The Oval, yesterday, shortly after tea. Where were you?

The slowly revolving London Eye is clearly visible from the upper tiers of the Barrington Stand at The Oval cricket ground, which at 4.12pm yesterday seemed rather apt - for in sport as in engineering, what goes around eventually comes around.

The slowly revolving London Eye is clearly visible from the upper tiers of the Barrington Stand at The Oval cricket ground, which at 4.12pm yesterday seemed rather apt - for in sport as in engineering, what goes around eventually comes around.

When England last won a Test series against the West Indies, in 1969, we not only had a cricket team to be proud of, our footballers were world champions too. Those days are not quite here again, but on Saturday the England football team did give the current world champions, France, a run for their money. And in hazy sunshine at The Oval their cricketing counterparts completed a handsome 3-1 victory over the West Indies, winning the fifth Test by 158 runs.

Nasser Hussain, the England captain, was barely toddling when an Englishman, Raymond Illingworth, last lifted the Wisden Trophy - the prize for which these two teams traditionally compete. That was in Leeds on 15 July 1969, six days before man first stepped on the moon. In the intervening decades, an English victory has generally seemed a good deal more remote than the moon. But the West Indians are no longer the irresistible force they were in the 1970s and 1980s, while England are no longer the puddings they have sometimes seemed.

Accordingly, The Oval was packed to the rafters yesterday, a stirring sight that had veterans of the press box trawling through their memory banks for precedents. Remarkably for the last day of a Test match, there were also thousands of disappointed punters milling around outside, denied the opportunity to pay at the turnstile.

In the press box, it was generally agreed that the venerable ground had seen nothing like it on the final day of a Test match since 1953, when one of English sport's greatest swashbucklers, Denis Compton, hit the runs to win the Ashes.

One wonders, though, whether Compton, who also played on the wing for Arsenal, would have approved of the football-style triumphalism that erupted outside the pavilion when the last wicket fell, as hordes of fans chanted "Ing-er-land" and even, improbably, "Wisden's coming home!" Still, the conclusion of one of the longest losing (and drawing) records in sport seemed to justify the excitement.

Because, while England's victory now puts them sixth in the table of nine Test-playing nations, 31 years is a long time in cricket. As it is in popular music.

On 15 July 1969, the number one record was "Something In The Air" by Thunderclap Newman. And that is a coincidence, because yesterday in Kennington I discerned something in the air once more. I think it was optimism for the future of English sport, although it might just have been lager fumes.