No longer simple

In the past ten days or so, we fans of Test cricket have followed:

* A triple century and a near-triple century.

* A century by a little slip of a wicketkeeper who has never so far fulfilled his batting potential; yet when he got to the mark, he pulled from his pocket a sheet of paper that had the names of those who stood by him, meaning he had been confident from the start of getting there.

* A down-to-the-wire draw in Antigua that confirmed the unique capacity of this form of the game to produce twists and turns and bitten-off nails. On Cricinfo, Andrew McGlashan called it "the most nerve-jangling of results"; his colleague Andrew Miller said it "was the game at its very, very best."

* A superb Australian win in South Africa, over a South African team that had dominated them in Australia. And this win was engineered by a bowling attack made up of two men on debut, a man playing his second Test, a man playing his fifth and a man playing his 19th. Vital batting heroics came from two of the men on debut too.

We followed all that because it's Test cricket, not one-day or T20, in which you'll find these themes in full flower.

And then gunmen attack Sri Lanka's Test cricketers in Lahore, killing their security policemen and injuring a few players. I follow this sickening news just as closely as I followed those earlier joys of Test cricket.

Those simple joys of Test cricket.