IT’S NOT CRICKET. In the old days, sometime in the distant past, cricketers played by the spirit of the game – no sledging, no cheating, no questioning of the umpire’s decision. Now it’s all different: dominated by financial demands, professional in its cynicism. The spirit of the game is endangered.

All that wishful thinking is nostalgic nonsense. Even if the participants then were divided into gentlemen (amateurs) and players (professional), the sport was ‘never a gentlemen’s game’ – to cite the title of Malcolm Knox’s masterful account of international cricket’s first forty years (Hardie Grant, 2012). It was fierce, often ruthless, highly contested, politically riven, with players looking for every advantage and potential pay-off. It is just that we like to think, looking at what we see now, it could once have been somehow different and better.