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Two years ago we had . The second Miracle of Cardiff was every bit as impossible to believe.

Midway through the final afternoon it was still raining. England were 92 runs ahead, waiting to see if they might possibly get on for a couple of overs before the inevitable early finish so Ian Bell could complete his century.

Under the covers was a pitch apparently as devoid of life as the moon and nowhere near as dusty. Sri Lanka had stuck on 400 in their first innings without their best player even making a contribution. The rain kept falling. Just shake hands on the draw, we begged them, so we can all go home.

The game finished early alright. Two baffling, thrilling hours after Bell had marched off, England had sealed one of the that they have ever been involved in.

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Cardiff, Wales

On another blustery grey day devoid of almost any other excitement, you just knew Kevin Pietersen would be the one to light up Cardiff with some fireworks and drama.

Unfortunately for Pietersen, it wasn't a blazing century or all-out assault on the Sri Lankan bowling that did it. No buckles had been swashed nor thrills spilled before he fell, the victim once again of a curse that refuses to leave him alone.

According to , the batsman who would be king has now been dethroned by left-arm slow bowlers 19 times in his last 61 Test innings.

Neither are we talking about the cream of the world's twirlers. With the exception of New Zealand's Daniel Vettori, Pietersen has been banjaxed by a line-up of steady Eddies and honest toilers - Paul Harris, Sulieman Benn, Shakib Al Hasan, Yuvraj Singh, . He's even been .

It's a remarkable statistic, not only because of the percentage and names involved but also because it seems to get worse the more Pietersen insists that it's getting better.

Pietersen doesn't like the idea of being dominated by anyone, let alone a small, chubby Sri Lankan who is as likely to marry a pop star and pick up lucrative endorsements as Pietersen is to become a Buddhist monk.

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Cardiff, Wales

You know it's been a slow day at the cricket when the loudest cheers are reserved for a spectator dressed as a master of the hunt clambering aboard a pantomime horse and riding it round the boundary boards.

All morning long, unrelenting waves of rain had washed across Cardiff, and everyone had complained of terminal boredom. Then play began, much sooner than anyone
expected, and the complaints actually increased in volume.

It might not have been rock and roll, but the England hierarchy liked it. and apparently impervious to anything except old age.

England, 353 runs behind at the start of play, had gone from second best to a point where a draw is a near certainty. The new-look Sri Lankan attack, mystery spinners and all, looked as spicy as a slice of white bread.

Test cricket has always been as much graft and grind as thrills and spills. Forget the thousands of empty seats hours before the close, or the fact that the dominant topic of conversation all day had been This was one for the puritans. The cavaliers could seek their breathless pleasures elsewhere.

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Cardiff, Wales

Midway through Friday afternoon, an unheralded Sri Lankan batsman moving serenely towards a fine Test century, England's most aggressive bowler wicketless for 100 runs and chances going down faster than the lagers in the crowd, Andrew Strauss had to earn his captaincy corn.

The new ball had been and gone, yielding a solitary wicket. James Anderson was off the field, struggling with back and side problems so painful he would later be sent for a scan. The atmosphere inside the ground was as flat as a Welsh cake.

In such unpromising conditions, what is the canny Test skipper to do? How to reignite his spluttering side, to somehow conjure some menace from the most placid of pitches, to wangle out a well-set batsman and manage the frustrations of his struggling strike bowler?

"First things first: engage your Test brain, and not your World Cup brain or your Twenty20 brain," says .

"There are 450 overs in the match, not 40. To get to where you want to be, you have to put the right building blocks in place: accurate bowling, tight fielding, making the opposition work for their runs, being patient.

"England had a really good first half hour on Friday. They pitched the ball up and got it to swing, so Sri Lanka had to sit in for a while. When they then saw off the new ball, it was England who had to sit in. That's Test cricket.

"We all watch a lot of 50 over cricket, and Twenty20 cricket, so everyone thinks the game always has to move along at a rate of knots. Test cricket doesn't always do that; it's more like a game of chess. You have to know when to attack, and when to defend."

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Cardiff, Wales

If anyone feared English cricket might struggle to move on from the winter's heady triumphs down under, the first day of their Test summer put them right.

When Chris Tremlett had bowled England's previous ball in Test cricket, the nasty climber that took the bottom of Michael Beer's bat and cannoned into his stumps, 25,000 delirious supporters had turned a sun-baked Sydney Cricket Ground into a cricketing carnival like none other.

Four-and-a-half months later, as James Anderson delivered their next to Tharanga Paranavitana, the contrast could barely have been more marked - the skies dark, the temperatures low, no more than a couple of thousand stalwart supporters huddled under billowing raincoats and clinging on to umbrellas that were more parachute than parapluie.

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And so, at last, after farewells to international cricket and the first-class scene spread across four years and three continents, .

Glowing eulogies will fill the air, and perhaps a few relieved sighs from martinets among the game's administrators. For English cricket watchers there will be a mixture of both.

In two decades of devilish tweak, extravagant celebrations and tabloid-filling good times, Warne had a hold over English batsmen and fans like few others before and none since.

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