Cricket has adapted and survived for centuries, but a new struggle over control – combined with climate pressures – may test the game in ways it has not faced before.

Cricket is always in crisis. Some say it was lucky to survive beyond the Victorian era. During the 1950s and 1960s it became boringly defensive as rates of scoring plummeted and the game’s entertainment value declined. Then in the 1970s it was roiled by the Packer revolution, which was a war between ‘establishment’ and private control and became a battle between Tests and one-dayers for spectators. Now there is a battle between cricket run by national boards and by franchise-based T20 tournaments of great popular appeal. Climate change might also pose problems.

Can the game survive its latest challenges? Cricket has survived many crises by adapting and evolving. The changes it has gone through have kept it alive and popular but challenges remain, as they always have.

Cricket developed into what we today might recognise as cricket during the latter decades of the eighteenth century in the south of England. Nobles and the gentry largely fashioned it. Then the game spread to London, where business interests became involved, and in the 1800s it spread further to northern England and the working class. It became the game of the people in England.

On the wave of colonisation it spread to Australia, the Indian sub-continent, Africa, the Caribbean and New Zealand. Outside the Caribbean, it never quite took hold in the Americas.

For a time cricket was highly popular, though the rise of ‘Association football’ (soccer) in England threatened its hegemony in the early years of the twentieth century. It survived, though, and crowds for major games (county cricket in England and inter-state fixtures in Australia) were sometimes of several thousands. Even club matches drew spectators in numbers. ‘Test’ matches between the best players at national level were very popular, especially games between England and Australia which produced a great and enduring international rivalry.

After World War II, though, the game entered a difficult period and by 1970 it was in trouble in terms of popular appeal. A ‘win-at-all-costs’ or ‘loss avoiding’ mentality permeated Test cricket in particular, defensive sieges leading to drawn matches becoming common. Crowds declined. But one-day cricket, one innings per side, emerged in England and quickly gained a foothold. The entertainment factor returned, results within a single day were welcomed by many and crowds came back. But the one-day game threatened to a degree the longer form.

The competition between the short and long forms was resolved via a challenge to the game by Australian media magnate Kerry Packer, who also broke the monopoly power of the main cricketing boards by buying up the best players. Cricket was rejuvenated, over two decades it became professionalised in Australia and England and the rest of the cricketing world followed. Both one-day and Test cricket survived and became as much symbiotic as competitive with each other; innovations in the short form made their way into the long one, scoring rates in Tests improved and Test cricket regained public favour. Traditionalists feared the rise of the abbreviated game, but it became fundamental to the revitalisation of Test cricket.

The game expanded. In 1926 there were only three nations (England, Australia and South Africa) playing Test cricket in the form of four- or five-day (or longer) matches. By 1976 the West Indies, New Zealand, India and Pakistan had joined it. By 2026 Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ireland and Afghanistan had been admitted. South Africa, expelled during the early 1970s because of apartheid and problematic in promoting rebel tours while on the outer, had long since been brought back.

After 2000 a new form of expansion developed with the invention of a very short form of cricket. This was Twenty-20, in which each side batted for only 20 overs in games that were over in only three and a half frenetic hours. Crowds and TV audiences flocked to it and franchises were established to tap the money streams it generated. A problem of balance developed, with Test cricket and its first-class nurseries threatened. The Test form is unlikely to expand its membership further and may indeed contract. No less an authority than Greg Chappell has suggested that by the 2040s only half of the twelve countries now playing Tests will still be doing so.

By contrast, there are now more than 100 countries with organised men’s T20 cricket and 79 with T20 cricket for women. Cricket’s centre of gravity has shifted fundamentally.

The rise of T20 cricket has not been without problems. For a time gambling and match-fixing created a scourge, and the integrity of some matches was called into question. That even seeped into Tests.

The looming crisis today is over control of cricket. The contenders are the T20 franchise owners, many of them Indian billionaires, and the national boards. Boards that still run T20 leagues are considering privatising them. However that goes, Chappell suggests the boards and the International Cricket Council as controlling bodies will be on their last legs by 2040. Cricket might be losing control of itself.

Big capital might soon control the game virtually completely and T20 might dominate the entire ecosystem. The game’s very tools - bats, balls and pitches - could be subjected to purely commercial dictates.

And there is a suggestion that the game will eventually struggle against climate change. Increased temperatures, with accompanying unpredictable weather, might become existential threats.

So far, the game has faced down its problems, adapted to changing times and retained a place in people’s affections. But its challenges in the past were largely internal to the game itself, whereas the ownership crisis and climate change come from outside. These are very large influences and difficult to manage. In the current circumstances it is not easy to be optimistic about cricket’s long-term future.