Cricket 2009

We - that is the right thinking, church-going, Telegraph-reading, sober, honest British natives - are thoroughly cheesed off with those alternative shots on Sky of lots of Indians shouting, screaming, gesticulating wildly.

Can't they be like us, get the missus to pack a few cheese and tomato sandwiches, take our golf umbrellas "just in case", wrap up warm even if May is out, settle in the same part of the ground that Dad brought us too all those years ago, and applaud quietly when fifty or a hundred comes up?

Cricket in this country is a sport - not like rugger, certainly not even remotely like Association Football with its transfers and those dreadful managers - made for the retired middle class, clinging to a tradition that goes back at least until the 1930s. In those days you could take a copy of The Guardian, read Neville Cardus - on music if necessary - sip your vacuum flask tea, and still take enough notice of the game to make an intelligent comment if one came across an old friend in the tea bar during lunch.

Sadly it has all changed. Sky, for a start. We think at the start of every summer that they will quieten down - remember those long silences from Jim Laker when cricket was quite properly on BBC - that they will not flash statistics - or stats as the 2009 generation has it - on the screen for a fifth of a second and then whisk them off and that they will tell David Lloyd to talk properly instead of doing a passable imitation of the lad who used to cut our lawn.

We had to get rid of the part-time gardener; nothing seems to make Lloyd go back to Accrington or whereever he first saw the light of day.

No, it's not like the old days.

Sometimes though we watch those gloating, hysterical, sub-continental faces full of joy at the sheer marvel of the action in front of them and wonder if we might have a stronger, winning England team if they had support like that.

Perhaps not. The game's the thing. Winning is not necessary for enjoyment at a cricket ground any more than a big price is part of the love of art, of opera, or the Telegraph crossword. It's all about tradition, debating David Gower's cover drive, or John Arlott bon mots, or what E W Swanton said in 1956.

As for showing your emotions, that is beyond the pale. Don't you just hate it when spectators demonstrate to anyone - absolutely anyone - that they care.

It is easy to blame the trade unions because they are responsible for all the changes in society. Cricket is just part of the damage that has changed lovely, quiet, peaceful England into the chaotic mess it is today.

Emigrating might be the answer but then we're told things are worse abroad. Take Australia for instance. Full, door to door, of Vietnamese and Thais and Greeks, compulsory voting, radio announcers apologising when the temperature is "only 19" and grown men wearing shorts and no ties.

Sad, really. I don't know what the old folks would have said if they had been forced to sit next to someone at a cricket ground who never opened his Telegraph but just watched the game and screamed - yes, screamed - every time a four is struck.

Disgusting.