Tonight:
4°c
Neil Diamond is having one of those Indian summers that artists often enjoy as they head towards the Zimmer years, and good for him. I'd be thrilled if he took a wrong turn en route to the O2 Centre on Saturday, and turned up in Shepherds Bush to serenade my family with his timeless classics.
But if he came round here with his acoustic guitar and performed Forever In Blue Jeans, I should say, in Harry Enfield style: "Oi, Diamond, no! You may be one of the most durable singer-songwriters America ever produced, and I admire your tuneful voice as much as the understated poignancy of your lyrics. But what you know about modern cricket wouldn't fill the brain-shaped void in David "Bumble" Lloyd's bonce."
The song's chorus goes: "Money talks, but it don't sing and dance, and it don't walk." And Neil was quite wrong about that. In the brave new world of Twenty20 cricket, money sings rock anthems from the speakers, dances to them in the stands, and walks to the crease in garish clothes. For this is a game about cash, as piled high by Sir Allen Stanford and the Indian Premier League.
As this spring became a summer, the dosh has arrived with such startling speed that you can almost hear future beneficiaries joyously singing, "Who'd have believed you'd come along?" from Sweet Caroline. One cannot resent them the windfall. Who wouldn't want to fill their boots with the £50 notes Stanford so elegantly showcases in wheelbarrows
For all that, I cannot warm to a man who looks a little like the Fast Show's Swiss Toni, albeit with better access to the Grecian 2000 (or Grecian 2,000,000 as they call it in Texas), although not because of any perceived threat he poses to the five-day game. Test cricket may be like a beautiful woman, in that it needs cosseting and protecting from hard commercial realities, but beneath the delicate facade it is a tough old broad that's survived many gloomy prognoses, and will survive this one.
What won't survive is the special ethos that ensured that, even during the game's rare and brief periods of dominance over football, cricketers never sought to insulate themselves from their public. Even after the 2005 Ashes (Test cricket boring? Really), there was a sense that if you ran into Andrew Strauss, Matthew Hoggard or even Andrew Flintoff in a pub, they'd happily chat for as long as you wished (or in Flintoff 's case for as long as he was capable of speech).
Just after Botham's Ashes in the autumn of 1981, conquering captain Mike Brearley turned up as a part-time teacher (bizarrely he taught a subject called "psychodrama") at my school. I sidled over one day and said something gauche like "Well, that was pretty bloody marvellous, sir". He grinned coyly, mildly embarrassed at the gushing praise, and mumbled his thanks.
Well, we won't see any of that reticence when the new superstars of cricket emulate their football equivalents in terms of retinues as well as earnings. The approachability that made them so engaging will give way to bumptious arrogance, and a small but precious corner of English sporting life will die, never to be reborn.
One day soon, when they're cocooned by agents, advisors and minders, the likes of Kevin Pieterson may take another line from Sweet Caroline, and declare that good times never seemed so good. Others among us may prefer to borrow from Joni Mitchell, and wistfully observe that you dunno what you've got till it's gone.
