RIGHT ARM UNPREDICTABLES...

The English county cricket season starts today and it seems to bring with it a change of perspective. OK, so the world is still in a mess after a frantic winter of discontent, but for those, like me, who love the game, cricket brings an altogether different outlook. Well, at least it used to. I loved playing the game with its pace of life, its gentility, its respect for opponents and officials and the long, summer evenings whose peace was only disturbed by the sound of leather upon willow. In recent years, I`ve not seen as much cricket as I would have liked but I hope to see a bit more this season, possibly at Canterbury or the Hampshire Rose Bowl or even at Lord`s, who have sent me their splendid catalogue for the season.

But I wonder whether professional cricket is as it used to be. I wonder if circumstances are forcing it more and more into a purely commercial, results-drive business - like football, where the rich get richer and the poor fall by the wayside. The advent of money-spinning ventures such as 20/20, the 40 and 50-overs games seem to have captured the public imagination in a way that the county four-day matches have failed to do. But in the process, I worry that the essential spirit of the game is being lost.

Even on village greens, the game is played in competitive leagues with the antics and attitudes displayed in the professional game picked up and mirrored. There used to be - maybe there still is - a whimsical convention of telling the umpire what sort of bowler you were when you first came on to bowl so that he, in turn, could alert the batsman at the other end. "Right arm unpredictables," was my accurate announcement, for that is how I bowled. Maybe the game these days has become too predictable with too much at stake. And maybe I long for the unpredictability that used to be the hallmark of the cricket I used to know.