THEY’RE a famous concept in cricket – or certainly in cricket poetry: “the run stealers”.

They appear, twice, in probably the game’s best-known poem – At Lord’s, by Francis Thompson (1859-1907). As he watches the game, his vision is actually of games from the past, featuring his native Lancashire. The opening and closing verses conclude with the six most nostalgic lines the sport has ever inspired:

For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless clapping host,
As the run stealers flicker to and fro, To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

Hornby and Barlow were a Lancashire opening pair - Hornby an amateur, the captain, a dashing bat, and Barlow, a dour, stonewalling professional. Hornby liked to attempt risky singles. He often ran out Barlow, the first time for a duck, after which he always compensated him with a sovereign.

A nice piece of cricket history. But now, “the run stealers” could acquire a whole new meaning. Just one run needed off the last ball. Up goes a spiralling catch. A fielder safely pouches it, but the batters have completed a run – which secures victory.

This idea for “run stealing” is among an extraordinary set of proposals drafted by a rural evening league in North Yorkshire, the Ryedale Beckett, to try to halt the decline in local cricket. To be considered at the league’s AGM, at Helmsley a week tonight, they range from the uncontroversial – a later start, restricted run-ups – to the revolutionary: eight players per side, four runs for a wide or no ball, with no extra ball, last man stands, “double play” (two batsmen dismissed off a single ball, e.g. caught and run out), and, of course, that “run stealing.”

It’s easy for traditionalists, of whom none surpasses your present writer, to react with horror and dismay. But at least here is an honest attempt, from the grass roots, to confront the grave crisis facing the game.

Not enough youngsters are entering. Even many established players, especially if not among the four or five who tend to dominate most local teams, baulk at the time needed for a cricket match. Lack of engagement is a prime cause of the drift away from the game.

As the Ryedale Beckett AGM doubtless will recognise, there are serious flaws in the proposals. A winning last-ball six would be stymied by a wide. But any tendency to ridicule can be silenced by referring to history. In 1919, to “speed up cricket,” The Times, no less, suggested banning left-handed batsmen.

But to return to those run stealers. Reviewing the 1938 season, the great cricket writer Neville Cardus reflected that “to see Paynter and Washbrook [another pair of Lancashire openers] stealing runs is one of the finest sights of cricket today. They stir memories of the legendary past, when ‘the run stealers flickered to and fro – O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!’ ”

If Cardus were alive today he might be able to relive the experience in Ryedale next summer.