The beauty of the game, as the American philanthropist and cricket nut John Paul Getty once said, is ‘its 360-degree possibility’. It is still a game where there is decency and respect for your opponent and a general camaraderie that no other sport can match. It is fascinating and bewildering and fast and slow and regular and unpredictable and apparently static but always evolving. And, in the end, cricket is the prime subscriber to the most famous sporting line ever written: ‘It’s not who won or lost that matters, but how you placed the blame.’
