There are innocents who believe that sport is immune from history. Sport loves to see itself as an ideal pastime, safe from the follies and foibles of a changing world, but sport changes as fast, if not faster, than anything else.
Sometimes this happens with the force of revolution, like the ending of the amateurism regulations in tennis, rugby union and track and field; sometimes it is part of a slow and apparently inevitable process, as with the commercialisation of the Olympic Games that began in Los Angeles in 1984.
And we seem to be at a critical moment in cricket. This could be an incident that future historians of sport will write up as a pivotal chapter in their books: using the date 2014 as historians of larger matters use 1914. For it seems that international cricket is beginning to break up. Cricket has never been stronger in terms of money, audience, power, and (in some places) participation: but it seems that the game's traditional structure is no longer appropriate
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