ALL TOO BRIEF..

Yesterday was officially and meteoroligically the first day of Summer.   Today in an unfinished stadium in a galaxy far, far away, Ingerland will be playing Brazil.   The game has been arranged as part of the `celebrations` to mark the 150th anniversary of the Football Association.   The chances are that England will get stuffed by the supreme masters of the game and that should be that for yet another seemingly endless season....oh, apart from the Euro Under 21 Tournament and a whole series of other jousts involving our young players.

It would be nice to be able to revert back to the `40s and `50s when there was a clear dividing line between the football and cricket seasons and when heroes like Denis Compton and Arthur Milton would hang up their cricket whites on one day and don the colours of Arsenal the next.   But the advance of commercialism in all its grasping forms has long since eroded those halcyon days and we are now left with a sporting calendar of blurred edges, dictated by television, advertising and an ever widening gulf between the rewards in the respective games.   It`s hard to comprehend that, these days, an experienced Test and County cricketer will be extremely fortunate to earn as much in a whole season as the likes of Rooney, Walcott, Suarez earn in less than a week.

But surely the football is now really over, isn`t it?   And surely we can all be left in peace to enjoy the few fleeting weeks of summer as the only truly beautiful game takes centre stage.   And it`s not just the grand arenas of the game - Lords, The Oval, Edgbaston - that will help us recapture the spirit of sport.   It`s also the county grounds, sparsely populated,  struggling on in their own inimitable way, exuding all the charm, the wistfulness and the romance of years gone by.   And most of all it`s on the village greens, the playing fields of middle England, where the spirit, the respect and, yes, the love of simply playing and enjoying the game will once more be revered.

And if anything captures that spirit, it must surely be the scene depicted by David Inshaw, above, where the game is played on a green and pleasant Dorset hillside and where the twilight descends and another long summer day drifts away into a still and silent night. And we will cherish those days, for they are all too brief and we know, we just know, that the tribal mayhem of yet another football season will come along all too soon to shatter our silence and, like the England team, draw us back  into the dark ages once again.