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The reason people love cricket is that it’s cricket. It’s a difficult game, and a physically testing one, and yet cricketers can get wilier and wiser as they get older and maintain their competitiveness. There are cricketers playing now who are in their late thirties and at the top of their game. They have been playing at a high level for nearly two decades, and have become almost legendary. This also means that a kid who grows up admiring a particular player has the chance to play with or against him.

Cricket is a common language which transcends nations. It binds together kids and adults in India, Pakistan, Jamaica and the West Indies, Malaysia, Australia, England, South Africa, New Zealand, and Indonesia. If you go to a cricket match in Bermuda, it’s less like a sporting event and more like the St Patrick’s Day parade.

And beyond that: cricket is a game where top level players make decisions based on sportsmanship as well as on the desire to win. In this last test series between England and India, an England batsman misunderstood the situation on the field and was run out while under the impression that the ball was not in play. Despite the serious disadvantage to his team the Indian captain chose not to claim the dismissal. It was the right choice: the cricketing thing to do. India lost the series – not, fortunately, as a consequence of this sequence of events – and the team will get a hard time for that at home, but no one will question the appropriateness of that decision.