English cricket must reassert itself

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a wonder of its day, designed to symbolise the economic and military supremacy of Great Britain. It was an Exhibition that gained its strength, as English cricket invariably likes to do, by an innate conservatism, a sense that change must take place in a context of stability and tradition. It was driven not by revolutionary fervour, but by an assumption of superiority that underpinned the Victorian age. English cricket's Great Exhibition dare not proclaim such superiority ñ although Giles Clarke, an ECB chairman not often touched by self doubt, will doubtless come close.