Cricket is in crisis, or perceived to be so; rugby union even more so. Tennis and, to some extent, football, are being viewed in a better light. Why? It is more than the effect of the weather. It is also because tennis has Tim Henman (and Sam Smith) and football has Michael Owen whereas rugby's best players, rich and exhausted, are not even playing for their country and the stars of English cricket (do not forget, Darren Gough and Dominic Cork were briefly television and tabloid stars) have temporarily lost their dazzle.
In a world which is increasingly led by the media, where politicians put public relations before policy, star quality and winning are all that counts. To understand that is to get nearer to a solution to the desperate ennui which hung over Old Trafford for the first few days of last week's third Test and a certain feeling at Lord's this weekend that a bad moon is rising over our lovely game. Until England have world-class performers, especially in the chief match-winning roles of fast bowling and leg-spinning, the sky will not turn blue.
People, and I am guiltier than most, get very emotional about cricket, which is good to the extent that they care passionately about its present and its future. But the vague call to 'modernise' the game is pointless if it takes no account of present realities and past mistakes.
Actually, if one can look beyond the plight of the England team at this moment - and thanks to the character shown over the last two days in Manchester it is not so hopeless as it threatened to be - there are plenty of hopeful signs, not least in the embryonic efforts of the International Cricket Council to spread the game to new areas of the world. The captain of one of Vienna's six cricket clubs, popping up in the crowd last week at Southampton, expressed the view that if only next year's Cricket World Cup could be shown on television in Austria - or any Test or international cricket - it would be far more popular than the boring basketball and baseball which they currently suffer via satellite from America.
The England and Wales Cricket Board have embraced the need for development in our own backyard, acknowledging the link between grass-roots development and, several years down the road, a successful national team. Two videos aimed at the schools, Cricket - That's Wicked, featuring music by Oasis, and Teach Cricket? You Must Be Joking, with Rory Bremner, are being used to show both children and teachers that it is a simple, enjoyable game. Some 1,200 schools have responded by ordering copies of the board's coaching manual.
No one is busier at Lord's than Hugh Morris, the board's technical director, who still wants the national cricket centre (academy, if you prefer) which has been debated for too long. Lilleshall is ready-made but whereas Morris prefers a purpose-built site, there are others, like Nottinghamshire's chief executive, Mark Arthur, who believe that regional centres such as the sparkling new development at Trent Bridge are a better bet.
The emergence this season of a highly promising cricketer from the Somerset academy, James Bulbeck, supports the theory of 18 regional centres of excellence based on the first-class counties and this should surely be the starting point for the Trangmer committee, who are now considering whether there should be a centrally employed group of England players - it is long odds against - and for the autumn review which will look once again at the structure.
England are sixth out of nine in the world Test rankings and fifth out of the 11 countries who now play recognised one-day internationals. There has to be a clear-minded distinction between the need for a strong England team and the desirability of a commercially successful county game.
Some changes have been made in the cause of one, some of the other. But one thing the game in the United Kingdom has not been afraid to do is to change. Let me just remind you what has already been done in the cause of both (in a game which some people will always believe to be in need of modernisation) since the counties pioneered professional one- day cricket with the first knockout competition in 1963:
60-over cricket; 40-over cricket; 50-over cricket; covered pitches; bonus points; four-day cricket; points for draws; relaid pitches in search of extra pace; overseas players (a) introduced, (b) reduced to one per county; new stands and indoor cricket centres on most major grounds; an 18th first-class county with a handsome new ground; 40-over cricket scrapped; the Benson and Hedges scrapped; a new 50-over league started from 1999; four-day second XI cricket; county board XIs to link club and county cricket; premier leagues; development officers working to a national development plan, etcetera.
Specifically in search of a winning Test side the activity has been more a question of personalities: an England coach was the answer, so we had Micky Stewart, then Keith Fletcher, then Ray Illingworth, then David Lloyd. The chairman of selectors was a clot - he nearly always is - so we had Ted Dexter, then the same Ray Illingworth, a sort of supremo, then David Graveney. The captain was hopeless - he nearly always is - so we had Graham Gooch, then Mike Atherton, now Alec Stewart.
All we needed, all they needed, all English cricket ever needed, was world-class batsmen and, especially bowlers. And good weather. With or without the counter-attraction of a football World Cup, cloudy skies always lead to gloomy prognostications about cricket. The game has always been in crisis. Witness A G Steel in Wisden in 1900, when cricket was the supreme summer game and W G Grace its king: ``As played under its present conditions, cricket is in the very direst peril of degenerating from the finest of summer games into an exhibition of dullness and weariness.''
Memories of 1981 are rather fresher, and yet people forget the strange course it took. The season began with a miserable May after a heavy England defeat in the West Indies made worse by the sudden death of Ken Barrington, continued with an Australian win in the Prudential Trophy and the first Test at Trent Bridge, and reached a nadir soon after a Lord's Test which according to Wisden continued a morbid trend marked by ``bad weather, controversy and abysmal public relations''. Ian Botham resigned as Test captain before he was pushed and England looked like going two down by the Saturday of the Headingley Test.
Now, 1981 is remembered as the year of the great Botham/Brearley/Willis revival. How shall we recall 1998?