England captain Andrew Strauss on his way to a century at the Lord’s Test against Australia on Thursday

At the start of the summer, on one of those uncertain, cool, grey, English May mornings, I spent a few hours at Lord’s cricket ground watching the England tail wagging vigorously against the West Indies pace attack. Here was a mirror image of the scenes that I’d witnessed as a young boy mad keen on cricket, when a rampant West Indies team either toyed with England or frightened the life out of them. It was fun watching Ravi Bopara and Graeme Swann strutting their stuff, but I couldn’t help feeling a certain unease or even sadness.

This feeling intensified when the West Indian captain, Chris Gayle, the most languidly ferocious striker of a cricket ball since Clive Lloyd, came to the crease to open the tourists’ innings. Gayle stroked a couple of sumptuous straight drives for four, then he was out to a careless shot. As he ambled back to the pavilion, he didn’t look especially bothered; he should at least have been thinking – as I’m sure Brian Lara, not to mention Geoff Boycott, would have been – about the effect on his batting average.

The fact was that Gayle’s heart simply wasn’t in it – not in that particular match, and apparently not in that form of cricket. He is on the record as saying that he wouldn’t much mind if five-day Test match cricket disappeared altogether. Gayle seems to prefer the fastest form of the game, Twenty20, of which he is an undoubted master. Twenty20 provides fantastic entertainment but, as I’ve written before, it breaks the unique, slow contract with time made by the longest form of the game. There can be no lulls or dull stretches in Twenty20; the pace fluctuates between extremely fast and frenetic.

As I watched at Lord’s another thought struck me: Twenty20 is in every way less terrestrial than Test cricket. It is designed for TV, and can be played anywhere because it is not really grounded anywhere (the Indian Premier League could be relocated to South Africa with no bother), and it can be played under natural light or floodlight. I wouldn’t be surprised if an indoor version was invented some time soon.

But the cricket I know and love is played on a ground – on a particular piece of turf with a history and a geography, including a psychogeography. Lord’s is one of those grounds, a place self-consciously replete with history, and as it happens very full of personal history and memories for me.

Lord’s sounds lordly, and you somehow assume that its name has to do with lordliness. This both is and isn’t true. What is now Lord’s cricket ground was once a perfectly ordinary piece of ground, in actual fact a duck pond in St John’s Wood, leased by the entrepreneur Thomas Lord on the instigation of Lord Winchilsea for use by the newly formed Marylebone Cricket Club.

As a boy I was fascinated by the terrestrial quirks and peculiarities of Lord’s. There is, of course, the famous slope – the ground inclines eight feet from side to side, and the slope can be exploited by clever bowlers, making the ball come in to or move away from the batsman. As the ground meets the benches under the pavilion, there is another small slope, which means that a boundary struck in that direction has to be hit a little bit harder.

According to the official Lord’s website, which has a rather snobbish bias, the nobility (call them nobs) wanted somewhere exclusive to play their cricket. Lord’s became the venue for the match between Eton and Harrow schools in 1805 and has remained so ever since. But it is also the home of Middlesex County Cricket Club and the venue for the National Village Cricket Competition.

Lord’s, in other words, is the site of a complex history and conflicting movements: towards enclosure and exclusivity and towards an opening up to the world – but it is above all a grounded and terrestrial site. If Lord Winchilsea and his mates wanted to make cricket the preserve of the ruling class (which it never was in the first place), they failed. Cricket spread like a benign virus, infecting many parts of the former British Empire but especially establishing itself in south Asia, where 90 per cent of today’s cricket supporters hail from. “Players” took over from “gentlemen”, a move cemented when the great Len Hutton became the first “player” captain of England.

The attempt to enclose cricket made by the nobs of Lord’s failed. Cricket reasserted its nature and its origin as springing from the common ground. Lord’s became not just a snobbish preserve but part of the national, and international, endowment and psyche. The worst decision ever made by the England and Wales Cricket Board was to sell the viewing rights for home Test matches from 2006 onwards to a non-terrestrial broadcaster. The great 2005 Ashes series, broadcast on the terrestrial Channel 4, was watched by up to 8m people. The highest-ever audience for cricket on satellite broadcaster Sky, by contrast, is 1.5m.

That decision needs to be reversed, to reclaim Test match cricket as part of the common ground and the common culture, a game played by boys and girls anywhere where trees bound a mown meadow.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres