THERE is a vintage moment in the televised version of Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) stays at Lord Marchmain’s palazzo in Venice. Laurence Olivier, as Marchmain, asks which Venetian painter he likes best.

Irons: “Bellini.”

Olivier: “Which one?” Irons, deflated: “I’m afraid I didn’t know there were two.”

Olivier, triumphant: “There are three!”

As with the Bellinis, so with today’s cricket magazines. Many fans assume that there is only one — The Wisden Cricketer, formed in 2003 from the merger of The Cricketer and Wisden Cricket Monthly (WCM). In fact, there are three.

The second is All Out Cricket, the organ of the Professional Cricketers’ Association. Originally called Cricnet, it made little impact and was relaunched a year ago with new co-owners. The third is Spin, launched two months ago by Highbury House, a magazine publisher.

To claim that cricket is publishing’s hot new sector would be pushing it. That position is taken by our leading national sport — shopping. But cricket is a warmer potato than it was a few years ago. This is partly thanks to the double shot in the arm of a winning England Test team and the success of the Twenty20 Cup.

The Cricketer, launched in 1921, was the voice of the Establishment. Its strengths lay in schools cricket, in its genial conservatism and in initials: EW (Swanton, its eminence grise for decades), CMJ (editor in the 1980s, now the distinguished Chief Cricket Correspondent of The Times), MCJ (Nicholas, on the board for years), ETC, ETC. It was not so good at keeping up with trends, in publishing or in life.

WCM appeared in 1979 as a kind of splinter group from The Cricketer, started by David Frith, its editor at the time. An outstanding historian, Frith produced a magazine of strong views but showed no more interest in young readers than The Cricketer. When he retired in 1996, WCM was running as many historical features as contemporary ones and, in the age of computers, it was being put together with cowgum.

Together, the two magazines catered well for the old-school cricket lover in his MCC tie and hardly at all for his son or daughter, let alone the grandchildren. I succeeded Frith with a brief to modernise WCM. We did a publishing deal with the go-ahead John Brown, moved from Guildford to London, got Apple Macs and lowered the average age of the reader from 55 to 36. Paul Getty allowed us to double the editorial staff, to four, and hire an excellent designer, Nigel Davies, who is still at The Wisden Cricketer.

Under my successor, Stephen Fay, the eminent business and sports writer, WCM remained well to the left of The Cricketer. The merger was more of a Wisden takeover, with Mark Getty, son of Paul, owning the new magazine and Wisden staff running it, led by John Stern. His Wisden Cricketer is the most professional of today’s cricket mags, the best-written and the most elegant.

All Out Cricket, edited by Andy Afford, the former Nottinghamshire spinner, is more of a glossy fanzine. It has little to say but plenty to ask, using its access to the England dressing-room to do cheeky, laddish Q&As about clothes and music. You can see a 15-year-old Loaded reader enjoying it, although he might be disappointed with the underwear shots.

In between lies Spin, edited by Duncan Steer, who used to do the Test-match programme. It has the most editorial pages of the three, the most flavour and the sharpest editing. It is also the most international, which fits the times as the cricket world shrinks to a global hamlet. For fans who are in their twenties or Asian, Spin might be the first choice.

In ten years, cricket magazines have gone from two titles that were backward-looking to three that look forward.

The progressive consensus that Tony Blair talks about has come to pass in a most unlikely field.