“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.
