KEY POINTS:
It's not so very long ago that cricket was widely seen as a uniquely tedious form of English middle and upper class eccentricity which had been forced on the less privileged and exported to the colonies as a subtle form of social control.
The historian G.M. Trevelyan believed that if the French nobility had played cricket with their peasants, "their chateaux would never have been burnt", and Lord Mancroft, a Tory politician, speculated that the British had invented cricket "to give themselves some conception of eternity".
The bewilderment it aroused was succinctly expressed by the American who, on having cricket explained to him, wondered why anyone would want to play a five-day game that might end in stalemate.
That was then. Cricket now is on permanent fast forward. These days, test matches rarely go the distance. Indeed, cricket has become so frantic that tests increasingly resemble the one-day game, which in turn is often indistinguishable from the hyperactive slog-fest known as Twenty20.
In 1986, the New Zealand seamer Willie Watson complained that bowling to the flamboyant Indian batsman Kris Srikkanth was like bowling in the highlights package. This is, increasingly, the bowler's lot. Apart from the notoriously sporting wickets sometimes presented to teams visiting this country, supposedly as payback for similar rorts pulled on the Black Caps when they were touring, bowlers are usually required to operate on surfaces so bland they are little more than stages on which batsmen can confidently strut their stuff.
When said batsmen are gym-pumped and wielding high-tech clubs that make earlier-model bats seem like hockey sticks, and when the boundary ropes have been brought in to oblige the broadcasters' desire for all-out action and the advertisers' insistence on space in which to deploy their hoardings, the result is often a carnival of extravagant hitting.
These pyrotechnics, in which brute force often supersedes timing and spectator catches have become as obligatory - and tiresome - as the Mexican wave, find little favour with purists, who prefer a more elegant and sedate spectacle but they are a disempowered minority.
Cricket has always performed a balancing act by having one foot on the village green and the other in the high-stakes international arena. The saying "it's not cricket" has rarely been used without irony since the 1932/33 Bodyline series: "There are two teams out there," said the Australian captain Bill Woodfull, "but only one is playing cricket."
The reduction of a game to a pitiless confrontation in which batsmen were targeted by express bowlers operating without legal or ethical restraint was repeated by the Australian team in the Lillee/Thomson era and the West Indian dynasty which supplanted them. Eventually the lawmakers effectively outlawed the four-pronged fast bowling blitzkrieg.
But the spirit of the game continues to be assailed, notably by the systematic cheating evident in synchronised, premeditated appeals and batsmen standing their ground when they know they're out.
That issue pales in comparison to the challenge of preserving the game's traditions while maximising the commercial opportunities available in the global sports broadcasting market.
Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that commercial - and inevitably therefore political - preponderance is shifting from England and the white Commonwealth countries to India, where an essentially English legacy isn't always seen as something to be cherished.
Perhaps nothing illustrates cricket's problematical complexities as starkly as the Zimbabwe issue. There's no reason cricket should have been spared the misery that has engulfed that godforsaken land but the international cricket community's ability to exert pressure has foundered on the obstacle of Afro-Asian solidarity.
In 1984, Robert Mugabe, the architect of Zimbabwe's agony, said: "Cricket civilises people and creates gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen."
Henry Olonga should be playing in this World Cup. The first black player to represent Zimbabwe, he has the best bowling figures achieved by a Zimbabwean in a one-day international.
But Olonga, sensible fellow, is in exile; there's a warrant for his arrest for treason, a crime that carries the death penalty.
How did he betray his country? At the last World Cup Olonga and a team-mate wore black armbands "to mourn the death of democracy in our beloved Zimbabwe".
