Ah the cricket season again.

 Ah, the cricket season again.

Let us pause for breath. It's all becoming very hectic, frantic and frenetic. The Premier League season is approaching its natural end, the closing stages of another magnificent football season about to reach another thrilling conclusion. Liverpool and Manchester City are locked in combat, striving to land the knockout blow and it couldn't be closer.

These two giants of the game will have to be prised apart at this rate, so closely contested is the battle. Liverpool currently edge City and it looks as if this one could go to the last game of the season. How refreshing is that? City are being pushed all the way to the Premier League title and what a welcome change that will be since most of us had assumed they did have it wrapped up, signed, sealed and delivered, in the bag. But the unassailable 12 point lead has now been whittled away and the Premier League will either turn a bright red shade or light blue complexion. 

Meanwhile here we are heading towards the end of April and guess what? The cricket season in England has already begun in those enchanting counties where the corporate tents and lily white marquees are slowly bursting into commercial life. Then, respectable looking umpires in white coats will step down elegantly from pavilions all across the country. They'll have on around their waists thick bunches of cricket pullovers, wrapped securely around them and then in their coat pockets, a whole selection of paraphernalia such as coins, cards, quite possibly their car keys and, above all, a red cricket ball will be produced. 

For decades and centuries this has become the perennial ritual that has accompanied the start of the cricket season. Both Oxford and Cambridge university will be ready and waiting, raring to go. For as long as anybody can remember the universities have always taken precedence in cricket's pecking order and the hierarchies have always been evident in the sport's  class ridden structure. Not that it's always been this way but when two universities meet on a cricket pitch in April you know the season has begun.

Cricket for most of us was always rooted in the village green game where two local teams gather together in front of imposing cathedrals, impressive church steeples and where the wisteria garlanded thatched cottages nestle away in an idyllic corner. Cricket is about gentle sedateness, cream teas with scones, jam, butter and those tiny sandwiches with egg and cress or cheese and pickle. It is about the rich tapestry of the English summer, the trickle of applause which can be heard every time a batsman prods a run to mid wicket and the richly gratifying crack of ball against willow. 

In the old days schoolchildren would gather enthusiastically by the boundaries of our noble cricket clubs and run towards the ball before picking it up excitedly and then writing a whole spreadsheet of figures and details that were so essential to the occasion. At lunch they would once again produce their tupperware box for a bottle of pop, while adding leg before wicket for the umpteenth time. It was a timeless procedure that was somehow synonymous with both the club and England national Test side. 

Cricket was always that therapeutic activity so desperately needed when football became all too much for cricket aficionados. It was a game designed for both young and old, a means of slowing down the reflexes and soothing fevered brows. Many of the county grounds were so laid back and relaxed that the rows of deckchairs and, quite possibly sun loungers, were never in short supply. You opened up your Daily Telegraph or Times, scribbling away at the crosswords before looking up at the game and blinking in the sunlight with that very contented air. The sun glasses would be briefly lifted and, quite nostalgically, the great Don Bradman would be lofting a handsome drive into the Lords tavern.

The wonderful John Arlott, who had painted the game's manifold colours so decoratively and decorously for so many decades just after the Second World War, was the man who breathed grammatical life into the game. For Arlott, cricket was indeed poetry in motion, a game of simplicity and purity, untouched by the gaudy baggage of sponsorship, where purple and green shirts would offset orange and blue trousers.

And that's where the traditionalists would look at you in sheer horror. Where on earth did the precious, beloved summer game go? Who had the effrontery to hijack the game, selling it down the river, ruining the structure of the game as a spectacle, disfiguring the game and pretending that cricket was somehow a child's colouring book rather than sport? Was it Kerry Packer, that rather dogmatic and opinionated Australian businessman who had simply wanted to transform the whole landscape of the game? Or was it the equally as brash Rupert Murdoch who continues to treat cricket as if it had been let loose in a children's nursery art lesson, all fetching reds, blues, greens, oranges, yellows and browns?

But here we are at the start of another county Championship cricket season. Middlesex will be proudly possessive of English cricket's headquarters Lords, Essex, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire will have a certain South East panache about them, Nottinghamshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire and Leicestershire will display their Middle England sensibilities and Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire will all be competing in a hotbed of  Northern England rivalries.

The wickets, at the moment, are green as the apples in an England orchard but shortly June and July will arrive like the yearly fairground. If a sweltering heatwave should find its way onto British shores, then dusty wickets will look brown and the ball will fly off the seam, cutting into a batsman's pads too sharply for words. We will be wagging our fingers by way of acknowledgement of a four to the leg side boundary and then indulging in a couple of Mexican waves should the game become bogged down in a brief period of tedium which only lasts for perhaps a couple of minutes or so. 

So cricket will be bounding down the pavilion steps, batsman will wave their bats respectfully, swinging their arms before reaching the crease, digging holes worthy of an archaeological project and then patting the ground with all the due deference of a keen gardener tending their roses and shrubs. Then they'll prepare to face the fiery hostility of a quickie bowler who just wants to take wicket after wicket. The crowd will become animated, the blazered members at Lords will take off their hats, clap raucously and then go back to the last remnants of their brandy. It is all very British and quintessentially so.

The gentlemen in the BBC Test Match special radio commentary box including the hilarious Brian Johnson, who formed a deeply emotional attachment to the cakes that he was frequently sent by avid listeners to Radio Three. Then there was the eloquent Christopher Martin Jenkins, a mine of information and statistics and then Arlott himself. Arlott would create poetic word pictures that would drift beautifully across the airwaves.

 Arlott was also a wine connoisseur without peer with an impressive wine cellar at his Alderley home but cricket for Arlott was one of his precious prints and souvenirs, a work of art to be cherished for ever. Cricket still holds a lifelong appeal to those who just want the game to remain as it is rather than tampered by those who know nothing about it. You can hardly say any fairer than that.