Commercialism has suffocated the game

With the English papers abuzz with stories from the Ashes, Simon Heffer takes the opportunity to reflect on the aesthetics of cricket. Commercialism has stained the international game and, today, the only real cricket you'll see in England is played on village greens and school fields, he writes in the Sunday Telegraph

The curse of money has led to the very appearance of the players changing. They no longer wear flannels and cotton shirts on which the sleeves can be rolled up and down: they are in pyjamas (coloured pyjamas for one-day matches) saturated with the logos of their various sponsors, and with ubiquitous sponsors' baseball caps for the mandatory post-match over-the-moon/sick-as-a-parrot interview imported from soccer (alongside the numbers on the back of the shirts in most forms of the game).