This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Only the English could have invented a summer sport that can’t actually be played for large chunks of the English summer. Dry weather, which cannot be relied upon in Britain at any time of the year, is unfortunately rather fundamental to cricket.

Each year Wisden, the cricket-lover’s bible now on its 161st annual edition, includes a review of the previous season’s weather. The hours of play each county team has lost to rain are meticulously recorded: in 2023, Yorkshire was worst affected with 106 and a half hours wiped out whilst Hampshire fared best with just 40 hours and 15 minutes rained off.

For a people with such a fixation on the weather, cricket seems a perfect fit. So it remains our great summer game, notwithstanding the fun of the Wimbledon fortnight and the ever-expanding reach of football, which now gives up just a few weeks in July for other sports to take the spotlight.

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In many ways, cricket is in rude health. Each of the six test matches held in England each year is sold out, or close enough, even when tickets for many seats now cost well north of £100. The Roses match between Lancashire and Yorkshire, the Cheltenham cricket festival and the Eton–Harrow match may not be the great society gatherings they once were. (An older acquaintance of mine recounts his embarrassment, attending the latter event in the 1960s, to behold his Austrian mother arrive dressed in her most exquisite outfit, already perhaps forty years out of date in her estimation of the grandeur of the occasion.)

But the Test matches, particularly at Lord’s, continue to rank with Wimbledon and Royal Ascot as sporting occasions that transcend mere sport — in a way that no football matches quite do.

It is impossible to guarantee that amateur cricket will maintain its rich presence in English summer life

The national team, too, is faring well. The past 12 months have seen the retirement of two all-time greats in Stuart Broad and James Anderson, but the team still contains two more in the form of Ben Stokes and Joe Root. Stokes as captain and Brendon McCullum as coach have caught the nation’s imagination with their hard-driving “Bazball”, prioritising entertainment over results. The purists resent the relentless aggression with which this team plays — but who could deny that the tied Ashes of 2023 provoked more interest, column inches and sheer joy than the more clinical but less colourful England victories of some previous series?

The professional domestic game has benefitted from innovations of its own. Matches in the Twenty20 Blast routinely attract crowds of thousands, even at the smaller grounds such as Derby. Livestreams of the County Championship allow fans to tune in from their homes, their desks or their phones, dipping in and out over the four days over which the games unfold; I have a friend who regularly WhatsApps me from his home in Jerusalem commenting on the nuances of Middlesex’s team selection, bowling changes and field settings.

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What of the amateur game? “In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone,” wrote Lord Denning in 1977 as he declared in a seminal Court of Appeal judgment that homeowners who set up home next to a cricket pitch cannot sue to stop that pitch from being used to play cricket. “Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch.”

Walk through the English countryside on a Saturday or Sunday, and there is every chance you will come across a village game. (Find the grounds in winter, and you will see a small slice of summer: many village pavilions don’t bother to put their clocks back to GMT in October, reasoning that to do so would be redundant given there will be no games before BST resumes in March.)

Much amateur cricket is deadly serious: the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) claims to oversee 5,500 different clubs, many of which have multiple teams of both sexes, and the final of the Village Cup is played at Lord’s. Last year Milford Hall, of Staffordshire, narrowly beat Leeds & Broomfield (from Kent not Yorkshire).

But it is at the lowest level — where the word “amateur” can truly be used as an insult, not merely a descriptor — that the cricketing summer takes its finest form.

Nothing unites the British like cheerful failure. Members of the No. 10 cricket team boast that they have never won a game; we shall see if their embrace of happy mediocrity survives the recent change of regime. At this level, where captains sometimes bring on their worst bowlers to avoid winning too heavily in an uneven game, the vaunted “spirit of cricket” shines.

But there is danger ahead. Cricket’s current status is built on increasingly shaky foundations. The seeds were sown by the ECB in the latter years of the Blair premiership: in 2003, the board came up with Twenty20 cricket, the bite-sized form of the game which takes around three hours rather than a day or more. The next year, it signed a deal to move Test cricket broadcasts from Channel 4 to Sky Sports.

The rise of T20 has exported some welcome innovations to other forms of the game, in particular a sharp improvement in the skill level shown by fielders. But the hold that it has established on most cricketing countries — particularly India — has fundamentally transformed the basis on which global cricket has been organised for a century.

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For the vast majority of professional players, it is now more lucrative to play in T20 “franchise” leagues than for their country — let alone for an English county, Australian state or Caribbean island.

England’s Sam Curran was paid $2.2m to sign for Punjab Kings in the Indian Premier League this year; he could be forgiven for not caring that he has not been picked for a Test match since 2021. Because each league takes up no more than a month or two, their number has expanded even with a static pool of players. Andre Russell, a preternaturally talented all-rounder, has played for almost two dozen different T20 teams around the world including in the USA, UAE and Canada (and for the West Indies Test team — once).

The quality of franchise cricket can be higher than international level, as has always been true in football; the upshot is empty stadiums even at major tournaments like the recent T20 World Cup, and a cricketing economy based around television audiences, mostly in the subcontinent.

Outside England, India and Australia, it is now rare for Test series to last longer than two games, let alone the five or six once common. The West Indies, so feared in the second half of the 20th century, were first to decline; they are now being followed by South Africa and Sri Lanka, and there is every chance that New Zealand and Pakistan will be next. The three giants remain as strong as ever in the longest form — but how long can England pack out Test grounds at home if there are only a couple of teams who can put up decent competition?

The T20 revolution has wrought its work on the county game. Notwithstanding robust interest in the four-day Championship, it has been pushed to the margins of the summer: this year, just four out of 14 rounds of fixtures are being played in June, July or August. The best domestic players no longer take part in one-day cricket at all, ordered instead to focus on T20 and the Hundred — an even shorter form dreamed-up by the ECB to appeal to children. It is easy to see the pipeline of Test cricketers drying up in the coming years, as young stars respond rationally to the incentives and priorities put before them.

Taking cricket off free-to-air TV may have an even worse effect on the game’s status as our summer sport, reaching as it does to all levels. In return for a cash boost in the short to medium term, the ECB has gambled away the future of the game.

On the first day of James Anderson’s final Test match in early July, Sky Sports recorded a viewership of just under 700,000; that same day, by comparison, the BBC’s coverage of the Wimbledon quarter-finals attracted more than 2.4 million, and ITV’s showing of the Euro 2024 semi-final was watched by more than 20 million people.

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What is the upshot? It is obvious: children and young adults who have never been able to watch cricket have little interest in it. Why would they? Only a small minority of state school pupils can play proper matches, and even in public schools the cricket season has shrunk as an obsession with exam results has grown.

Yes, there are bright spots: cricket for women and girls is growing at all levels, and in many areas the British Asian community is keeping the sport alive. But it is impossible to guarantee that amateur cricket — so unsuited to a world where people find themselves ever busier — will maintain its rich presence in English summer life.

Nostalgia is dangerous. Now, no less than 200 years ago, there are few more magnificent sights than a cricket pitch towards the end of the day, dappled with the long, spiky shadows of an English summer. Cricket will not die. But as the game grows up, will it be leaving home?