CRICKET/Test match: Blot out the Hutton inquiry headlines and the price of beer and for almost three hours yesterday afternoon, as Mark Butcher stood impassively at the crease and pummelled the ball through the offside, it might have been two years ago.

Then Butcher, batting with a panache that had seemed beyond him, made an unbeaten 173 to beat Australia. It was the innings that elevated him from a cricketer with talent unfulfilled to the top echelons of the game. Since then, he has averaged the better part of 47 runs per innings.

Yesterday, under skies sufficiently leaden to produce extravagant seam movement and a half-hour stoppage for bad light during the final session, he added 77 to the century he scored at Trent Bridge last week.

It was an accomplished innings, that of a fellow secure in his role as a senior statesman, and one which has helped keep England in the fourth Test after South Africa had been dismissed finally for 342.

Together with Marcus Trescothick, Butcher added 142 at more than four runs per over for the second wicket after Michael Vaughan had been dismissed cheaply.

In this form, there is no more watchable batsman in the England side than Butcher. His clip through mid-wicket off Dewald Pretorius and the chop through backward point that followed it as the bowler adjusted length and line - a stroke played as if it were an old-fashioned policeman cuffing an apple-scrumper round the ear - were among the shots of the day.

They could only be matched perhaps by Butcher's drive which was eased just to the onside of straight and down the hill to the dressing-rooms as Andrew Hall went round the wicket.

One more delivery was dispatched to the mid-wicket fence in the following over, but it was to be his 11th and final boundary. The following delivery from Jacques Kallis was outside off stump and moving away towards the slips. Butcher pushed gently and edged to Mark Boucher.

It is 23 innings and more than a year since Trescothick last made a century for England, but he battled hard for almost three hours yesterday. He overcame some early problems as the new ball nipped and skipped about to play with more freedom, making 59 before Kallis took a remarkably agile caught-and-bowled chance.

Butcher was dismissed by Kallis shortly before the light closed in terminally with 16 overs still remaining, but a bristling Nasser Hussain had already hit three boundaries in his 14 as England reached 197 for three, still 145 adrift of South Africa. An excellent game is developing.

This should be a low-scoring game but none of the five England pacemen was able to finish the South African innings when the series perhaps was there to be won.

The last three wickets added 200 runs, with Gary Kirsten falling for 130 and Monde Zondeki preceding him for 59.

South Africa's response was significantly worse, however. Their bowlers were unable to come to terms with the length or direction demanded by the increasingly pockmarked and erratic surface and Shaun Pollock was missed dreadfully.