Why today's cricketers are better than their predecessors

In the 1985 film Back to the Future, Marty McFly and the Doc require a DeLorean car to hit 88mph to travel through time. Unfortunately the time-travelling cricketer has yet to construct such a machine - perhaps a heavy roller with a turbocharged engine - so we must use statistics, match reports, the cracked and scarred relics of willow and leather, and try to imagine a different era of the game.

Or, like me, you can return to train with the team you played with in your teens, Barkby United, a Leicestershire Premier Division club I made my debut with over 30 years ago. Back then my comprehensive school was hardly equipped for proper cricket. All we had was a poorly kept square and a coffin of rotting pads, those cloth batting gloves with rubber spikes for protection, and a single razor-edged plastic box that would either fall down your trouser leg, or more terrifyingly, slip and hang like a guillotine over a more tender area. So if I wanted to play, which I really, really did, I had to trek across the cow fields at the back of my estate to the pretty village with the cricket ground.

That first night I turned up to nets, I ran in to bowl wearing blue trainers. Thirty years ago the maverick Ian Botham was still playing. He had a bleached mullet and swung a hefty Duncan Fearnley. Now mullets are an anathema - although Brett Lee and Ishant Sharma have tried their best to bring them back into style - and I can't remember the last time I saw that once-ubiquitous DF brand on a sticker. I didn't have the mullet, but I did have the bat, and like a lot of kids, I tried to hit Bothamesque sixes every other ball. And herein lies the generation gulf between the cricket I played then and now: our coach in the 1980s would send us out of the net to run a lap of the pitch if we lamped one back past the bowler. It wasn't "proper cricket". Proper cricket, at least for the first few overs you faced, was either leaving the ball or playing textbook forward- or backward-defensive shots. Launching the ball, even if you middled it, was a crime against correct batsmanship.

Fast-forward to 2016. I'm in the Barkby pre-season nets with head coach Tom Flowers. I'm that old I used to play with his father, Kevin, a feisty league paceman armed with a bushy moustache and colourful array of swear words, who would bring his son to games to watch him bowl out the opposition. When Tom was only three, and swinging a plastic bat with forearms like Popeye, we made predictions about his pedigree that proved to be true. He went on to play first-class matches for Leicestershire CCC, and now runs his own coaching school. I used to throw down tennis balls for him to whack when he was a kid, offering tips on how to grip the bat and how to stand.

Now Tom is the one telling me what to do, and I'm listening. Rather than drills on how to leave a hittable delivery outside off stump, pressure contests between batsman and bowler are set up to replicate on-field dilemmas. When bowlers get on top, the Barkby batsmen adapt - reverse sweeps, paddle shots and Dilscoops, and even forward-defensives are angled into gaps for runs.

This is a long way from being punished for hitting a cricket ball, and makes me accept that this generation is simply better than my generation. I know that claim might upset some old-school clubmen, who'll argue that we played on minefield wickets, and that a Reader ball could turn corners even on a sunny day. But sporting evolution, channelled by the environmental changes of the game, has created mutations in the cricketing animal.

This World T20, I predict, will be another tournament dominated by the bat - bar another India-style implosion - with, I hope, some more star turns from spin bowlers. I'd love to see Adil Rashid step up for England, and if he becomes anywhere near as intelligent and wily as Imran Tahir, we'll have a leggie of real talent. The problem is the willow-armed foe. Conditioning, power, the dizzying array of shots available to the best, means these batting wizards will spell ball after ball to the boundary. And it really isn't, despite what commentators argue, just about bigger bats. It's about better brains and canny preparation. The confidence and freedom to go out and attack from ball one.

The knock-on effect from the pro game is right here in the City Cricket Academy in Leicester. After AB de Villiers steps across and swipes a ball from a yard outside off stump through midwicket, so does a teenager in the East Midlands. Kids are working with coaches and Sidearm throwers to perfect their ramp shot, while the bowlers fire yorkers at orange cones.

Beam a modern batting hero into the 1930s and I reckon they'd cope. Drop Bradman into a T20 and he'd probably lose the game for you. I can't recall Michael's Vaughan's exact words, but during a Test Match Special discussion about how bowlers used to be much faster, he lost his cool. "Rubbish." I know he said that much. His blunt point was that in every other sport players have become more powerful and the game quicker, and that cricket wasn't an exception.

Running in to bowl at the Barkby tyros, it's hard to disagree. I'm bowling at the sons of the dads I used to play with, and they are better than their fathers. And this World T20 will only provide more evidence of generation super-cricketer.