THE cricket season has kicked off. The football allusion is appropriate because cricket’s hierarchy is determined to run this best and loveliest of games primarily as a short, sharp football-style contest of high-octane non-stop competition. It is convinced its plan to do so will restore cricket to second only to football as England’s most popular sport.

Key to this is the banishment of county cricket to the boundaries of the game.

Tom Harrison, chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, declares: “Our county brands are not cutting through”. His board’s answer is “all about creating brands that are relevant to families and children. We have to connect with their busy world.”

According to YouGov survey, the present Twenty20 competition has already done that. Measuring something called “the buzz factor” – jargon for public perception – it says: “The positioning of the event as an entertaining spectacle, with music, dancers, low-cost tickets and Friday night games has helped push ‘buzz’ up by 6.6 per cent” – the biggest for any sport.

But the ECB still judges it a poor thing compared to similar competitions abroad. It believes its new Twenty20, based on city regions, with players bought at auctions and (doubtless) a frenzy of knobs and bells, is, in the words of ECB chairman Colin Graves, “the right way to reach audiences, create new fans and fuel the future of the game.”

Strange then that Eoin Morgan, England’s one-day captain, arguably the first player to emerge as a one-day specialist, says a “key turning point” for his generation was the 2005 Ashes, which gripped the whole nation. “Awesome” he calls it. And so it was – cricket played in whites, over five days, with no contrived regulations and certainly no music, cheer leaders or flares. Strange indeed.

In the 1952 Wisden, the great cricket writer Neville Cardus answered the calls then being made for ‘brighter cricket.’ Accepting that “as a game pure and simple, depending on who wins, cricket is often a poor substitute for football, tennis, racing or tiddly winks,” he warned: “The emphasis on cricket as competition is dangerous. Yes, the result is important. But cricket must retain its fascination as a spectacle, pageant in summer time, and medium for expressing character.” Late in life he confessed: “I can now look at a match only if it transcends competitive interest and achieves personal touches of art.”

A Cardus man down to his appreciation of the crowd as integral to the day’s enjoyment, I’ll stick my neck out and say cricket is taking completely the wrong path. In my busiest years nothing, except a day walking my beloved Yorkshire moors, re-charged my batteries more than a day at county cricket. Flask, sandwiches, rug (possibly), Playfair cricket annual to hand.

The white figures were a tableau of beauty. On the dreariest of cricket days overall there were still cricket things to admire. And always there was that contribution by the crowd celebrated by Cardus. During some dull play at Scarborough I overheard a neighbouring spectator insist that Fred Trueman was “just a trundler really.” I noticed a cloud form over Skipton way, Fred’s home patch. In thrill-a-ball cricket the spectator never would have said that, or I wouldn’t have heard him.