ESPN's Wright Thompson, an American journalist, on his experience of watching and reporting on a Test match at Lord's.

A few clouds change a game, so the old saying at Lord's is that you need to always be looking up. Other things create microclimates, which change the game. When a new stand was built at Trent Bridge, the ball moved less. At seaside grounds, tides affect the swing. Captains study the tides. This is wonderful stuff. I imagine the American cable television show, where red-faced writers scream at each other about the tide tables, about the phases of the moon, about how volcanic activity in the Ring of Fire is messing with the barometer, Woody Paige having an aneurysm over hectopascals.

All this, I realize, is part of the joy of Test cricket. The outcome of the games is so closely tied to nature that watching demands an awareness of the world around you. Modern inventions mostly keep the world at bay. Don't like the weather? Close the windows. Turn on the AC. Light a fire. But following Test cricket requires, for at least five days, being governed by subtle shifts in the elements, just as surely as an ancient sailor.

Simon Hughes argues in the Daily Telegraph that the ICC missed a huge opportunity to bolster the status of Test cricket by bowing to pressure from broadcasters and scrapping the Test Championship set for 2013.

In the past fortnight there have been two of the closest and most gripping Test-match finishes in history. The World Test Championship is necessary. It would give every match a wider context and teams something to aim for, as well as a proper global climax for the five-day game that the 50-over and Twenty20 format already enjoy.

Peter Roebuck points out some lessons to be learned from the poor crowds at the Pallekele Test in the Natal Witness. Stadiums should be built with more foresight he says, and Test cricket in general needs to take steps to become more viewer-friendly.

Test cricket needs to fight for its audience and ought to permit free entry into the public areas. Also, it could provide transport, shelter and other facilities in the ground. Faster over rates can also help, as players spend an inordinate time standing around chatting, drinking and moving sight screens. Obviously, too, it’s no use building vast stadiums far from population centres.

Why would a blind person love cricket? In the Guardian, Peter White, who was born without his eyesight explains how he is charmed by the game's sounds, scores and slowness, and provides a rare insight into gamesmanship among the vision impaired.

In these soft days, I gather blind batsmen don't run: scores are based on how far the ball has been hit. At the special blind school where I and my friends regularly played, two totally blind batsmen would cheerfully hare off from opposite ends for quick singles, frequently colliding in the middle with earth-moving consequences (one of them my now slightly crooked nose).

The value of mimicry in blind cricket must not be underestimated. Mischievous fieldsmen would often imitate your batting partner in calling you for an impossible run. Compared with the gamesmanship employed by blind players, the likes of "bodyline" Jardine, Tony Greig and Paul Collingwood are mere babes in arms.

In this age of instant gratification, waiting for anything has become a strange, outdated notion for most of us. Test cricket, however, requires a lot of waiting, which has its own joys, as Rohit Brijnath elegantly explains in Mint.

Waiting is Test cricket’s separation point. Waiting for openers to settle in, the shine to wear off and Warney to come in. Waiting for tea when Laxman the fencer might walk in, waiting for the pitch to turn and Tendulkar to elevate on tiptoe and drive straight. Waiting as a partnership drones on for eventually a wicket or many will fall. All this I cherish. But I am only a spectator, I need a player to understand the viscera of waiting, so I call Dravid because no one waits like Dravid.

In the Guardian, Mike Selvey argues that Rahul Dravid deserves just as much credit as Sachin Tendulkar.

And yet Dravid, in his own way, has been every bit as important to Indian batting as has been Tendulkar. Some of the statistics that have been unearthed in the past week or so tell their story in a way that such figures often fail to do. Of Tendulkar's 51 centuries 11 have come in a losing cause. By contrast, before this last match Dravid's 128, made against Zimbabwe 13 years ago in Harare, was the only one of what is now 34 hundreds that has resulted in defeat for India. Dravid represents security.

Martin Kelner, in the Guardian, wonders what will be the more attractive draw this summer - an epic battle featuring some of Test cricket's greatest names, or another Cesc Fábregas phone-in?

Certainly, Sky's opening caption on day one of the Test against India, IT.. DOESN'T..GET..BIGGER..THAN..THIS, spelled out in huge letters across the screen was beginning to look a slightly wobbly premise – depending on what you take IT to mean – as famine in Africa, massacre in Norway, and the death of a talented young singer, all laid claim to being BIGGER.

The problem with Test match cricket is that you never really know how BIG it is until it is over – history is usually the judge – and the drawn-out format invites those of us with itchy remote fingers to wander elsewhere – at least until the final act.

BBC's Jonathan Agnew asks former England captains Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Vaughan, and former Australia captain Steve Waugh to nominate their greatest Test match of all time. Listen in.

Former cricketer Nari Contractor, who led India to a historic series victory against the English in the '60s, talks to DNA's Gautam Sheth on his experiences of playing in England.

“In those days, we would rarely get a chance to play in England, we believed that education in cricket was incomplete till we didn’t play in England.” Contractor felt that the conditions in England were always treacherous in some sense. The 78-year-old, who played in 31 Tests, said uncovered strips and unpredictable weather didn’t help their cause as they had very little protection too. “Helmets were an unknown commodity then and we players made thigh guards with a chunk of sponge or rubber."

Avijit Ghosh, writing in the Times of India, remembers the time India and England scored 588 runs in a single day of Test cricket in 1936.

Andrew Strauss, writing in the Daily Telegraph, says cricket lovers have to embrace other forms of the game and use them to introduce newcomers to Test cricket, while administrators need to look at the bigger picture and not just instant financial gratification.

There should not be an unhealthy competition between the formats. The challenge for administrators is to get that balance so that all can coexist together. The difficulty is that commercially, shorter forms of the game make more sense than Test cricket so it is a challenge for administrators to look at the bigger picture rather than just the bottom line ... Sometimes that means investing in something that is not the most profitable in the short term knowing that in the long term it might pay off.

Test cricket needs to re-invent itself by creating more meaningful contests, writes Mukul Kesavan in the Telegraph. The top five Test-playing nations should play only among themselves, and only at centres that have a Test culture, like Bangalore, he says.

Test cricket is being killed off by meaningless Test matches played between mismatched teams or third-rate ones. It is suffering because of the International Cricket Council’s idiotic missionary impulse, the mad idea that Test cricket’s health depends on it becoming a more global sport. Nothing could be further from the truth: history teaches us that Test cricket is essentially a bilateral game: it prospered even when it was played by just two countries, England and Australia.

After watching a low-scoring thriller between Pakistan and Australia at Headingley, Jarrod Kimber pleads for Test pitches with more help for bowlers. On Cricdude, he contrasts the Headlingley Test with the one going on at the SSC, where only eight wickets fell in 267 overs, and says the Sri Lanka match is a poor one even if there is a result because the first three days were about "pointless stat collecting by batsmen".

Runs on pitches like this SSC one mean very little. The bowlers are not in the game; they are hardly required at all. New ball bowlers come on and get smashed, spin bowlers come on and do everything they cannot to be smashed. Wickets come from luck and lapses in concentration. It isn’t a fair fight. And it makes the tests bloody dull.

Why are many Tests these days getting boring, despite fast scoring-rates? It's because runs are coming at the expense of wickets. You need runs in a Test but wickets are the actual currency. If wickets aren’t falling in a Test, you’re not getting any nearer a result, and the current India-Sri Lanka Test seems to be heading that way, writes Alex Bowden in the Wisden Cricketer.

My point is that an innings of 500 is not five times as exciting as one of 100. A target’s a target, so in reality they’re equally exciting. However, for the very same reason, a run is one fifth as exciting in the high scoring match because it’s only one fifth as important. In the highly unlikely event that Test cricket pitches were consistently made a little more challenging for batsmen, maybe people would be five times as interested in each day’s play.

While no one can deny that Shahid Afridi and Chris Gayle are the two coolest cricketers around, writing in The Wisden Cricketer John Stern says, the fact that both have chosen not to play Test cricket is worrying.

They might be mavericks but I don’t imagine they are alone in their views. I suspect there are dozens, hundreds even, of players at various levels of the professional game who pay lip service to the primacy of Test cricket but, given a no-strings-attached choice, would ditch it quicker than you could say IPL.

The MCC has taken the lead ahead of the ICC, cricket's governing body, in suggesting suitable measures to ensure the survival of Test cricket, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent on Sunday. The ICC, he adds, despite extensive discussions on the subject, has prevaricated.

There is a crucial difference between the composition of the ICC groups discussing this seminal restructuring and the MCC world committee. One former Test cricketer will be involved in the ICC's conversations, David Richardson, their head of cricket. It will otherwise include professional administrators. Whereas the MCC group is chaired by Tony Lewis, who with due respect, is one of its least illustrious members. The rest include former Test cricketers and accomplished men such as Andy Flower, Martin Crowe, Mike Atherton, Rahul Dravid, Majid Khan and, as it happens, Dave Richardson.

Given that Indian business houses account for so much of the game's income, any steps taken to boost Test cricket's popularity in the subcontinent must be encouraged. Writing in the Guardian, Dileep Premachandran supports an idea like playing under lights, if it is the only way to get back the sort of crowds you had two decades ago.

Lalit Modi's right when he says that people can no longer afford to take days off to humour such a habit. Maintaining tradition is one thing, but is it really worth risking extinction for it? When probes have been sent to Mars and you can voice-chat in real time with someone in Buenos Aires, is it really so difficult to produce a white or pink ball that will stay intact for 80 overs under lights? Is keeping the ball red more important than keeping Test cricket in good health?

Ayaz Memon believes that the golden age of Test cricket, widely heralded as the period between 1890 and 1914, is upon us once again. Writing in the Times of India, Memon quotes stats such as the increase in the number of results and scoring rates to justify his contention that the period that started in 1990 is "arguably the most audacious expression of skills since the 1890-1914 era"

The brazen jump out drive of Trumper and the nuanced leg glance of Ranji are justifiably venerated. But the ‘upper cut’ of Tendulkar, the slash over point for six of Sehwag, Pietersen’s switch hit, Ponting’s pull-drive off the front foot, Lara’s Nataraj-like pose in pulling off the back-foot, and the overhead scoop of Dilshan are no less enthralling even if they don’t fit the copybook.

True, covered wickets and improved bats have made it more burdensome for bowlers, but the game has hardly suffered for they have coped superbly. Some of the most skilful and highest wicket-takers in the history of the game — Murali, Warne, Kumble, McGrath, Akram, Younis, to name a few — have been products of this era. Though more nuanced and less overtly expressive than batsmanship, bowling skills have evolved to a remarkable degree too.