It is Test cricket in historic but higgledy-piggledy surroundings. No great sporting event gives you quite so much for so long while you move so little. Absorption, consumption, conversation, these three probably never come better than when England do well at Headingley.

Of course it is not ever thus. Thursday was good cricket but, with a half-empty ground, lacked the sense of occasion that this final Test, this chance to correct cricket's dozen years of hurt, should command in the public psyche. Thursday was the day the doubts crowded in.

From the first moment you clapped eyes on the assorted mishmash of stands, pavilions and seating that make up Yorkshire's hallowed sporting temple to the last when the cab driver regaled you with the iniquities of Asian unrepresentation, there was an uncomfortable feeling that this so long-awaited first visit to the ground of legends might be rather less in the proof than in the anticipation.

Fred Trueman had been the first person to greet us, clutching that great French horn of a pipe of his. He is splendid but even he admits that his swashbuckling days are long over. So too for Headingley itself. At every turn you are reminded of the giant feats of yesteryear, Grace's last Test way back in 1899, Bradman's 300 in a day, Botham and Willis's return from the impossible, Boycott's hundredth hundred. But look around and think of other stadiums, other sports and it is the future you worry about. Can this series decider, this climax to a cricketing summer, this most coveted of sporting invitations, really be played out in a such a setting?

Headingley might be rightly hallowed as the current centre of by far the largest cricketing county, but as a Test venue for the millennium, it is, in the words of one Michael Atherton, ``something of a dump''.

The reasons are not hard to find. Step into the press lounge and opposite the sepia pictures of gods such as Rhodes, Sutcliffe, Hutton, Trueman and 'Sir Geoffrey' himself are the names Jones, Clues and Harris, not so familiar to those of us raised outside the white rose county.

They are, of course, Lewis Jones, Arthur Clues and Eric Harris 'The Toowoomba Great' of the 1930s, all giants of Leeds rugby league at the back of whose stadium we are sitting. Walk through another door and there is the Leeds Rhinos ground complete with a full complement of cricketing cars parked across the pitch. Say Headingley in Leeds and more people think rugby than cricket. It is not a happy mix.

Last year the Yorkshire membership voted 3-1 in favour of establishing a new ground at a state-of-the-art cricket centre at Wakefield but these plans were scuppered when the rugby club, as landlords, slapped on a £17 million writ for future rent.

Yorkshire sporting politics are byzantine enough at the best of times, but looking at the county's chief executive, Chris Hassell, lovingly going over would-be development plans was to know that this is likely to be another complicated chapter. Even if the local council agree to some bold new facilities on the present site, the cricket club will still be stymied by being without the customer franchises. It is enough to make you choke on your beer.

Of which there is plenty. Much has been made about the new Western Terrace ruling that no spectator can bring in his own beverage nor take more than two pints at any one time from the bar. What had not been explained was that, long queues permitting, every spectator expected to have these statutory two pints all the time. Quite how they concentrate on the cricket is a tribute to their love of the game.

Mick, Brian and Gary were my team. Mick had played second XI cricket for Yorkshire, Gary was a helicopter pilot whose trick was to carry three pints in two hands and a glass of wine in his top pocket. Brian was a builder who was a golfing buddy of ``Athers'' and who kept good humour while we ribbed him about his losing bets on runs per session. But when you once had a winning £37,500 bet on Dancing Brave at Ascot, a bit of ribbing is easy to take.

So too was the cricket. The electronic scoreboard may have taken until tea to function but England stayed in the hunt. With the replay screen and the last-ball mph there to tantalise us, a day passes in happy commendation and rebuke. ``Good old Gus'', ``How could you drop that Nasser?'' and most of all ``Put it up them Goughy''. The scene was part of a great tradition. But to compete in our leisure future, it surely deserves a better home.