In cricket, perhaps more than any other game, there are times when your patriotism for the nation that bore you is overtaken by patriotism for the greater nation of cricket. It felt like that as I watched England seizing an inexorable control over the first npower Test match at Lord’s. It wasn’t the fact that they gained a decisive advantage; it was that they did so without playing terribly well.

And that seemed to me to be a terribly sad thing. I longed for West Indies to do better: take wickets, get ’em hopping, hit a few people, work up a little fear. Perhaps this longing comes from the idea that the game matters more than the results, that cricket has a beauty, a symmetry and even a moral purpose that other games cannot match. But really, I think it comes from the terrible fragility of the sport of cricket.

It simply can’t afford to lose one of its main teams. Cricket has a fine symmetry. There’s a Test team on every continent and West Indies account for two all by themselves.

As I watched events unfold yesterday – Paul Collingwood leaving the pitch when his personal tally was effectively 111 for four, Matt Prior seizing his moment with wondrous élan – it was not the renaissance of England that affected me, but the continuing decline of West Indies.

So much so that I genuinely wished we were back in 1984, when four great fast bowlers battered the England batsmen into helplessness and a battery of great batsmen bludgeoned the England bowlers into impotence. Better to see England beaten by a truly great side than to see them dominate this ramshackle apology for a Test team. I’d sooner see greatness than mere victory.

I remember feeling the same thing in 1985, when England overwhelmed Australia at a time when schism and strife dominated Australian cricket. Ian Botham summed it all up when he hit their top fast bowler, Craig McDermott, for a straight six first ball; and though it was great to see Australia suffer, I hoped very much that Australian cricket was not in terminal decline.

Well, I had my wish. You could say that Australian cricket has managed a recovery of sorts. I thought they probably would. But alas, I am inclined to think that West Indies cricket won’t.

They are officially better than Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, but then neither of those sides should be playing Test cricket. Bangladesh are not good enough yet and Zimbabwe aren’t good enough any more. West Indies are horribly close to joining them.

There is no star left. Brian Lara has retired from international cricket after presiding over the terrible decline of West Indies, often as captain. His own extraordinary brilliance has been counterpointed by the increasing weakness of the team itself; his own unbreakable self-regard has coincided with an increasing lack of self-belief in everybody else.

He was both a blessing and a curse, but if some are happier for his absence, the team itself is infinitely the poorer. When Lara went, the last vestige of fear went with him. West Indies have nothing left that can frighten England or any other of the top seven Test nations. And while some things in sport are cyclical – Australian cricket rose again, so did English cricket, Pakistani cricket rises and falls a dozen times a year – I am not convinced that West Indies will ever be a force again.

Tell me I’m wrong. Convince me. That Blackwash team – the team that beat England 5-0 and then again 5-0, home and away – was probably the greatest team that ever played cricket, and certainly the best I have ever seen. It was a team of a fierce and terrible beauty. It was a team that many hated, for its unapologetic and unambiguous brutality, but there was a grandeur and glory in that.

This was a team that knew itself, and knew that one great batsman would be followed by another, one great leader by another, one terrifying fast bowler by another. And most people thought it would never end, both those who loved it and wanted it to continue and those who wished it gone.

And now – like the impending extinction of a fierce and terrible carnivore – there is a complex suite of reasons for decline, no one more important than any other. We are faced with a fierce and terrible question: can anything be done to save it? Save the West Indian Tiger! Let us recreate the habitat in which it thrives, nurture West Indian fast bowlers in captivity before releasing them into the wild, build reserves and national parks where batsmen can reach full maturity unmolested by the dangers of the modern world. Let us have an international appeal: the West Indian Tiger must not go extinct!

Everyone with cricket in his soul will be the poorer if that terrible thing comes to pass.