Bell tolls zero

Long, long ago, when David Gower and Graham Gooch and other golden oldies were players not voices, there was a routine about my Sundays.

At 9am I'd ring the home of David Field, who worked for the Exchange Telegraph, a sports news agency, and he would tell me the squad for the Test starting the following Thursday.

There was no public relations department with the Test and Country Cricket Board that then ruled the professional game; and David had the duty to ring the chairman of selectors at breakfast time - the only witness to the announcement.

By midday the team was on the BBC radio news but that was too late for the editor's conference at my paper and, as there was almost always a surprise among the 12 or 13 names, the story was highly rated.

Now, in the age of 24-hour news, we forget how staggeringly slowly stories emerged 20years ago. Now I can get the names of the England squad for the third Test at Edgbaston into this blog in seconds; but let me tell you about 1959 when I worked on a local evening paper.

At 5pm I left the office to cover an evening match. Yorkshire were winning against Sussex and on their way to the championship, but none of us on the York Rugby League coach travelling to Hunslet could find the result that night. No text messages, no late night news, no Ceefax; no news until the morning papers arrived.

Now the process is so well tuned, players, coaches and PR men are so glib and the journalists so accustomed to lies, damned lies and statistics that no-one is surprised when forecast announcements mean nothing.

Thus today's proclamation of the England squad: same again, even though Kevin Pietersen cannot play, even though there is a temptation to tinker, "never change a winning team." Ian Bell will step up as No.4, "we will assess the conditions", and "the side will be announced on the morning of the match".

Some PR person has missed a trick here. Once the same-again con has been tried once, no-one is fooled. The public sighs, the papers pretend there is a story when there is nothing and we all feel cheated.

As a tempter to those who want to witness the match that must be counter productive.