Does Andrew Strauss See Chris Gayle in His Sleep?

At first it looked like we might get away with it. Chris Gayle's comments about not really caring if Test cricket went away and we just did Twenty20 were alarming. But by now we have got quite good at just blotting out that sort of talk. This time was different though: Gayle also had a message for Andrew Strauss. "Tell him don't sleep with Chris on his mind," he said. And this is the line that has lingered horribly. Not surprisingly, as it's the single most menacing thing any sports person has ever said. "Don't sleep with Chris on his mind." You can try saying it in a Mickey Mouse voice, or a Margaret Thatcher. It still emerges as a deathly whisper.

It seemed inevitable that Strauss would be dismissed by Gayle's bowling on the first morning of the current Test. And, as the England captain slouched off, he did look like someone who sleeps with Chris on his mind, a man who turns on the light in the wee hours and sees Chris staring back at him in the bathroom mirror, who pours his Shreddies at daybreak and glances down to find he's raising a spoonful of tiny sugar-frosted Chris's to his mouth.

It isn't just Strauss. Sleeping with Chris on your mind is a wider affliction among those of us with any emotional investment in watching England trying to come to terms with the new cricket. And until now there has been some vague hope that Twenty20 might just go away, that it might be one of those worrying new things that turns out to be not really a big deal after all. This does happen. For a period during the late 1990s sushi seemed important. It wasn't enough just to be able to eat it without making a face. You also had to know stuff about it. But this duly passed and these days sushi can be avoided, and even tentatively jeered at. The hope was that Twenty20 might turn out like sushi. But that won't happen now because Gayle is right. English cricket does sleep with Chris on its mind, plus all those other frightening new things out there: the thrusting leotarded crotch of the Bangalore Cheese-Graters and the irreversible devaluing of long, cold afternoons spent standing around in a field in Cumbria.

In the end you do start to wonder if sleeping with Chris – Twenty20 genius Chris, wild, ball-beating Chris – on their mind might be just the thing our dear old fusty cricketers need. Ian Bell: couldn't he do with a dream-life Chris-osmosis, a night-time Chris injection? How can we make this happen? Usually the trick is to think really hard about the thing you want to dream about just before you go to sleep. I tried it this week, but I kept accidentally thinking about whippy first-change seamer Lionel Baker instead and having a dream where he makes a haunting clay model of my head. The last few nights I've gone further and stuck a life-sized photocopy of Gayle's face directly over mine just before lights out. I've even tried saying "Chris ... Chris Gayle" a few times as I lie there trying to go to sleep. Nothing to report so far, although my wife has seemed a little distant.

For Strauss and Bell it might be better to prepare a bedside Chris pot-pourri (I imagine he smells of light, floral male grooming products). Then just close your eyes and drift off. Think about clouting the inducking yorker miles over cow corner during a rain-interrupted seven-over run chase. And don't, whatever you do, have nightmares.