be doing it a disservice, only because institutions in some parts of the world also imply a monolithic staleness, rigidity and heaps of red tape. This is more a vibrant, moving event, and people of all ages and colour give it a real hum. It is a date for the social diary. Breakfasts and lunches are organised around and during the Test, spectators make a real day of it, and it is a day for family, a day for friends, and probably a day for love also. It's in the papers, on TV, floating around on the net. It could even be Glastonbury for the life it brings, but without the drugs and maybe more suits.

Part of it, as one MCC member put it, is because cricket has a fixed place in the Australian calendar; things can easily be built around it, or organised towards it. At the hotel I'm staying in, people are already trying to book in accommodation for next summer's Ashes Test. Indeed, it is a constant gripe about the subcontinent that their calendars are in no way fixed; there is no equivalent to the Boxing Day Test or the Lord's Test in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. It is not entirely a problem of their own making, of course, but it isn't as if there are no solutions to it.

Crowds have been good so far, surprisingly so. Nearly 60,000 came on Boxing Day, almost 40,000 the day after, and even on the third day there were over 35,000 people. Outside of Faisalabad and Multan, Test centres in urban Pakistan might struggle to generate those numbers over two or three years of Tests.