A STARTLING futuristic vision of Lord's leaped out of the papers recently, showing what looked like a sausage-shaped submarine floating over the Nursery end, rather like a cut-out of a Zeppelin warship redesigned by Steven Spielberg.

It was explained as a projected new media centre, to be provided at a cost of £2.6 million by NatWest Bank in time for the 1999 World Cup.

Many MCC members must have spluttered into their cornflakes or dribbled egg down their orange and yellow ties. What was so amazing was not just the shape - variously described as ``a high-tech gherkin'', ``a hamburger without the beef'' and ``like Al Jolson's lips'' - but the surprise of it all.

Given that the bizarre apparition was at Lord's, a time- honoured symbol of decorum, the papers were right to give it sensational treatment. But their readers only have to look at it for one day. Cricket supporters will be stuck with it for a lifetime, which is why their opinions should also be heard.

The picture appeared on Sept 6. A day later, I received a letter dated Sept 5, along with the club's other 17,000 members, from the MCC secretary, J R T Barclay, advising me that a press announcement about a new Lord's media centre might be imminent.

That was the first we had officially heard about it. Yet other developments at Lord's, such as the Indoor Cricket School and the new grand stand, are subject to a prolonged process of debate and consultation, sometimes taking years. Something unusual was going on here.

Part of the answer clearly lay in the proximity of the final of the NatWest Trophy on Sept 7. One must assume that the bank's public relations machine went into high gear before the MCC's admittedly lower-key model could get its act together. NatWest 1, Barclay 0, so to speak.

The secretary's letter appears to represent a token and belated acknowledgement that members are entitled to know about major ground developments at Lord's direct from the club rather than through the public prints.

On the other hand, since NatWest are paying for this curiosity, the MCC may secretly feel that members are not entitled to the normal courtesies of consultation. It is this, as much as anything else, that niggles some of us.

Whenever I write about the MCC - whether to promote women's membership or seek a ban on smoking in the Long Room - I am taken to task by stiff-necks for presuming to comment on the internal affairs of a private club. If I don't like the rules, they say, I should resign which is a bit like saying that if you don't like the Conservative government, you should shut up and emigrate.

The MCC is much more than a private club, just as Lord's is more than a cricket ground. They are the showpiece and headquarters of English cricket (or, as we have to say now, of English and Welsh cricket). They set the style and standards of the game and require the same independent scrutiny as other great institutions.

The existing press box holds about 100 people, but is full only for Test matches and cup finals; most days of the season there are barely half a dozen scribblers there. The new space age media centre will hold upwards of 250 journalists and photographers, with their own restaurant. In Lahore at the last World Cup final there were about 350 from the media, which is why the old and new press boxes will both be retained at Lord's for 1999.

Then the few lonely scribblers will rattle around in an even bigger box than they have now, except for a dozen or so days in the season when it might be half-full. The new provision seems excessive and needlessly eccentric. A temporary structure could have been put up for the World Cup without changing the ground so radically.

THE press box in the Warner stand, at long leg or long off, is admittedly badly placed for viewing the cricket. The site between the Edrich and Compton stands is, of course, right behind the bowler's arm. But it also looks straight into the sun in the afternoons.

Did anybody think of this, or do the powers-that-be only watch from the pavilion or the Tavern stand boxes? They might have learnt from the Oval, where the heat in the press box can be unbearable.

At the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth (the media are notorious for biting the hand that feeds them) one has to ask: what is the deal with NatWest? The bank is not a charity and must presumably justify the cost in terms of benefit to its shareholders? What are those benefits? Perhaps we should be told.

As for the design, one asks only that it is efficient and fits in with the rest of the ground, the tone for which is set by the splendid old-world pavilion at the other end. I remember a former president, Lord Griffiths, saying Lord's should always be a cricket ground rather than a stadium.

Unlike the Mound stand, the Edrich and Compton stands are relatively plain and unobtrusive. Will the spaceship sit oddly above them? Besides, the stands only went up a few years ago, after a whole season's building delay. If the spot between them was so strategically important, why wasn't this thought of at the time?

The new design is said to be the latest in boat-building technology, to which one can only retort: has anyone ever seen a boat trying to look like a press box? The shape is defined by architects as ``a semi-monocoque'', which, roughly translated as ``half-cock'', seems entirely appropriate in the circumstances.