Last updated 11:35, Thursday, 24 April 2008

HOW many cricket fans, I wonder, rushed out first thing on Monday to get the paper to discover whether Delhi’s Daredevils had outslogged Rajasthan’s Royals in one of the first of the new Indian Premier League games.

Cricket has sold its soul for the money. Soon the gentle county game, even the traditional Test match framework, will be sacrificed on the altar of greed.

I forecast that, within a decade, cricket in this country will have been handed over to the lager louts, swilling their beer, wearing their replica shirts and chanting obscenities while the world’s leading sloggers crash and bash under floodlights for a couple of frantic hours in the middle.

People don’t want beauty, elegance and grace any more. Only a few dinosaurs like me and soon our day will be done. My nightmare is populated with the ghosts of Cardus and Arlott and the great players of a past golden era.

Thousands of football yobs will turn from the winter game to booze away the summer evenings while a little ball – pink, naturally – is thrashed meaninglessly around stadiums large enough to house big crowds.

The day is bound to come when county cricket dies and the game is franchised around our big cities, with drop in pitches on football grounds, and for a while the fans will love it until some other entertainment, even shorter and less demanding of their wits, comes along.

If Beethoven and Mozart are no longer good enough for the Prom concerts, they can certainly emasculate cricket and football.

By then the courts will probably have decided who won the 2009 Premiership and whether Leeds got their points back and I will be a museum piece.

And sport? Sorry, what was that?