England v Pakistan: second ODI – live!

Guess what? It’s raining again, quite hard, and the covers are coming back on.

The toss has now moved to 11.15am. The drama – sometimes it’s all too much.

England are holding another cap ceremony – not for a debutant, but for their only senior player. It’s Ben Stokes’s 100th one-day international. The squad stand in a circle as Ashley Giles makes a little speech and hands over a commemorative cap. Someone says something and Stokes bursts out laughing.

The covers, that is. The rain seems to have stopped, though the St John’s Wood sky is still a deep grey. As things stand, the start of play will be at 11.30am, with the toss at 11.

With football gripping the nation, how can cricket possibly compete? By doing what it does best: having a rain delay. There’s a light shower at Lord’s, and it’s expected to turn heavy. But the good news is that the forecast now has the skies clearing around noon, rather than 3pm.

Morning everyone and welcome to the OBO. Today, England’s World Cup-winning team return to the scene of their triumph for the first time. It’s coming, it’s coming – right, that’s enough of that. Since their epic encounter with New Zealand, two years ago next week, England’s cricketers have played three Tests at Lord’s, but no white-ball matches. They would never have guessed that the most famous ground in the world would miss out on a whole summer, spurned in favour of grounds with hotels attached. Nor would they have suspected that when they eventually returned, only one of their World Cup winners would be on board.

So this is a big moment for Ben Stokes, making his 100th appearance in ODIs and captaining England for the first time at Lord’s, in front of cricket’s first full house since lockdown. He likes it here, at least when there’s a bat in his hand: his last five innings for England at Lord’s, all in 2019, were 89, 84 not out, 9 not out, 13 and 115 not out, adding up to 310 runs at an average of 155. The 9 didn’t count in the official records, which is beyond ridiculous because it was scored, off four balls, in the Super Over of the World Cup final – possibly the greatest pressure-cooker in the history of cricket.

On Thursday in Cardiff, Stokes’s motley new crew gelled so well that he didn’t have to take a wicket or face a ball. Was it beginners’ luck, with Babar Azam’s talented Pakistan team getting caught cold? Did it suggest that behind every great squad there’s another one denied a decent chance? Or does it just mean that the solution to the eternal puzzle of England selection is to pick Stokes and any ten others?

The second match in the series will go some way to answering these questions, as long as the weather doesn’t ruin it for the crowd. The forecast is for rain in the first half of the day, clearing by about 3, so we may only get about 60 overs in – but that’s all that was needed in Cardiff. Play starts, in theory, at 11am UK time. I’ll be back around 10.35 with an update, and maybe even with the toss and teams.