Restless fretting about cricket’s health could be its great strength

Summer came late in 1906, and the spring, harried by a keen north-east wind, hardly stopped at all. May was cold and grey, frosty till the third Sunday. It was dismal weather for cricket. The season started on Wednesday the 2nd, but no one came to watch. Lord’s was empty. The Oval was empty. Old Trafford was empty. The press began to fret. On 27 May the Observer published a leader called The Necessity for Cricket Reform. It asked if the game had outlived its popularity. “Matches are being finished, but the crowds do not come,” the editorial read. “Cricket seems to have grown too old fashioned for these go-ahead times.”

The Observer wasn’t the only one worrying. The next year’s Wisden recalled “all sorts of gloomy forebodings”. Until “the sun came out and all was well”. By the far side of the summer, England was in the middle of a long, late heatwave. George Hirst did the double-double of 2,000 runs and 200 wickets, but Yorkshire were still pipped by Kent, who won 11 championship matches in a row, thanks in part to their brilliant young all-rounder Frank Woolley. It was one of the great seasons of the Golden Age, and when it was over, “no more was heard as to cricket being on the wane”.

All this is just another reminder that cricket has always had a morbid obsession with its own death. As if this thanatophobia is a natural consequence of following the game, the inevitable upshot of a sport that leaves you so much time to stew, is so closely yoked to the coming and going of summer, and so dependent on the vagaries of the weather. The anxiety gets to be infectious. I suffer from it myself. It comes on stronger with age, perhaps because we never care for the sport so much as we did when we first came to it, so, looking back, it always seems less to us now than it did then.

Even in 1906, the administrators and journalists were fussing and fretting over it, rethinking it and tinkering with the regulations to try to make it more appealing. In 1900 the MCC changed the length of an over, in 1904 there was a proposal to launch a new knockout competition for the counties, in 1905 they considered scrapping the toss, and in 1906 WG Grace argued the championship should be split into two divisions. There were running debates right through the decade about how many Test matches should be played, and how long they should last.

Which are all ideas we’re still turning over now, a century later. In the these last few weeks, the International Cricket Council has said that it is considering whether or not to scrap the toss in the new Test championship, there has been a push from within English cricket to get rid of the County Championship’s two divisions and replace them with regional conferences, and the England and Wales Cricket Board has, of course, announced it wants to change the length of an over so it can launch a new domestic competition. South Africa have already played a four-day Test. Cricket has been going on so long that there’s nothing new left under the sun.

This lingering suspicion that the game is an anachronism is not entirely unique to cricket. It runs through its cousin game of baseball, too. The writer Susan Jacoby has just published a book about it, Why Baseball Matters. Just like cricket, baseball is worried that it’s losing the young audience; it has the oldest, whitest crowd of any major US sport. Nearly six out of 10 fans for nationally televised baseball games are white men over 55. Compare that with YouGov’s sketch of the English cricket fan, who, compared to similar groups, is particularly likely to be a rightwing male, over 55, and well-to-do.

The MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, tells Jacoby he is convinced that the “three-hour-plus length of the average baseball game” is “a major problem for young fans”. Jacoby believes that “the aging of baseball’s audience is largely attributable to the profound dissonance between a culture saturated with devices that offer instant gratification and a sport that requires intense, sustained concentration”. Baseball’s problem, she argues, is that “it derives much of its enduring appeal from a style of play and adherence to tradition very much at odds with our current culture”. It is, as the Observer put it in 1906, “too old-fashioned for these go-ahead times”.

Last week the ICC held a seminar in Dubai to talk over its global strategy. It presented a “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats” analysis. It was a provocative document, designed as a starting point for the discussion. It listed the “time it takes to complete the game” as one of the weaknesses, flagged up T10 cricket as both a threat and an opportunity. It even went as far as to ask “Why does cricket exist – what’s its primary purpose in society?” Which sounds less like a threat, and more like an existential crisis.

Maybe cricket’s restless fretting about its own status is one of the game’s great strengths, a quality that has caused it to adapt and evolve, the reason we’re still playing and watching it all these years later. Certainly it seems to have been the backdrop to every other English summer since the sport started. We worry away at it until the sun comes out again. They say it will be shining when the first Test starts at Lord’s on Thursday. The crowds will be out, the international season under way, and all of a sudden, for those precious few hours, everything will seem right with the game.

• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.