Stereotypes die hard. Consider the summer game, for instance. It is axiomatic to complain that cricket is a desperately conservative game, run by fuddy-duddies, inimitably hostile to reform or change or modernity.
If anything the pad is on the other leg; there are times when cricket’s rush to attract new audiences leaves one suspecting that the game’s presiding officers think the sport’s current audience is part of the problem. If you like things the way they are and have been you’re an obstacle to progress. Sometimes, at least in darker moments, you think cricket’s administrators are so caught up in and obsessed with the need to attract new fans they’d happily jettison the game’s existing admirers if that was the price of success. Too often, not just in England but almost wherever cricket is played, the people prepared to pay to attend test matches are treated terribly.
This, however, is not one of those days.
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