Ken Jones: Tendulkar's sparkling innings encapsulates nature of change

One of my favourite remarks about sport was delivered many years ago by the American cowboy philosopher Will Rogers after a visit to Lord's for a Test match between England and Australia. At the close of play, Rogers announced that while he'd found cricket to be an interesting game and had quite enjoyed the experience there was room for improvement.

What he had in mind were the breaks for lunch and tea. "I guess that is how things happen over here," he said. "But if I had anything to do with it those guys wouldn't get anything to eat or drink until they got the job done." Rogers, I suspect, would have found proceedings in the present cricket World Cup closer to his sporting tastes and that of his compatriots.

That thought sprang to mind last Saturday when Sachin Tendulkar produced an innings of such stunning virtuosity that it dominated conversations into which I was drawn shortly before the match between West Ham and Tottenham at Upton Park. In the hands of a master, the finest batsman of his day, one-day cricket was suddenly rich in elegance, not a game of ugly improvisation.

As we move on in this sporting life things change, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. Some things remain fundamentally unchanged and yet they are different. For example, cricket, with a few technical adjustments, abides by laws formed more than a century ago and yet the one-day version is frenetic by comparison with the game Rogers attended.

In some ways it is intelligent and original, in others an insult to tradition. On the face of it, you might suppose that nothing is more marketable on television than a race for runs inside the allotted 50 overs, but I'm not alone in thinking that this often puts the result above performance to the detriment of technical entertainment. As one friend puts it, some of the shots employed, even by batsmen of distinction, would have caused, and indeed still cause, any self-respecting school cricket coach to throw up his hands in horror.

The pace of change in sport inevitably alters the public's perception. Thus Tendulkar's innings against Pakistan was seen more as a self-contained thrill rather than marvellous proof of a talent that rises above any other in his generation. Whether the little Indian would have dared to play with such daring in a five-day Test is another story. In other words, a reputation for being able to take a team apart, often depends perilously on things not happening too soon.

Importantly, the reporter and the broadcaster must always have in mind the settled view that readers or listeners hold of the game they are watching. An audience that has grown up with the pace of development in sport may be hungry for evidence of innovation, but not necessarily at the expense of uncomplicated entertainment.

Television has done more than anything to sharpen the sporting audience's awareness of what is going on everywhere, championship fights, international football matches, sports events of every kind. Frank Butler, who served the News of the World for many years as sports columnist recently recalled returning from foreign assignments he had covered to be bombarded with questions from people who had only read of the events or maybe caught a glimpse of them on cinema newsreels. "Television completely changed that," he said. "It provided everybody with an opportunity to form their own opinions."

I'd no sooner wondered about this, and wondered at the ease with which we have come to accept changes in sport that would have been unimaginable to past generations when I came across a newspaper story relating to the unforgivably parlous state of the Football Association. This was addressed in detail elsewhere in the publication, but the headline that caught my eye sat above a story announcing that the FA will not meet the cost of taking the families of England players to a summer training camp in La Manga.

The big questions to be asked about this, and last summer's massively expensive jaunt in Dubai before the World Cup, is who thought up the idea and why it was considered necessary? If the answer is Sven Goran Eriksson then another change is not out of the question.