Is a summer without cricket truly summer at all?

I suppose most of us have a hole or two in our lives right now. This is a time of absence; a hollow period in which time seems congealed. Every so often we receive a fresh reminder of all that’s missing. One such came to me this week as Cricket Scotland confirmed there will be no league cricket played here this summer.

Perhaps some local mini-leagues or knock-out cups will be organised in late summer and perhaps it will be different, and happier, elsewhere in the cricketing realm but, as matters stand, right now and right here, this feels like a strange kind of bereavement. Speaking for myself, I had been looking forward to playing in Perthshire and Derbyshire and the County Kildare and many points in between. Most, perhaps all, of that is gone now; the annual pilgrimage to Lords or Old Trafford or the Oval looks equally in doubt. A lost year beckons.

Sport is only sport, which is why it matters. At its purest, it affords an escape to an Elysian playing field every bit as stuffed with life as anything in literature or music or art. All the stories are there and all the heroes and villains too. For those initiated into the magic, a great test series – 1902, 1932-33, 1981, 2005 and many others – is a Homeric proposition.

In this country and in a handful of others, cricket is the quintessence of summer. This is so even if other pastimes are more popular. It is the summer game. Its absence, at both professional and amateur level, threatens to cancel summer.

For many of us, the familiar rhythms of Test Match Special (less Michael Vaughan please, by the way) and of the county championship – Somerset’s maiden title must wait another year – are the season’s guide-ropes. We may not be lost without them but we are strangely discombobulated nonetheless.

The yearning for it is palpable. The BBC and Sky have been rebroadcasting great matches from the past and this has allowed the congregation to gather afresh and revisit past epics. This has been lovely even though we know it is only the best available substitute for the real thing. Facsimile has never seemed so charming.

What do they know of England who only cricket know? Well, indeed. But what do they know of England – and Australia and India and Pakistan and other places too – who know nothing of cricket? Frank Keating, doyen of this parish’s sportswriting pages, wrote of his hero Tom Graveney that he was ‘blossom susceptible to frost but breathing in the sunshine’ and much the same could be said of cricket too.

But then cricket, and perhaps especially English cricket, often runs to elegiac pessimism. A casual browsing of recent titles demonstrates as much. There’s Duncan Hamilton’s The Last English Summer and then, this year, Michael Henderson’s That Will Be England Gone and, lately, there has been a noticeable uptick in attention paid to the cricketers of 1914 and 1939. The sweet and uncertain pleasure of a cricket-filled summer is forever menaced by darkening skies. It is a game forever on the brink.

This can be overdone. The game has always embraced change; it has progressed without loving progress. And while they did things differently in the past, they did not always do them better. The grotesque division between Gentlemen and Players scarred and shamed English cricket for a century. It only ended in 1962. English cricket has often been worthy of Orwell’s definition of England itself as ‘a family with the wrong members in control’.

As Derek Birley, cricket’s most bracing historian, noted, ‘cricket mythology requires us to believe in progression from rustic innocence to a golden age, followed by a decline’. We must guard against this and, helpfully, last summer’s spectaculars provide an antidote. In many ways, professional cricket in England has rarely been in better health. Grounds are sold out for international cricket and for county T20 cricket too. The sport has an audience that loves the game even if that audience sometimes seems to be viewed with suspicion by those charged with promoting and running the game.

How else to explain The Hundred, a form of cricket explicitly marketed to those who do not like cricket? A variant of the sport that unavoidably, deliberately, tells its existing audience they are not good enough. If there is any consolation now, it is that this affront has been cancelled for the year. The Hundred is a rebuke to cricket’s existing audience; its success would be problematic.

And this should have been a summer of growth anyway. England’s World Cup triumph and an Ashes series that, though drawn, contained a Stokesian spectacular to be remembered for the ages, should have been a kickstarting moment for the game here. This season should have been an opportunity to build upon that glorious year. Instead, cricket is frozen or rusting or any other way you wish to put it. There is a sense, typically, of being cheated here; a sense in which the answer to the internet question ‘why can’t we have nice things?’ is ‘because that’s cricket, chum’.

Still, if the professional game remains, by and large, in rude health the same cannot quite be said of its amateur counterpart. The problems are familiar and longstanding. My father gave me the game but that gift was supported by test matches and, crucially, county cricket on the BBC. Ian Botham and Viv Richards helped but television was an essential factor and Sunday afternoons were devoted to the John Player League.

Changed times, of course, and cricket will never again fill a third or a quarter of all the television being broadcast at any particular moment. We are all multichannel and multiplatform now. But that, in turn, reinforces the urgency of chasing the largest possible audience even if this is not necessarily the most lucrative one. The problem is not the product; the problem is the distribution.

To which must be added, of course, the near-total collapse of cricket in the state education system. Clubs across the country do their best but, as a general rule, they are more likely to recruit children who already have a family connection to the game. Those less blessed in this regard are the real prize.

For some of us, ineptitude is part of the point too. This is not only a matter of self-serving argument. Unlike its American cousin baseball, cricket is a game to be played and not merely watched. It is not just for the elite; it is for the village too. I have taken part in fixtures in which the protagonists ranged in age from 10 to 70 and this is hardly unusual. On such occasions, the thread connecting generations is a tangible thing.

Now there are old men who will never play again and youngsters who miss out on this formative year may slip away from cricket too. There must be many clubs secretly wondering if they will return in 2021. Cricket is a demanding idiosyncrasy; it asks plenty of its congregation. It is not for everyone and that is fine but those who love it do so deeply and with a keen awareness of cricket’s fragility. In a world busy getting busier, cricket must fight for the right to have its own rhythm; its own pace; its own place in the sun.

But this looks like being a sunless summer. Perhaps some cricket will be played and whatever survives of the season will be seized upon as a precious treat but it will not quite replace what is being lost. We who miss cricket are not so foolish as to claim its absence is the worst of this emergency. Of course not. Yet we miss it dearly, keenly, piercingly, nonetheless and it feels as though this matters. There is only scant consolation to be drawn from the fact we know we are not the only people feeling this.

The ‘cricket tragic’ – to use the brusque but splendid Australian term – is a necessary part of summer’s song. He – or, ever more often and happily so these days, she – is part of the thread that runs from Lords and MCC to even the humblest, dogshit-strewn, council park. The eternal number 11, never trusted to bowl and always banished to fine leg, is a familiar member of every club; hopeless and always keener than common-sense suggests should be plausible. For they also serve who cannot be trusted in any of the game’s three elements.

And the tales told, rosier by the telling, of that perfect cover drive, that improbable yet imperishable six, that once-in-a-lifetime catch, that perfect arm ball or, contrarily, the worst umpiring decision in the history of the game – ‘howzat dad?’, ‘That’s out, son’ – the shameful lengths to which some will go to prevail, or the most hapless piece of fielding since, well, the last one. All become legendary as the years roll by; warmed and polished until they become less a concrete piece of personal or club history than an expression of some platonic ideal of how this part of the game might be played for better, or often, for worse.

There will be few such moments this summer for this will be a summer largely bereft of tales. The professionals, for now, must do without their livelihood but perhaps – in some ways – they suffer less than the tragic for whom this summer has a hole of a different kind. A curious absence in which all the familiar markers of the season have been uprooted or misplaced, leaving only this melancholy thought: is a summer without cricket truly summer at all?