The first day of an international summer is always a great occasion for the English cricket fan. Home to some of the most overzealous and frankly joyless officials known to man, Lord's has an atmosphere all of its own, and it is one which still sets cricket aside from other sports in England. Thursday sees the opening Test of the summer as England take on the West Indies.

A gentle buzz of anticipation hovers around the ground on the first morning, and a feeling as if you've never been away. As the summer's first Test arrives ever earlier, that might not be too far off the mark as the ceaseless encroachment into May finds Lord's under leaden skies.

Sit back for a moment and watch the pavilion, and one can envisage Jack Hobbs striding purposefully out of the Long Room and through the gate onto the field of play, as he did almost a century ago. Nowhere is the history of the game more visible or tangible, from the tips of the Grace Gates to top of the Edrich Stand.

And this is what truly sets Lord's apart as the cathedral of cricket, where the match in hand becomes almost secondary to the reverence for the game and the sense of history palpable to the occasion. This year the first Test is awaited by some with more longing than usual, starved of Test cricket for three-and-a-half months whilst a World Cup, bloated with its own self-importance, overstayed its welcome by at least 20 matches.

The World Cup displayed virtually every ill affecting the sport in the modern era; the surfeit of matches, the over-the-top security and anti-enjoyment measures, the overpricing of tickets, the profound lack of common sense by the game's officials, and most drastically, how global interest wanes when the giants of Pakistan and India exit stage right.

The ICC's preoccupation with money over competition and quantity rather than quality killed the excitement in what should have been cricket's centre-piece event, and frankly the tournament got the ending it deserved, as the final descended into dusky farce.