The cricket season- an English summer stunner.

The cricket season - an English summer stunner.

Is it really that time of the year again? How time flies. It hardly seems like yesterday since the snooker table green of football's opening day back in August, seemed to go on for eternity for those who thought those muddied football folk would never take any kind of break. Now though the absorbing Premier League title race between Manchester City and Liverpool looks as though it could go right to the last day of the season and  those whose blood pressure can hardly take any more may want to look away now.

Meanwhile the latter stages of April, apart from its blissful suggestions of summer and those subtle hints of warmer days and gentle breezes, also brings it with that lovely tapestry of summer cricket, men in billowing white shirts, white trousers, snazzy helmets, agile catching hands, silly mid offs, three slips, mid on, deep square legs, tiny clusters of slips, gully fielders, backward square leg, third man and above all that charming umpire who every summer never fails to tickle our funny bone.

The County Championship cricket season is well under way but across Britain, chocolate box village greens will be alive with the sound of sharp, piercing cries for leg before wicket and howzat from permanently optimistic bowlers who love the sound of their deafeningly vociferous voices. It is England at her most dignified and polite, England behaving with utter decorum, moving sedately through those measured routines without ever disturbing the peace of orderly Sunday church services.

Across the playing fields of England, Sussex, Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Kent, Worcestershire, Glamorgan, Middlesex, Durham, leafy Gloucestershire, cricketers will be clattering down the pavilions of a thousand clubhouses. They will swing those beefy shoulders, crouch on their haunches, flourish their bats, exercise reluctant limbs, stretch sluggish calf muscles before mentally and physically preparing themselves for a day in what today seems like shimmering Easter Sunday heat.

Then they'll skip out onto an immaculate green batting and bowling pitch which looks so fresh and pristine that you could easily eat your Sunday roast lunch on it. The well manicured blades of grass have been mown thoroughly and before you know it, the men who play their cricket on a Sunday will be crashing their lofted sixes into the clubhouse bar thereby interrupting countless games of dominoes and cards played by elderly gentlemen smoking nostalgic pipes.

Further out into the patchwork quilt of England's rolling and tumbling hills, its inviting and beckoning rivers and its handsome waterfalls, yet more batsmen dig their bats religiously into the crease, looking fondly at the Mendips and Quantocks, the Lake District and the Pennines dreaming of centuries and half centuries or perhaps congratulating themselves on just how conscientious they've been in an enthralling run chase.

In the final closing overs of the local village derby the men with those sturdy caps on their head and the protective helmet that always looks ever so slightly intimidating will lift up their well worn bats for one last cavalry charge. The batsmen, sensing that this could be their time, dance out of their crease and thump the red ball violently and brutally over the top of a crumbling score board. The ball invariably drops into either a sheep's pen or perhaps next to a group of fiercely judgmental and highly critical cows who were just beginning to enjoy their Sunday afternoon nap.

Hundreds of years ago cricket used to be the preserve of wealthy landowners, the landed gentry, irate shepherds, furious farmers but perhaps that was totally untrue and merely an urban myth. And yet cricket is, was and will continue to be one of those timeless summer recreations where at the end of the day the church bells will ring out inevitably across rows of neatly symmetrical terraced houses.

Then the bowler at the sheep pen end will roll up his sleeves, heaving aching limbs for one last whirl of his arms and driving himself almost desperately towards the stern and phlegmatic last batsman. The ball goes flying through the air like a school playground catapult and the world stops for a second or two. There is a sharp intake of breath, as the last six balls of the over are fierily delivered and the tea time sandwiches are prettily arranged.

The first ball seems to nip back off the seam and end up locked in the batsman's pad. The second ball must have ended up in the hedgerows of somebody's back garden. The third ball gets the full and vigorous treatment landing quite accidentally in somebody's cider or maybe some quaint timber beamed pub. The fourth ball is rudely dismissed with an arrogant reverse sweep and the fifth ball was surely intended for the Scottish Highlands. The last ball of the over of the match must have been so wide that it was probably last seen in a farmer's market or some remote allotment site.

And so the game draws to a close and the game of cricket has once again been paraded in its most stunning cloth and fabric. The red April sun now falls slowly but beautifully over the distant horizon, shivering in shades of now vivid orange and peach. The local batsmen, who work as well muscled blacksmiths or fishermen spending their free time beside sweetly tinkling river banks, now clobber the red ball over long on with a businesslike air about them.

Cricket will never fade from the public consciousness because the summer in England would feel lost without it. The first crack of ball against a willow bat is one of the most recognisable sounds ever heard in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It is English as fish and chips, steak and kidney pies, Sunday roasts, vicars kindly greeting their parishioners, warm beer and vicars once again cycling down beloved country lanes. Cricket will always be an integral part of English life and it would be hard to imagine the game as anything else. That's six and they'll never get that one.