Cricket just isn't like it used to be...

A year ago in these columns Nigel Mountford, the CEO of Devon CCC, watched the game restart after two years of Covid restrictions and sensed that something had changed.
In a Torbay Weekly interview Mountford warned that cricket in particular, because it takes longer than most other sports, faced big challenges.
It may have been happening anyway, but those two stay-at-home years had accelerated a reevaluation in many people’s lives.
Family and work commitments had moved up the priority list, but just as big a factor was something we can call ‘lifestyle’.
Gone are the days when cricketers in the summer, and footballers and rugby players in winter, committed themselves to months of availability, broken only by injuries, family bereavements and, possibly, a birth in the family.
If you were a ‘proper’ player, you didn’t even get married at the ‘wrong’ time of year.Wives, partners and girlfriends more or less went along with it all, and whole families grew up around the clubs. Many an away match turned into a day out or a trip to the beach.
Now, one look through the weekly preview columns shows how things have changed, just as Mountford said it had.
Players are regularly unavailable because of birthdays, ‘stag’ dos, holidays of course, work, ‘paternity leave’ or the odd music festival or two. It may be frustrating for some, but it’s the way it is and it’s best not to spend too much time chuntering about it.
It’s ‘modern’ life, much of it driven by social media. And it isn’t suddenly going to stop changing, or move into reverse.It’s why T20 is now the go-to form of cricket for many, to play and watch. Sure, it’s worth fighting for some of the more traditional values, because they’re still valuable and
still relevant.
A five or six-hour cricket match without some tea in the middle is a poorer day for it. But, as ever, it’s adapt or die..