Jason Roy’s Stateside jaunt the inevitable endgame for cricket as we know it

T here was something weirdly gripping about the sight of the Sky Sports punditry team reacting live on a deliciously sun-dappled Oval outfield to the news on Thursday that Jason Roy has accepted an offer to play in the new US-based T20 league, in the process ripping up the last few months of his England contract.

This is both something and nothing, a tell, a symptom, a creaking of the weather vane. Such has been the pace of change in the wider super-structure, cricket’s ossified old board-led calendar blown simply away by a series of pop-up leagues conjured out of the air on fumes and paychecks, that it already feels like an inevitability.

Here we have the irresistible triumph of global hyper-capitalism, as expressed via Andre Russell inside-edging a flat muscle-six over long-on while the man on commentary who just shouts “wow!” shouts “wow!” and an advert for industrial-grade sealing compound scrolls across the eyeballs of half a billon captive consumers.

Not that you’d know it from the telly. The key message from the Sky team, still out there passing the port to the left as the windows shatter, the chandelier falls into the soup tureen, and Sid James brushes the dust from his epaulettes, is that it’s all fine, that this is all very mature and grown-up, that nothing of any great significance is happening here.

This is not a criticism. The other side of this, the end of the world as we know it stuff, will be forcefully put elsewhere. It was instead fascinating and instructive to hear what Eoin Morgan, Ian Ward and Mark Butcher thought, because all three know how it feels to navigate the life of an international cricketer, the most capricious of alleged team sports, and an enterprise riddled with pitfalls, bogus