Cricket's return should be cherished despite loyalist alienation

I sometimes think cricket clubs should charge admittance by the hour, since they’re providing therapy for the dyspeptic and shelter for the eremitic. The sport ought to be considered one of the lesser key-worker services, essential to the mood and temper of households across the country.

The season finally gets under way on Wednesday, when the first Test between England and West Indies starts in Southampton. County cricket is three weeks behind it. Things will run easier now, with Sky Sports on in the corner or Test Match Special playing in the background, the over-by-over up on the desktop. Life will be a little better for the people who love the game and a little more bearable for the people who live with them.

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It’s only half a joke. There is a passage in Duncan Hamilton’s new book, One Long and Beautiful Summer, where he describes his attempt to self‑medicate his depression by taking a spur‑of‑the‑moment trip to New Road to watch Sachin Tendulkar bat in a warm-up match between India and Worcestershire in 2002.

“The whim on which it was made disguised a little desperation,” Hamilton writes. “Every turning in life seemed to be the wrong one then. Often the old Black Dog meant there was no recognisable shape to my life; everything was warped somehow, like your reflection in a fairground mirror. Heading to Worcester to watch Sachin Tendulkar was my search for a cure. Having successfully used cricket as a pharmacy before, I was doing so again.”

There will be people who think this strange behaviour, others of us who know exactly what he was looking for and who will find some small measure of it again when play starts on Wednesday.

Hamilton has won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize three times, for his biographies of Brian Clough, Harold Larwood and Neville Cardus. One Long and Beautiful Summer is his “elegy for red-ball cricket”. It’s a short and beautiful book. I read it back to back with another, similar, work, this one a longer requiem, by the former Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent Michael Henderson, That Will Be England Gone: the Last Summer of English Cricket. Hamilton and Henderson play in very different styles but there are points when they land on the same notes. They even turn up in the same places to write about the same games.

Which is a gag, given the size of some of the crowds. Counties could, perhaps, start offering special packages catering to all their spectators working on wistful reminiscences mourning the slow death of the game. I’d take one up myself, soon enough.

Cricket, and English cricket in particular, always had this melancholy bent, which might be why it’s a draw for us depressives. Its literature can be thanatophobic, it frets about the idea of its own death, which seems to have been looming over it pretty much every summer since the seven years’ war. But still, unless you want to take the lazy way out and dismiss all this as the work of men shouting at clouds, it’s worth stopping to think about why two prominent writers felt compelled to publish these books at the same time. The answer is that they’ve been driven to do it by the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Hamilton says he wanted to “wring out, drop by drop” English cricket’s last summer before the Hundred lands “on top of the game like a grand piano falling from space”. He knows how this sounds, knows people wailed about the Gillette Cup and the John Player League and T20, too, a format he’s grown to like.

“But the Hundred feels different”, it is “more than just a little reorganisation of the summer’s furniture. It is a reinvention of the domestic English game”. The Hundred won’t necessarily finish the County Championship but it will marginalise it and “fading into irrelevance can only be next”.

That was Henderson’s starting point, too. “It comes down to this stark, astonishing fact,” he writes. “For the first time in the history of professional sport a game is being changed by the people who run it for the notional benefit of those who are not interested. The Hundred is a cozening of the counting house, passed off as a necessity. Meanwhile, those odd people who do love the game, and cannot understand that necessity, are painted as reactionaries. As many of them have not been slow to respond, there is quite a lot to react against.”

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Given that, he writes, “it seemed an appropriate time to saddle up Rocinante” and “revisit some of the places where I learned to love cricket”.

Are they tilting at windmills? They’re certainly serving an audience of men and women who likely already agree with them. But, as Henderson writes: “There are more of those than modern tastemakers suppose.” What comes through is just how much they love this sport and how that love has led them to be so angry with the people who run it. It is, and always will be, extraordinary that the ECB has managed to infuriate quite so many of its constituents.

The break caused by the pandemic might have been a chance for ECB to reconsider all this. Instead, it feels like the coming recession will make the board more determined to push on with it. Best enjoy these next few months of cricket, the solace they offer may be harder to find this time next year.