Sixteen years is a long time to wait for anything to happen to shake up the stuffiness which surrounds headquarters. Yet along with May showers and spring’s bracing weather even the pensioner manning the media gate at Lord’s has felt the growing breeze of change.

Amid the natural hype which surrounds Lord’s, the epicural centre of the game where history rubs shoulders with modernity and a new developing skyline speeds the game into the millennium, this year’s World Cup, the seventh, offers a new window to the game in England.

While South Africa head Group A and Australia lead Group B, there are six sides who can step into the final on June 20. South Africa and Australia apart, Pakistan and the West Indies fancy their chances as do England and India. There are also New Zealand and the holders Sri Lanka, and outsiders for a place in the super Six Zimbabwe.

But the attraction of the World’s best and three minnows has, along with the fickle British weather, has allowed an English audience, once they get rid of the lingering winter phobia, to see how their own can measure up to the best. Or how the rest of the best measure up to the modern stars.

Yet the tournament, spread across the British Isles with an African footprint in Holland to boot, will have a decidedly low key fanfare: a fly past from the RAF and little else. Not even a traditional waving of flags. Perhaps, after the light and music fiasco in Calcutta in 1996 which cost a pretty brass fathering or more, the money is being conserved for something else.

Not so much starting off with fireworks as a couple of thunderflashes.

The VII World Cup begins today with a trophy but minus the name of a sponsor, so we have the ICC World Cup in its place. Which suggests those responsible missed a great opportunity to market an event which will attract a daily audience of a billion TV spectators.

By the end of it, should England by some miracle reach the final, the tabloids might wake from their goalmouth slumber and splash it on the fifth inside page.