Testing times ahead as cricket continues to devalue its traditions

So it is possible to go without Premier League football and still have a Super Sunday.

I wouldn't recommend it as a lifestyle choice, but as a one-off, and blessed with decent options elsewhere, it worked out okay.

Wentworth looked resplendent as it always does, a perfectly manicured corner of commuter belt, where your standard four-up, four-down goes for only marginally less than a LIV golfer's signing-up fee. Beverly Hills minus the weather and the Kardashians.

Talking of LIV, plenty of their lot turned up for the PGA Championship and were made to feel at home by the tournament being shortened to their bread-and-butter of 54 holes, and then made to feel like nobodies by Shane Lowry's withering "that was for the good guys" victory speech.

And then there was the cricket from The Oval, the third and final Test of a glorious, comical series against South Africa, the seventh and final Test of a glorious, comical summer, all adding up to a heart-warming and spirit-lifting reminder of why we love the long form of the game, and why the ECB need roundly condemning for their attack on it.

So golf and cricket rejoiced in holding centre stage on the strangest of weekends, a weekend where football somewhat unfairly got it in the neck for cancelling matches as a mark of respect to the Queen.

I'd rather they hadn't but these were literally unique circumstances and they made a call, rightly or wrongly. I've got a thousand sticks with which to beat football's authorities but the decision on Friday morning was made with all the right intentions.

To happier things and to cricket. Well, I say happier but sadly this tale has a depressing footnote – actually, make that a depressingly familiar footnote because it involves, inevitably, money and a false narrative which we're being force fed.

And that narrative is that Test cricket is now so insignificant in the grand scheme of cricketing things that next season, indeed up until 2027, you will not see a single Test match played during the whole of August.

That's right, the time of year when schoolboys and girls (who can afford Sky) have all the time in the world to revel in an artform that Ben Stokes and pals have just elevated to ludicrously, fantastical, absurd heights, will henceforth be wholly given over to The Hundred, the Vitality Blast's utterly pointless cousin. Call it T16.4 if you like, except I don't like. I'm just being told to like it and if The Hundred is the ECB's idea of an answer to cricket's future, then it is being asked the wrong question.

The Hundred is here to stay because the ECB and its backers have ploughed cash and reputations into it and can ill-afford to lose either. And I guess, for those who lack the attention span to deal with an entire T20 match, it serves a purpose.

The issue here – and I've nothing against The Hundred apart from it being rubbish – is that a balance needs to be struck between all formats of the game, but the ECB is so trenchantly opposed to that, hence this year's ludicrous County Championship programme which featured four matches in April and here we are, in the middle of September, with two more rounds of matches yet to be played. Diehards gathering at New Road in a fortnight will be filling in Christmas cards, not scorecards.

But the ultimate beamer to the gullet will surely be the loss of August Tests, notionally until 2027 although once things go they rarely come back. Just when Test match cricket has never looked rosier.

I'm not going to debase myself by using that hideous name doing the rounds for the type of cricket England's Test team now plays, that hideous molestation of the English language dreamed up on the fly by a pair of interns over a game of table tennis and a camomile and halibut smoothie.

But we all know what the word is and we all know the pleasure this entertaining approach has brought to millions of cricket fans. And not one of the South African Tests lasted more then three days, a brevity that you think the ECB would give their blessing.

Let's not kid ourselves. If England go to India or Australia and play like that they'll get absolutely battered, but that's almost by the by.

Endeavouring – as the ECB and Sky evidently want to – to reinvent cricket's audience artificially does not represent progress, it merely offends a lot of fans and disrupts a balance which needs striking.

And while the loss of an Ashes Test in August – for the first time ever – might seem a triviality by itself, it is part of a wider overhaul from which there will be no going back.

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