Time to end ECB spin and give English cricket the governing body it deserves

“The world keeps on ending, but every year new people too dumb to know it show up as if the fun’s just started.” John Updike’s creation Harry Angstrom, antihero of the Rabbit novels, may have been musing on life as a weary middle-aged car salesman in rust‑belt America. But he could just as easily have been speculating on the fate of English cricket down the years: a sport that is always in crisis, that is always dying, that has been dying in some form since the day it was born.

No doubt the denizens of 18th-century Hambledon’s Broadhalfpenny Down spent their evenings sighing around the innkeeper’s fire about the collapse of batting techniques, the impatience of the young and how the whole thing will never survive the invention of the electric telegraph. Even the Ashes, Test cricket’s golden-age souvenir and commercial life force, was born out of a funeral rite.

Zoom out and it is tempting to conclude that End Times and lost idylls are English cricket’s natural state, a function of where it sits in the calendar, a sporting season that dies every autumn as the skies grow dark, where sunlit days are only ever snatched in between the gloom.

That drum has begun to beat a great deal louder in recent years. And with feeling now as the usual notes of doom coincide with genuine contraction and decay, the disappearance from schools, the marketing surveys that rank cricket just below lacrosse and eating sand in lists of favourite activities; along with hard, inconvertible evidence of racism, elitism, exclusion, a monoculture sealed behind its high garden wall. At what point do we reach critical mass?

For all the minor chords, there is something else here. As the current season revs on into high summer, as the crowd basks and boozes