The deserted village green: is this the end of cricket as we know it?

Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to developers, the countryside is ingrained in our collective consciousness as our unspoiled national haven. It is Albion’s Garden of Eden, with its Holy Trinity of village church, local pub and cricket ground.

Englishness itself, as much as cricket, is the main theme of Michael Henderson’s genre-melding

And That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket. The title alludes to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Going, Going’, and the last summer was 2019, when Henderson, sportswriter and cultural critic, took a journey around the cricket grounds of his past.

The international summer was glorious: England won the World Cup at Lord’s (on a typically incomprehensible technicality) and drew a thrilling Ashes series. But now the sport is on the brink of a defining moment. In a few months’ time — national health permitting — the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) is launching a new competition into an already packed schedule. It’s a jazzed-up, short form of the game called The Hundred, and is aimed at the non-cricketing public. It could have come straight out of an ECB version of W1A.

The plan is to arrest an alarming slide in the popularity of cricket amongst the young. ‘Cricket, the game of summer,’ writes Henderson, ‘is now ranked the eighth most popular sport in English secondary schools, behind football, rugby, swimming, athletics and — this takes some believing — basketball, netball and rounders.’

The problem, then, is real. But there’s a chance the ECB’s proposal will kill traditional cricket — and with it, Henderson implies, Englishness itself. Furthermore, The Hundred will symbolically mark the moment when cricket becomes urban rather than rural.