Well, thank God that’s all over. There was a time when the end of an Ashes series, the end of any Test series in England, made me incredibly sad. It used to mean the end of summer — of warmth and beauty and the television endlessly decorated with white-on-green — and the beginning of sad things — cold weather, vests, football, school . . .

But not this year. This year I am not at all sorry to see cricket disappear from the television, the papers, the world. I positively welcome the autumn clouds that will shroud this summer in their icy folds. I look forward to Ovaltine, misty breath on frozen mornings, celebrity dance programmes ... and next year I think I shall follow tennis instead.

Cricket is dead for me. The body to be cremated and the ashes taken to, no, wait, that’s been done, hasn’t it? The elegiac has always had its place in cricket, but this time it really is over.

Really.

The summer began depressingly with a mini-series against the miserable West Indies, after which their sullen captain all but announced the death of Test cricket himself. And then the Ashes was heralded with the news of injuries inflicted on key players in the Indian Pemier League, the clumsy retirement of Flintoff, anger in Manchester at the cash-driven shunning of Old Trafford as a Test venue, the loss of Kevin Pietersen, and the sad exile of a home Ashes series, for the first time in history, to a subscription channel.

And it got worse. As things hotted up, cricket went cravenly yoof. Stuart Broad, a friendly-looking, gangly lad, delivered half a dozen overs of straight-up-and-down seam bowling and the nation’s (male) cricket writers exploded into their collective pants. Seasoned hacks, middle-aged men you would think had resolved all those tricky feelings at boarding school, went into raptures over his blond hair, his blue eyes, his “boyband looks”.

The morning after Broad’s five-wicket haul last Friday, I was halfway through the report of one of my favourite cricket writers when, as I came to another gushing paragraph about the lad’s lean, young limbs, smooth and hairless, pumping eagerly, his tight bottom seemingly at one with ... I tossed the paper aside and cried: “Oh for Heaven’s sake, just get a room!”

And I think it behoves us to remember that Lily Allen, who fair stole the summer with her appearance on Test Match Special and declaration of love for cricket, is a beautiful thing, a very sexy woman (every bit as lovely as Stuart Broad), a great musician, very funny and clever, BUT SHE DIDN’T INVENT CRICKET! Why was the great Jonathan Agnew (and others, including the less great David Lloyd) so excited that she liked this famous game? Why so flattered? What an admission of cricket’s ill-health that men who played the ancient game to such a high level, and love it so well, should consider cricket to have been in some way honoured by her attention? For me, it is not cricket that is made more beautiful by Lily, but she who is made more lovely by cricket.

And then on the Sunday it was Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe in the TMS box, a newcomer to the game (having been the sort of kid who did drama at school instead of games because he couldn’t run properly), barely grasping the term “wicket” or “run”, being lauded and fawned over for remembering one or two dreary statistics. Why was the TMS box so grateful to have this mighty sport tolerated by the scary performing monkey-child?

1981 was the Botham/Willis series. 2005 belonged to Flintoff and Vaughan. What a damning indictment of ’09 that it will be remembered as the Ashes of Lily Allen and Harry Potter.

The migration to Sky was a tragedy. Cricket is a minority sport and for any sense of communality to attach to it, it needs to be easily available to watch. It is not like football. Of my closest 30 male friends, no more than three or four are genuinely interested in cricket, so I’ve always embraced the wider community of cricket lovers, sharing past series with the chaps who run my local newsagent and grocer’s, with my South African postman, with the children of neighbours, with Australian barmen, Yorkshiremen and Lancastrians down for the night to steal the lead off the church roof, anyone I can find who lives and breathes the game. But this year they haven’t been watching, because they don’t have Sky. And so when I watch, I watch alone.

Nobody watched the Ashes this year. Just a few hundred thousand couch potato members of the sports channel pay-per-view community, watching because there wasn’t any football yet, or darts or speedway or boxing, getting value for their subscriptions, fat on the sofa in last year’s Premier League football jersey, thick as you like, tweeting Bumble to say how much they fancied Lily Allen and googling “lbw” to find out why the man in the motorbike helmet had to go home when the ball only hit him on the leg.

And then with Sky there is also the tragic gormlessness of Sir Ian Botham — living proof that the ability to play sport is handed out at birth in inverse proportion to an ability to talk interestingly about it. He’s. Just. So. Boooooooring. And, worse, so obviously bored. Speaking in that chief-superintendent monotone, describing the fall of a vital wicket as if he were giving directions over the phone to a lost minicab driver (“left by the old Blue Star garage, round the one-way, second right, if you come to the big funeral parlour you’ve gone too far, Katich is on his way, and Australia are 143 for 5”).

I’ll admit that part of my Ashes blues are the result of having missed quite a lot of the good stuff this year. I still play the game sometimes, and so was out in the field when we won the Ashes last Sunday (with lucky blighters shouting “Harmison’s on a hat-trick!” from the pavilion) and in a sweaty changing room listening through a shared earpiece when Monty save the day in Cardiff. I was stuck at Nice airport for the whole of Flintoff’s magic spell at Lord’s, and I was out buying cheese when Broad had his moment. But then when I did catch some of it live, I saw only large, stupid men failing to execute simple stratagems and swearing a lot.

Yes, there was Ponting, the last giant, walking the Earth in a daze, like Polyphemus, wondering where all the other giants had gone.

Yes, there was Straussy. A lovely little chap. But I’m good mates with his old head boy from Radley, and thus can see him only as a plucky little fat fellow from the junior dorm, constantly being given wedgies and apple pie beds, and having his tuck box burglarised.

It’s not that I’m an old fogey or that I yearn for baggy flannels and cotton shirts and fair play. I went to some Twenty20 matches in the World Cup and I rather liked it. It’s something else.

I have very much the feeling that I had after Italia ’90, when the great repopularising of football began: a tragic sense of impending death. A sense that to make this new, more widely accessible sport live, the old one will first have to be killed. And I don’t want that.

Neville Cardus wrote: “If everything about England was destroyed except the laws of cricket, English society could still be re-created from them.” I used to think that was true. Today I’d be happy if they could just re-create the cricket.

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