The forecast looks grim as climate crisis knocks cricket for six

“L ike most cricketers, I just want a peaceful life,” says Xeena Cooper, a member of Bristol’s Extinction Rebellion Cricket Club, hitting a ball around in Hyde Park in the spring sunshine. “I don’t want to feel guilty or anxious or uncertain about the future of the game.

“Cricket is the perfect vehicle for climate action, because the communities who congregate around cricket have our differences but we all share one thing, which is love. And the spirit of the game is exactly what we need to cherish and amplify at this point in history.”

The club are in London as part of the Big One, a long weekend of climate protest involving more than 200 groups and headed by Extinction Rebellion, who stepped back from their policy of civil disobedience at the start of the year. XRCC spent much of Friday afternoon once the rain had eased playing cricket on Parliament Square with an ever-changing gang of enthusiastic children.

Earlier in the week, another cricket fan with climatic fears stood up at Lord’s to speak at the annual Wisden dinner. Peter Frankopan is the professor of global history at Oxford University and author of the weighty new book The Earth Transformed. It is a history of humankind through a climate lens, and ends in a vision one reviewer described as “not so much pessimistic as quasi-apocalyptic”.

His Wisden speech laid out the challenges facing cricket as the climate crisis thunders towards us, with much of the cricketing world in its direct line of sight. Already this spring, Asia is frying under a record-breaking heatwave. Delhi reached a temperature of 40.4 degrees on Tuesday and six Indian cities crashed through the 44-degree barrier.

Climate scientists have also predicted that this could be the year where summer