The state of play

New season, old problems: falling attendances, fusty attitudes, disasters both on and off the field.

But how is English cricket ever to pull itself out of the familiar spiral of decline? And how does Mark Ramprakash fit in? Robert Winder reports

IT'S APRIL. The clocks have changed. The air smells of spring flowers, and the woods are full of bluebells. The sun, when it appears, is almost warm. Blackbirds twitter in the hedgerows, and cherry blossom showers onto suburban pavements like confetti. There's a familiar smell in the air: canvas, grass, wood, oil and leather. In the mornings you can hear lawnmowers, and in the lengthening evenings people are gathering in pub gardens and spilling beer on the Tarmac. Yes, it is that special time of year: the beginning of the cricket season.

Hmmm. It might have been possible to write that kind of stuff a decade or two ago, but these days it sounds merely quaint. Beginning? What beginning? England have only just finished a tense series in the Caribbean. And quite apart from the team's up-and-down performance out there in the sunshine, cricket has been making headlines off the field as well. The resignation of Mike Atherton has confronted the powers-that-be with an intriguing choice, and the vibrancy of one-day cricket now poses interesting problems in terms of selection and attitude: if the one-day team can score 300 runs in 50 overs, how come the Test side so often makes heavy weather of 200 in a full day?

Cricket has been making headlines behind the scenes, too: first over the MCC's embarrassing failure to admit women, and then, even more odiously, through the scandal surrounding the sacking of the pregnant secretary at the England Cricket Board. Cricket, in other words, is a year-round circus and a year-long story. It is foolish to pretend that it "begins", in any meaningful sense, among April showers. The only thing that begins now is county cricket, and that is a different matter. To many (if not most) cricket fans, our domestic cricket season has long since ceased to be a stimulating competition in itself; on the contrary, it is a hindrance, the time-consuming reason why our national eleven does not perform better.

Nothing exposes our season's anachronistic nature more than the way it starts: with the coming week's warm-up games against the universities. The contrast between the drumming, all-seater pressure of the one-day internationals on television last week, and the tranquil, walk-the-dog atmosphere of these games is a pointed reminder that our first-class game does not prepare players for the international arena. Michael Atherton's last act as captain was to aim a parting shot at the "mediocrity" which England's domestic season produces. He is by no means the first to make such a charge. And we can be sure that he will not be the last, either.

This season will feature, for the first time, a system whereby a top- half finish in the county championship will earn counties a place in a new play-off tournament. But this will only exacerbate the larger problem, which is that we continue to put quantity above quality, and regard professionalism as the ability not to turn it on but simply to turn up, day after day after day. Even football has the sense to launch its season (which these days starts about three weekends after the end of the old one) with a bang: a charity play-off at Wembley. If cricket did the same, we would kick off this week with a one-day gala at Lord's between the county champions and the NatWest winners. It would be both a big occasion and a proper game. As it is, even keen cricket fans are never sure when the season actually begins; it splutters into life, with a few ignorable matches, like a motor failing to ignite first time.

In recent years there have been many proposals for a restructuring - a two-division championship, a six-zone regional competition, the contracting of the best players to the national board instead of the counties, and so on. Most of these ideas have foundered on the doggedness of the game's rulers (the counties) to keep things roughly the way they are. One can sympathise with this desire: county cricket is an ancient and lovely thing. But quite apart from the fact that inter- county rivalry carries almost no bite in these peripatetic days, the season badly lacks a competitive edge - most years the championship is decided by rain, and it is well-known that he who wins the toss wins the Nat West.

There are growing murmurs about the structure of international cricket, too. Lengthy overseas tours, featuring repeated tussles between the same opposition, might not forever satisfy the high-octane demands of the television companies who now finance, and increasingly pull the strings, of the world game. In the jet age there is no logistical need for tours to be shaped according to the timetables of steamships. So inevitably there is gossip about the possible formation of an international cricket league, or ladder, which would allow Test-match cricket to be an ongoing tournament rather than a series of inconsequential one-offs.

All of which means that we had better appreciate this English summer - its deckchairs, its rugs-over-the-knees, tea-out-of-a-Thermos charm - on the grounds that there may be few such seasons left to enjoy. Change, it needs to be said, has been in the air for years; and so too has pessimism: Wisden has been announcing the death of English cricket for more than a century now. And while it is tempting to hold the county grind responsible for the breakdown of so many promising English bowlers, it doesn't seem to have done Ambrose and Walsh much harm. Still, the financial facts are hard to contest: county cricket is no longer much-loved. More spectators go to Manchester United on an average Saturday than pass through the turnstiles of some counties in an entire season.

It was impossible not to think of these besetting problems last month, when Mark Ramprakash suddenly flew out of his chrysalis and fluttered into view as a top-class international batsman. His talent has never been disputed: when he first blew onto the scene at Middlesex, his impressed colleagues thought him a prodigy, like the Indian teenager Sachin Tendulkar. So it was tempting, in the following years, to see his inability to dominate the international scene as primarily a managerial failure. Often, it was said that he was moody, difficult, too weak psychologically to cope with the strain of it all. Ray Illingworth once alarmed the nation by confessing on the radio that he'd tried to talk to Ramprakash, but it was useless - "he just sits there staring". The dismaying thought gained ground that England's failures weren't so much down to the players as our hidebound cricket system. One was forced to wonder what would have happened if, say, Tendulkar himself had been English.

Well, he wouldn't have played for England when he was 16, that's for sure. We don't do things like that over here. So he couldn't have scored his first international century when he was just 17. Instead, he'd have played club cricket on Saturdays, with the odd game for his county seconds in the school holidays. There wouldn't have been much hope of his playing for the firsts, because there'd have been a strict pecking order of established pros ahead of him in the queue. And these pros would have been encouraging, but distant. They wanted hot young talent, but not just yet, thanks very much - not in their benefit year.

At his club, the older lags would have had lots of fun at his expense. They'd have given him bottles of baby milk at tea, and told him to work the bar on Sundays - hilarious, since he wasn't even allowed to drink yet. To prove he wasn't a drip, he'd have downed a few pints one night and thrown up in the car park. Goodness, how they would have laughed.

His chance would have come eventually. Perhaps he would have scored an ultra-composed fifty in a Lord's final, announcing himself as a future England prospect. First, though, he would have had to fill his boots, as they say, on the county scene. Which isn't easy, not in the daily struggle against overseas bowlers like Waqar, Donald, Ambrose and Walsh. He'd have learned to stop playing those extravagant shots which no one else dared even try, and which got him rebuked by his coaches. He'd have become a nudger and a nurdler, good at deflecting the ball fine for two. Eventually he'd have been called up by England, only to find himself out of the final eleven. He wouldn't have learned about this until the morning of the match, after a sleepless night dreaming of the morrow. And the worst of it was that his county would have wanted him at Derby - so he'd have raced up the M1, strapped his pads on and been bowled not playing a shot by Wasim Akram. He'd have thrown his bat around in frustration and been fined and dropped, and the press would have said, well, nice lad, but has he got the bottle for it? Before the next Test match he'd have heard on the radio that he hadn't made the final thirteen. No one would have told him why. He might also have heard the chairman of selectors saying we just weren't producing the batsmen any more - he thought covered wickets were to blame.

That, until recently, was roughly the career of Mark Ramprakash. His admirers were glad to see him cast off the shackles last month. But at the same time they must have asked themselves once again why it took the powers that be so long to unlock his evident gifts.

Ramprakash - with his dashing Guyanese elegance - offers English cricket an image far removed from the rows of empty seaside deckchairs that have characterised it in the past. So too do glamorous, cool young blades like Ben Hollioake, who wandered out to the middle in the West Indies like someone trying to hit sixes in a charity slogathon. And as it happens the English summer continues to offer a neat opportunity to television companies, if only because it is the one time of the year when no one else is playing. World cricket is a winter sport. One could easily imagine an all-star international tournament played in the English summer, beamed on live television to the cricket-hungry populations of the subcontinent, South Africa and Australasia (with "virtual" advertising hoardings tailored to each local market by trendy new software). And one has to ask: which would draw the crowds, and the interest of the media? The subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) vs the Rest of the World at the Oval? Or Sussex vs Notts at Hove?

Cricket's ruling bodies have declined to reform themselves. But this might mean only that others do it for them. Everyone knows that cricket's once-hallowed place in our sporting calendar is slipping. Thanks to the World Cup, this summer will be primarily a footballing one; and bats and balls will struggle to make the back pages of the newspapers. There are noises too that the protective legislation which keeps home Test matches on the BBC may be torn up. It is not clear that a migration to Sky would harm cricket (it hasn't hurt football); but the game does risk being pushed even further from the centre of the national consciousness.

For all of these reasons, the immediate dilemma - who should be England's captain - is a serious one. The selectors face a symbolic choice. Alec Stewart is the safe option, and Nasser Hussein is officially the next- in-line. But there were signs in the West Indies that Adam Hollioake, in the one-day tournaments there (and in Sharjah), might have what it takes to blow away the cobwebs and lift the hangdog atmosphere that has surrounded and bedevilled the team for so many years. Even in defeat he seemed able to draw plucky performances from his team-mates. England's only successful captain in recent times was Mike Brearley, whose batting hardly merited a place in the side. But the received wisdom still insists that a captain must qualify first as a player, so Hollioake will probably be passed over. Safety-first - the very reason why our team so rarely plays above itself - will probably prevail again. Perhaps it will be reassuring in a way, a sign that some things truly do not ever change. !