In contrast with England's problems in Belfast, Australia, without their captain Ricky Ponting who is on a brief holiday back home, had no trouble in disposing of Scotland by 189 runs at the Grange in Edinburgh. Brett Lee, who missed all the Ashes games, was grinning as broadly as ever. Perhaps he will tell the England batsmen what the joke is before the two T20 matches and seven one-day games unless he adopts Andy Murray's belief that sport is too important for laughter. "Funny game?" asked Herbert Sutcliffe, the great Yorkshire opening batsman, "It's not meant to be."

Wisden, the most conservative, old-fashioned, unchanging and unchangeable book of sporting record, is to produce an electronic version. Whatever next? Baseball mitts for fielders, night vision goggles for floodlit matches and - Bob Woolmer's dream if you remember - two way radios so that the coach can play a more important part in the tactics. Give it 20 years and we might have all those modern additions to the old game. The whining noise is not from the radios; it is John Wisden spinning in his grave.