The Test of time: In the week of the 2000th Test we pick the best ever | Barney Ronay

Denis Compton and Bill Edrich make their way through the celebrating hordes after England beat Australia to win the Ashes in 1953. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

A Grand Combined Melbourne and Sydney XI take on England's Yorkshireman-Sussex miscellany. Deprived of their first-choice wicketkeeper, who has been arrested en route in New Zealand, the first Test ends in a 45-run defeat for England. "This must never be allowed to happen again," promise the selectors.

WG Grace, the first great Victorian colossus of the first great spectator sport, scores England's first Test century on his debut. England win by five wickets. The Body of English Cricket, still very much alive and well, watches the action from a seat in the pavilion and enjoys an excellent lunch.

England lose their first proper Test on home soil, the "Demon" FR Spofforth taking 14 for 91. A record crowd of 39,194 people watch, one of whom famously gnaws through his umbrella handle in the tense final moments. The Body of English Cricket, now deceased, is incinerated and placed inside an urn.

Hot on the heels of New Zealand, India play their first Test and lose by 158 runs despite reducing England to 19 for three in the first innings. Fourteen years later India finally play someone other than England. Almost 20 years later they win a match. They are, though, quite good now.

With the series 1–1 and Don Bradman insurmountable, Douglas Jardine instructs his fast bowlers for short-pitched balls aimed at the body. Aussie batsmen take the blows. Diplomatic cables are exchanged. The tour almost collapses. One team are playing cricket out there. And many years from now a disappointing TV adaptation featuring actors in baggy trousers saying things like "ya pommy bah-stard" will capture it all very vaguely.

A match that stands as an open rebuff to the perennial gripe about a game that can go on for five days and still be a draw: here's one that was still a draw after 10 days, and was abandoned only because England really did have to catch the boat home. At that stage, with a match aggregate of 1,981 runs scored, they needed just 42 to win, albeit it would still have taken them a day to get there. Somewhere, in a thicket on the Highveld, it is tempting to believe at least one superannuated South African cricketer is still playing it.

A last muted hurrah for Test cricket's second golden age of Bradman and the great English batsman Wally Hammond. Needing four runs for an average of 100, Bradman is marooned forever on the statistical absurdity of 99.94, bowled for a duck by Eric Hollies. Denis Compton and Jim Laker would go on to oversee a shift in fortunes for England, for whom a decade of Brylcreem-drenched global dominance enacted with tiny little wizened dark brown bats awaited.

A cricket nation of a thousand brilliant fast bowlers is born, succumbing rather meekly to the New Enemy by an innings in Delhi. Pakistan's first ever XI contains a Waqar, a Khan and 17?year?old Hanif Mohammad. Best not to write them off just yet.

"Yes ... And is it ... Yes ... England have won the Ashes!" Brian Johnston's words as the winning runs ensured England regained the Ashes after almost 19 years is cricket's first great TV commentary moment. Eliding with the coronation and the Matthews Cup final, Test cricket is suddenly a part of the New Elizabethan televisual age, an age that dawned – take note – without the need for erotically writhing podium girls or recurrent 10-second blasts of foot-stomping Euro house.

Bowling solely from the Stretford End Jim Laker takes nine for 37 and 10 for 53 as England win by an innings, the greatest match analysis in Test history and all 19 wickets celebrated with a vague shrug and the odd stiff handshake. England's other bowlers sent down 118 overs combined while taking only a single wicket. England's other bowlers might want to have a look at that.

Intimidated by Lillee and Thomson the previous winter, Clive Lloyd's West Indians are recalibrated as a relentless fast-bowling force. Michael Holding and Wayne Daniel bowl short and put three batsman out of the match in the first innings of a crushing victory. The beginning of an era of generational fast-bowling dominance. Also the beginning of the end for Mike Gatting's nose.

The first post-World Series Test, which saw the return of the elite pirate players of Kerry Packer's league. The breakaway had failed and all was back to normal again. Floodlights, highly paid superstar players, coloured clothing, piped music – cricket certainly wouldn't be seeing any of this again. This was also the first real post-helmet Test match and the beginning of the end for the quaint old rest day. The future started here.

Another great spurring moment of popular Test romance – not to mention the drawing of one of the great sustained spells of corporate after-dinner anecdote-recounting. And BBC video-selling. Mike Brearley's England win despite following on, Ian Botham's hundred and Bob Willis's eight wickets overturning victory odds of 500-1. As England edge home the stock exchange halts briefly, Headingley fills up (apparently) with every single cricket-watching male in the western hemisphere and even the royal wedding later in the week starts to look like a decent excuse for a party.

Post-apartheid South Africa's first Test in over 20 years. A great match too, in which Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh simply refuse to be beaten, bowling out the Proteas for 148 chasing 201. South Africa have emerged into a bright new Test future based solely around fair play and Corinthian ideals. Future captain Hansie Cronje is one of 10 bright-eyed Test debutants. Just saying.

Some cliches are true: Shane Warne really did make Test cricket seem unusually vibrant and the ancient craft of leg-spin appear extreme and edgy. And the ball that announced Warne as a generational force is truly a thing of beauty: Warne's first delivery in Tests in England drifts in late to square Mike Gatting up, then leaps away off the pitch to peg back his exposed off stump. England lose the Test – and would win only seven of 36 with Warne in the opposition. Bowling Shane, indeed.

The end of an era: no longer would England be repeatedly thrashed by a multi-pronged fast-bowling entity infused with post-colonial vengeance; instead they would be repeatedly thrashed by a multi-pronged fast-medium and leg-spin entity infused with post-colonial vengeance. Steve Waugh's supreme double-hundred seals a 2-1 series victory. The McGrath-Warne axis prepares to flower over the next decade, the centrepiece of the greatest team ever seen. And the Windies begin their steady, purposeful transformation into the tear-jerkingly hilarious shambles they are today.

A new force announces itself at last in Test cricket. Yes, for John Crawley, who scored 156 in the first innings, this really could have been quite a match. Except his efforts are ultimately cast in shade by 16 wickets for future leading Test wicket-taker Muttiah Muralitharan as Sri Lanka win by 10 wickets on a dry and dusty Oval pitch.

Brian Lara's Test record of 400 not out is additionally astonishing for two reasons: firstly for the sheer bloody-mindedness of snatching back a record that had been taken from him by Matthew Hayden's 380 against Zimbabwe the previous year; and secondly as it was in a live game (England later followed on) and against the acclaimed Fab Four pace attack that would reclaim the Ashes the following year. The match was drawn but this was perhaps the crowning act of what is an ongoing global Test run glut.

An umbrella-gnawing finish to conjure memories of the original Ashes Test, and a high point of one of the great series. A Test that saw 1176 runs at more than four an over, 40 wickets taken and England sneaking home in some distress by just two runs thanks to a catch taken off Michael Kapsrowicz's forearm. Test cricket isn't simply a great game, or a wonderful exposition of character. It is also torture. We now have definitive proof of this.

A cinematic moment of departure for Test cricket's leading wicket-taker and still a divisive figure for some, the biscuit magnate's son who brought a brand of brilliantly unorthodox street cricket to the global game. Some careful shepherding of the Indian tail in a 10-wicket win brought Muttiah Muralitharan his 800th wicket in his final Test. In many ways, we will never see his like again.

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Why Jamie Redknapp goes over the top top top when rating players | Barney Ronay

Jamie Redknapp was a top top player before he became a Sky Sports football pundit. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

It seems significant that the dominant emotion of the current summer transfer window is not excitement or ambition, but a kind of generalised, grasping confusion. Mainly, nobody has any real idea about value. English premiums, contract lengths, degrees of risk and reward are all suddenly avenues of fevered debate. It is a peculiarly exciting mess – and one that is developing its own language. This week Harry Redknapp described Luka Modric, who looks increasingly haunted and unhappy, like a frightened cat being forced into a basket, as not just a good player but "a top, top player".

Redknapp isn't alone in identifying this quality. Charlie Adam has talked about the "top, top players" at Liverpool and how he's looking forward to "learning from them", albeit this is the sort of thing you would expect Adam to say given his endearing resemblance to a Dickensian man-child rogue, perhaps a thieving tinker or a chimney sweep who is taught to read by a six-year-old girl and discovers the true meaning of Christmas. Top top players. Top top top top players. This is apparently the way we're going to talk about footballers now. But whose fault is it?

It is tempting to point to a wider overheating, a compounding of absolutes everywhere. It is a top top top top world and football is simply reflecting this. On the other hand it may be easier just to blame Jamie Redknapp. Redknapp popularised the concept of top top through his punditry on Sky Sports, often concluding his entertaining digressions with the phrase "We're talking about top top players, Ruud – top top top players". No doubt this has had a profound influence. Like the kind of people who shout "Murderer!" and "Give Denise's baby back!" in the street at off-duty soap actors, there are those who have perhaps become confused by Redknapp's TV persona and genuinely consider him to be a footballing oracle, the voice of what Pele once called "the top top game".

It is above all a crisis of diminishing superlatives. The concept of top top sprung out of a superheated Sky-driven Premier League where everything is great pretty much all the time. How do you express excitement or even mild approval in a world where the emotional barometer is continually pitched at a level of damp-eyed superbity?

In theory, this is an open-ended scale. Redknapp might remark in passing: "You look at Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs – these are top top players."

"Yes, Jamie," you'd say. "But you look at Xavi, Iniesta – these are top top top players."

"Lionel Messi, Nandor Hidegkuti, Garrincha, Hot Shot Hamish, the Honourable Alfred Lyttelton – you're talking top top top top top players," Jamie would insist, becoming agitated.

And so it is that fresh mezzanine levels of topness just keep opening up, secret doors, priest holes, tower rooms, private elevators, Jamie ushering you ever upwards though VIP suites of vertiginous approval and into a realm of pure top top top top top. In fact, the issue of footballing classification pre?dates even the Redknapp Index. The more you look at it, the more confusing it becomes – and so in the current age of rolling analysis the old problem of working out who is and isn't any good at football has become a barking chorus of blanket bafflement. This isn't cricket, where a player's worth can be measured out by an exacting formula. Football is free-form. It is one giant amorphous opinion. Even with things like statistics and goalscoring records and medals with things like "player of the year" inscribed on them, still the debate rages.

No one is safe. Frank Lampard is too fat. John Terry is too slow. Rio Ferdinand is too easily distracted by bright lights, magazines, shoes, gurgling banter-attacks. Steven Gerrard is simply a pair of wild, flailing legs. Stewart Downing is wreathed in a peculiar air of sadness. Peter Crouch is a brilliant satirical spoof of English traditional "strengths". Messi is a cheat, obsessed with temperate weather. Weirdly, the only exception, the only unclouded absolute, is Paul Scholes: if you say he's rubbish you get stabbed in the eye by the Queen.

This instability extends across management, officialdom and punditry. Sir Alex Ferguson makes referees give Manchester United trophies. Arsene Wenger is mad and a proven loser. Fabio Capello is evil. Stuart Pearce hates old people and dogs. Roy Hodgson tortures mice in his kitchen. Sam Allardyce regularly shoplifts penny sweets then just throws them out of his car window on the motorway.

I think Jamie Redknapp is great but there are those who see only a thigh-chafing collage of unrelated think-blurts. Is Graeme Souness really any good, or is he just grimacingly soulful and authentic, like a man in an uplifting advert for boiler repair care plans? Is Alan Hansen wonderfully laconic or does he just never say anything with any content, instead lolling immovably on his sofa cushions, trussed within his satin man-shirt and unspooling his soothing gobbets of TV-Scottish?

Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows anything. Glazed by superlatives, wildly overpriced and buffeted by conflicting tribal denouncements, this is now football's default setting: a gloriously irresolvable confusion of absolutes, and a condition that spreads right through from bottom to top to top top top top.

Twitter.com/barneyronay

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