A visceral alarm cracked the grey skies above The Oval a couple of Mondays ago: "Standing up! To Stuart Broad!"
It came from a gaggle of spectators, 20-something blokes all, ranged in row 14 of the Peter May Stand, which curves elegantly - like May's bat used to do - to the right of the shabby-chic pavilion, named for the cheerfully shabby, never chic Micky Stewart.
Jonny Bairstow, broken finger or not, had snuggled up to the stumps at the Vauxhall End. Broad, a purveyor of pace uncomfortably north of medium for batsmen, wicketkeepers and close fielders alike, stood at the top of his run at the Pavilion End.
At the crease, KL Rahul, a hundred and more to the good, bent into his stance, tapped the pitch in anticipation, and waited.
A way away from all that in row 14, the conversation buzzed at a higher frequency than before. Did England think they had a serious chance of a stumping or were they simply trying to keep the enterprising Rahul from using his feet?
Was Broad - who had bowled 74 batsmen, trapped another 68 leg-before and had another 291 caught - honestly in the market for that stumping? Had boredom set in on the last day of a match that might be losing its zest?
The Oval is a good place for such nitty-gritty talk. It's a cricket person's cricket ground, where the game is thought about and discussed to an uncommonly deep level, and it's nothing like London's other famous ground, Lord's, where the quality of the canapés seems to draw more interest than the calibre of the captaincy.
In row 15 at The Oval that day, envy smouldered silently. It swirled in a South African who could hear the spectators in front of him pulling their debate this way and that, which they would do for the rest of the day's play and doubtless had done and would do on many other days under England's mostly dappled summer skies. They could talk about what they had come to watch: cricket, as in the stuff that happens in front of you and its myriad intricacies. And nothing else.
Transformation? What is that, exactly? Some kind of clumsily named Japanese car? Kolpak? Which Saffer have we signed this time? They're all decent, you know, and at almost R20 to the pound they'd be stupid not to sign up.
The Saffer in row 15 didn't want to be decent. He wanted to laugh out loud to get their attention.
And once he had it he wanted to point at them with the kind of rudeness that could get you moered good and proper in a Boksburg bar, slap his knee, and yell, "Ha! Brexit! Idiots!"
He did none of the above. Instead he listened to what cricket people talk about when they have the luxury of talking only about cricket.
As he did so, the ghosts of the present and, gulp, future, swooped and sniggered: AB de Villiers confirms he will play in the Pakistan Premier League; Johan Botha is a coach in the Caribbean Premier League and a player in the Big Bash League; Herschelle Gibbs is a head coach in the Afghanistan Premier League; David Miller has given up on every cricketer's dream of playing Tests; Simon Harmer, Morné Morkel and Kyle Abbott are among the top wicket-takers in county cricket; now Wayne Parnell has signed a Kolpak deal.
Is that just the way things go in a developing economy, or an unheard alarm for cricket in SA - wake up, your most important resource is draining away.
And what are you doing about it?
Do you really think we're fooled by what look increasingly like pie-in-the-sky promises of T20 tournaments that may or may not happen, that you failed to deliver a year ago, that now loom as pale imitations of something that never was, and that may result in you having the pin-striped pants sued off you?
Row 14? Are you listening? Quiet: here comes "Broadie" .....