Cricket has adapted and survived for centuries, but a new struggle over control – combined with climate pressures – may test the game in ways it has not faced before.

Cricket is always in crisis. Some say it was lucky to survive beyond the Victorian era. During the 1950s and 1960s it became boringly defensive as rates of scoring plummeted and the game’s entertainment value declined. Then in the 1970s it was roiled by the Packer revolution, which was a war between ‘establishment’ and private control and became a battle between Tests and one-dayers for spectators. Now there is a battle between cricket run by national boards and by franchise-based T20 tournaments of great popular appeal. Climate change might also pose problems.

Can the game survive its latest challenges? Cricket has survived many crises by adapting and evolving. The changes it has gone through have kept it alive and popular but challenges remain, as they always have.

Cricket developed into what we today might recognise as cricket during the latter decades of the eighteenth century in the south of England. Nobles and the gentry largely fashioned it. Then the game spread to London, where business interests became involved, and in the 1800s it spread further to northern England and the working class. It became the game of the people in England.

On the wave of colonisation it spread to Australia, the Indian sub-continent, Africa, the Caribbean and New Zealand. Outside the Caribbean, it never quite took hold in the........

© Pearls and Irritations