The importance accorded to Lord’s is an anomaly. Lord’s is cricket’s history, by no means its present. The ground made by Thomas Lord is no longer the centre of cricket because cricket is no longer an English game. It is a game that is also played in England but is by no reckoning England’s premier game in terms of popularity. It is in the Indian subcontinent that cricket has become a mass phenomenon. Cricket matches in India and Pakistan and the returns they fetch fill the coffers of the International Cricket Council. In terms of performance too, English cricket is nowhere near the top. The real talents of the game and the crowd-pullers come from elsewhere — India, Australia, the West Indies. England has no one to match the talents of Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara or Matthew Hayden. Other than history, Lord’s no longer has any claims to the pre-eminence it enjoys. It is cricket’s principal pilgrim centre. In operational terms, Lord’s has, in fact, already lost its position. All the commercial operations are run from Monaco. Lord’s, or to be more precise, its historic Long Room, serves as a site for important meetings regarding all that concerns the game itself. The proposal to move the headquarters of the ICC away from Lord’s is an attempt to keep pace with present reality.

The proposal aims to bring all the operations of the ICC, commercial and sporting under one roof. This makes administrative sense. It is not possible to bring the commercial operations to Lord’s because of tax considerations. So it is more convenient to take the sporting aspects out of Lord’s. The latter is a symbol of two things. One is the white domination of the game and the other is an ineffable graciousness that was associated with cricket at a period of time. Both these are now things of the past. The white domination ceased with the emergence of black power, epitomized by the West Indian pace battery under Clive Lloyd. The mantle may have passed to Australia, but the domination is not complete because of the presence of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The graciousness associated with cricket disappeared a long time ago when cricket started to become more professionalized. The entire ambience in which cricket is played has undergone a fundamental transformation. Cricket administration has to adapt itself to the demands of these changes. It cannot remain confined to an outmoded ideal. The move away from Lord’s might appear to Colonel Blimp to be the end of civilization as he knew it, but that civilization died when the sun set on the British Empire.