SEASONAL affective disorder (SAD): it’s what many people suffer with the coming of autumn.

I love the autumn with its blazing colours and early mists, but what makes me sad is the end of the cricket season. It goes so quickly.

April – when I got my picnic box out for the first time and set off in waterproofs for the opening match – seems part of ancient history.

That day I spent at Lord’s for the Test with Sri Lanka – was it really four months ago?

Well, I shall have to make do with TV highlights of cricket in foreign parts to dispel the winter gloom. But I shall feel deprived.

I was christened into the Church of England, but my real religion is cricket.

I’m your typical cricketing fanatic and I don’t like change. When I was growing up in Yorkshire, there were only two sorts of cricket: 28 three-day county games each season and five Tests.

Then we got 60 overs, 50 overs and the Sunday league with 40 overs. The biggest change was the coming of Twenty20 and, for a dyed-in-the wool fogey like me, it took some getting used to.

I’m not curmudgeonly about the new form of the game. It’s improved fielding and running between the wickets; run rates are astronomical and it brings in the crowds.

But it’s not the real thing. Proper cricket is men in whites – not pyjamas – playing a game which requires mental stamina as well as athletic skill: a drama with plots and subplots, subtleties, abrupt reversals and long stretches in which, to the unschooled eye, nothing much seems to be happening at all.

To the fanatic, these are the best bits.

Next season will bring a radical innovation which is being described as the biggest change to cricket in the past 50 years.

There is to be a new Twenty20 competition, not played by counties but by cities on Test grounds.

So there will be such as Leeds, Riverside, Manchester, two London teams and, I hear, matches played at Wembley.

The hope is for large crowds, excitement, generous sponsorship razzmatazz and the bringing in of a lot of lolly – some of which will help support the traditional county game.

Well, good luck to it and I hope it prospers.

But I’m desperate to see the longer form of the game preserved and prospering too.

Really, the long and short of it is that there are two different games – like chess and draughts, like the 50 yards dash and the 10,000 metres.

We need the longer game, because it has complexities and layers of meaning which the stand-up-and-slog variety can’t comprehend. Critics will accuse me of nostalgia and shameful elitism.

To this I plead guilty. But there are other – I would say more important, overriding – reasons why the long game should be treasured. These reasons are social, cultural and deeply personal: in the end they are probably even spiritual.

There are many people who live alone – sometimes they are acutely lonely – and who don’t have a lot going on in their lives.

The four-day cricket match is their lifeline. In some cases I know, it’s pretty much their whole life.

Twenty20 gives you crash-bang-wallop, beer, snatches of pop music and in three hours it’s all over.

But you go to the four-day game and you get talking to someone; friendships are made; whole networks of relationships are formed.

Like the church, the chapel and the pub, the long form of cricket is part of our social fabric. We must look after it.