No-one wants to be nasty ... but that wasn't much of a contest

It's got to that point in the series. You see it often now, when Sri Lanka tour England, Australia, India, and sometimes, New Zealand as well (when they roll out the grassy pitches). We're at that stage where the home side seems, almost from day one, to be breezing so effortlessly to victory. The point when their internal narrative dilemmas become more conspicuous than the contest between the two teams, because sports need to create drama, and this is the all the drama we've got.

Is the temporary captaincy weighing too heavily on Ollie Pope?

Is Gus Atkinson a serious allround option , long term?

Has Jamie Smith already proven he's worthy of a long stint in the team?

Sri Lanka, though, are fighting, right? They're showing they can play… well some of them. Kamindu Mendis is swimming in runs. That's good news, given he's just 25. Milan Rathnayake 's got a bit of fire about him, correct? There could be something there, for the future maybe? And they came out in the second innings and made England work for the wickets for almost 87 overs.

We're speaking almost entirely in condescensions now. We have to disassociate the Sri Lanka batting of the second innings from the Sri Lanka batting of the first innings , in order to pay these compliments. We pretend that "fight" was not necessitated by crumbling failure in other portions of the game. Because, you know, what else is there to do? No one wants to be nasty.

Cricket is an entertainment business, and there are economic pressures to make this seem more like a contest than it is, to defend players and decisions perhaps more than they deserve, and perhaps most of all, to convince the audience they are getting a better show than they actually are. We attempt to do this even when the stands in the most famed cricket ground in England are roughly no more than 35% full on the fourth day of a Test, on a Sunday in the most reliably good-weather portion of the English summer. (In the spirit of only paying backhanded compliments, here's one to the English weather.)

There is an argument that the prices charged for a seat at this venue are too high. There is an argument that it is precisely this kind of financial opportunism that has made the Test game poorer , as India, Australia, and England, the three biggest cricket economies, have not invested sufficiently in other nations, leading to the game having become less vibrant - maybe across formats, but especially in Tests - over the last 10 years.

There are other arguments too, but we've cornered ourselves. We're not pretending that the playing field is even - or even close to even - any more, because these seem like foregone conclusions. Instead, here we are again, pulling punches even on teams that have done poorly even by their own standards.

We're not laying into Dhananjaya de Silva choosing to bowl first under cloudless skies on the first day as harshly as we could be. In de Silva's mind, England having been 216 for 6 soon after tea on that day is vindication for his decision, and we're not going to describe Atkinson's 118 off 115 balls as an accident that was waiting to happen.

We're not going to roast the Sri Lanka top-order as severely as we could. Almost every decision taken in this Test was an attempt to protect senior batters. This is something de Silva himself suggested, when he said: "Our top order was struggling in the last match. I needed to give them a break and see what the pitch was doing, and then we'd have a bat." This, despite one of the first things that anyone learns about Lord's is that the overhead conditions are more consequential to the threat bowlers pose than the nature of the surface. ("You look up at Lord's, not down .. etc etc")

On day four, Sri Lanka sent in a "lightwatchman", at 43 for 2, when the skies became gloomy in the middle session, to protect the next three batters, each of whom has between 55 and 110 Tests on their record. At which point, you start to wonder what is going on. They are sending the bowlers out to bowl when the skies are clear because the top five is struggling, and bowlers out to bat when cloud comes over. Are they just throwing bowlers at all their problems like sandbags at a flood?

There are further weirdnesses. De Silva said experience in English conditions was key to doing well in this series, and actively lobbied for more exposure, but then left out Vishwa Fernando who had taken 17 wickets at 13.35 for Yorkshire in three matches earlier this season. He suggested more solidity from the top three would have helped the rest of the batting order to prosper, but then asked Nishan Madushka to keep wicket and open the batting, which surely has to have struck almost everybody as a bad idea.

However, it is increasingly beginning to feel, in these global cricket conditions, that even when we make these critiques, they do not bite as hard as they should. They do not have the effect they once did, because what is the flood that Sri Lanka have to contend with in this series compared to the tectonic forces acting upon the game?

It is possible audiences are aware of this too. If Australia had been in such a modest position at the start of day four, would the stands have been so empty? Would more spectators have shown up to Lord's to watch mighty India fall in similar circumstances? It feels more likely. Those series feel rambunctious. This one feels as though fans of the home team are just hoping for some good cricket and little more

But we're not in an Australia or India series. We're here, noting that Sri Lanka made it through to the second new ball in the second innings. That three batters crossed fifty in one innings, compared to just one in the first dig. We use words like resilient, and valiant, to describe a batting performance in fairly sedate conditions. Because, if you take in everything else that is happening in the game, we are in danger of straying into flagellation. And no one wants to be nasty.