If it was a cunning plan, it certainly worked. Readers, no doubt disgusted with my attempts two weeks ago to banish for good the preamble to the Laws concerning the Spirit of Cricket (and your letters left me in no doubt that you were), are justly toasting me since you have had the pleasure of reading both the Sage of Longparish and CMJ. In the same week, too.

Not much else but the Spirit of Cricket, I suspect, would have pricked these two into action at a quiet cricketing time, but they know more than anyone that one of the advantages of being the incumbent cricket correspondent is The Last Word. In any case, a gauntlet thrown down by the Sage to rewrite the preamble to the Laws of the game, described by me as “well-meaning guff”, is not lightly ignored.

But first, because one of my principal objections to the preamble was that it is impossible to articulate something that means different things to different people, and something that has to be contextualised depending on which part of the world the game is played in, let me encapsulate, briefly, what the spirit of cricket means to me.

You will not be surprised to learn that I don’t think cricket occupies a higher moral plane to other games. Nothing in its history suggests that it does. Its “uniqueness”, as described in the preamble, comes not from the way the game is played but from the game itself. What other sport comes close to matching the ebb and flow of a five-day game, played over two innings, when conditions, over which the participants have no control, play such an integral role?

Anyway, in attempting to articulate what the game means to me, these images were the first that came to mind.

Two photographs, one I know the provenance of and one I do not. When Patrick Eagar was on a “booze cruise” during the tour to the West Indies in 1974, he passed Accra beach, Barbados, as the sun was setting and saw a game being played with, as it turned out, a young Gordon Greenidge. The resultant photo is my favourite cricketing image (it is Eagar’s favourite snap, too). All the joy of cricket as an unorganised, in the formal sense, pastime is captured, along with the vibrancy of beach culture and the loose-limbed athleticism of West Indians.

The other image is of three urchins playing a game of street cricket in Mumps, Oldham, with a dustbin for the wicket and the narrow, cobbled street for a pitch. It suggests that cricket was once, more so than it is now, an essential part of the fabric of the British way of life. The blackened faces of the three boys, the black eye of one of them at leg slip, the rough-hewn clothes and the stitched-together, leather-strapped shoes point to horrendous poverty, but at that moment the game is everything, as you can see from the concentration on the boys’ faces. The batsman is playing a decent on drive, too.

A young Lancastrian, obsessed with the game. Playing the dice game Owzthat for hours on end with nobody for company and still able to remember the Lancashire team that adorned the scorebook: Lloyd (D), Wood, Pilling, Lloyd (C), Hayes, Engineer, Hughes, Simmons, Lever, Lee, Shuttleworth. Then, later, hitting a ball in a sock tied to a washing line for hours so that no grass ever grew there in the summer. Was it possible to be more excited about a game?

Allan Donald’s feet. Come again? After the Old Trafford Test match against South Africa in 1998, a game in which England had hung on grimly for a draw, I went into the South Africa dressing room and chatted to Donald for a while. He had bowled his guts out for the last part of the day as South Africa pushed for victory and his feet were blistered and bloodied and recovering in a bucket of iced water as we talked. Nobody could have given more in an ultimately futile cause, although he was cheerful enough over a post-match beer.

The crowds turned away from Old Trafford in 2005. It was suspected that the North had fallen out of love with Test cricket for a while as it was a struggle to fill the ground. And then came that epic final day of the Ashes Test, when roughly 20,000 people turned up only to be told that there was no room at the inn. It was an astonishing sight as they all trooped away disappointed and to see that enthusiasm for the game is still there, given the right circumstances.

Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh walking off together for the final time at the Oval. These ageing warriors played Test cricket in England for the last time in 2000. The England team had shown their respects with a line-up as each of them walked on to the ground for the last time, which was nice but a little premeditated and formal. Now, as they walked off, the crowd rose as one and cheered them all the way up the steps. It was a lovely moment.

All fairly random images, I’m sure you’ll agree. Each of you will have your own moments/images/reasons why the game is important to you. How can those feelings, particular to each one of us, be distilled into something meaningful? Having read the preamble again, it really boils down to respect, so here is my humble attempt at cutting the waffle:

“The Spirit of Cricket is best expressed when there exists due respect for the umpires, the Laws of the game and those who play it.”

No doubt our readers can improve upon that.

A spirited debate

Battle was joined by The Times’s heavyweight cricket writers when Mike Atherton wrote that “other than encouraging basic human qualities, such as showing respect for your opponents and discouraging violence on the field, nobody is left any the wiser what the Spirit of Cricket is”.

John Woodcock, the Sage of Longparish, offered his interpretation — “what is thought of as being honourable and less than honourable” — but agreed that it “is essentially a matter of personal discernment, and highly susceptible to changing times”, adding: “It is positively alarming how much more impenitent players at all levels have become.”

In Christopher Martin-Jenkins’s view, “cricketers from the village green to the Test arena have a shrewd idea, in 99 cases out of 100, what is and is not within the Spirit of the Game. That spirit, distilled, is simply ‘fair play’.”

Matthew Hoggard falls victim to harsh new world

C. L. R. James thought of county cricketers as “welfare staters”. What he meant by that was an acknowledgement that they were paid, often a pittance, but were allowed to fade away gently in their own time, picking up a benefit along the way, before taking up a cushy job coaching the second XI in retirement.

For many years that was how it was. Not any more, as Matthew Hoggard found out this week when he was, to use his own term, “effectively sacked” by Yorkshire, to whom he said he had been exceptionally loyal.

It was newsworthy precisely because of its rarity value. Who was the previous England cricketer to be released by his county before he felt he had served out his time?

Player power has grown in recent years. The ability to move counties more easily, the increased role of agents, central contracts and more opportunities to exploit commercial realities mean that players have become acutely aware of their own worth. Hoggard knew that when he made demands about the length of a possible new contract and its value. Players’ representatives negotiate in a manner that was previously unimaginable.

Hoggard’s “sacking” was a statement from the counties that this more brutal, more cut-throat, some might say properly professional arrangement cuts both ways. A sportsman’s bargaining power results only from his ability to perform and, unlike other professions, it wanes rather sooner and rather more quickly than you would like.

The welfare-state mentality no longer exists. Players are unwilling any more to be paid a pittance and, as Yorkshire showed this week, counties will become less willing to accommodate ageing, and costly, cricketers at the first sign of decline. James would hardly have recognised it.