What will cricket be like 50 or 100 years from now?

How knowable is cricket's future? Could it be predicted, if you picked up on the clues and you knew where to look - or perhaps more importantly, how to look?

It's easy to presume that we're at some kind of peak moment, a point where the game has almost completed its evolution and there's not a lot of wriggle room left. The players are stronger, fitter, more powerful, nurtured by sports science rather than raw steak and physical labour. The cricket bat as an object has maxed out, and the laws governing its dimensions and materials prevent it changing in any significant fashion. Test matches exist in their eternal way as games of exquisite and sometimes excruciating drama, and yet more prone to positive results than ever. T20 is the ultimate concentration of form, a starburst of action that has yielded techniques that had no need of existence even two decades ago.

Earlier in the summer, at a pop-up bookstall in the hushed grounds of Winchester Cathedral, I found a copy of The Happy Cricketer by A Country Vicar, published by Frederick Muller Ltd, in 1946. "The draughtsman of cricket literature" promised the blurb, so I bought it. The book's previous owner had stuck a small newspaper clipping to the title page, a picture of the Rev RL Hodgson, and then noted underneath in a wobbly hand, "Vicar of South Baddesley 1917-1946".

The picture shows an elderly fellow in a flat cap and striped blazer, a neat white goatee on his chin. He is a figure from another age, a time in which an unassuming clergyman would not feel the need to advertise his real name on the front of his book. From a lovely, reflective chapter on Ranjitsinjhi, whom he knew from his time at Cambridge, the Vicar writes of the Prince's first appearance for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord's in 1896:

"During a stay of precisely ten minutes at the wicket, he made 47 runs off twelve balls… He never bothered to play himself in and was LBW to the thirteenth ball, from Briggs, which hit him in the stomach."

Forty-seven from 12 deliveries? There's the shiver of the future about that little knock, isn't there, even if it was made with a bat as slender as an After Eight.

From the same chapter comes this:

"Ranji was not simply a reckless slogger… He had acquired a style by then - one remarkable and altogether his own. He made strokes entirely beyond the capacity of the average university batsman. He was a master of all the ordinary strokes: he drove, cut beautifully, pulled the short ones; but he also made, with certainty, amazing leg-glances off good length, straight balls which anyone else would have been quite content to stop."

Ranji had found a way to move the game forwards, just as Kevin Pietersen found a way to switch-hit and Tillakaratne Dilshan found a way to ramp the ball behind the wicketkeeper. They are separated by more than a century, but all are part of the long game of question and answer that cricket plays with its margins. Ranji's knock at Lord's was a sense of the possible - it's just taken a while for such explosiveness to become a more regular currency.

So if someone offered us the chance to look forward 50 years, or a hundred, what would we see? It might be a daunting thought (imagine how WG Grace would feel were he shot forwards in time, surrounded by the modern world). Almost everything could be alien, but there are intimations today of how it may be if we knew where to search.

From my stool at the back here somewhere in the early decades of the 21st century those horizons seem distant, but if I had to guess I'd say that the next great response will come from the bowlers, players capable of throwing pressure back onto the power hitters who are reshaping things right now. I don't how it will happen - new techniques, shorter or more deliberately volatile pitches, gene therapy - but the clues will be here already, glistening with promise.