Where next to conquer?

It was said of Mikhail Gorbachev that his flair was for walking backwards into the future. Cricket shares that talent. Coping with the present has been hard enough, without worrying about what's been round the corner.

The period in which Wisden Cricket Monthly was founded was a rare instance otherwise. Having been elaborately repackaged and modernised in Australia during the intrusion of Kerry Packer's World Series, cricket arrived in the 1980s a few months early, having been gifted a market for games in a day, in a night, in eye-catching colours and tri-cornered tournaments, with more pizzazz for television, greater rewards for players and advertisements between overs to bankroll both.

Two dozen years later, cricket finds itself in another bout of serious forethought, led this time by the ICC. The ICC is finding that the earlier revolution wrought most of the more obvious changes and its activities have so far involved more of the same: more cricket, more television, more marketing, more money. The next wave of reform will be more fundamental, redesigning cricket for a rising generation of sports consumers and priming it for pastures new.

Some years ago I was at an Australian Cricket Board function as the chairman Denis Rogers unfolded a vision of a globalised game. With great solemnity and ceremony he announced that Australia, as part of its ICC remit, would be taking cricket to China. One imagined a Lord's war cabinet with a world map on the wall: "OK Australia, you take China; India, Asia; England, South America. The rest of you, spread out. Meet you back here in 20."

Extending cricket's sphere of influence was never going to be that easy, for three interwoven reasons. Its initial spread was as an Imperial game. Its success sprang from its capacity to serve both colonial and nationalist ends, to be a means for the payment of homage and for the expression of independence. In post-colonial times it is drained of that meaning: it becomes simply a game to win, drawing its prestige from money and marketing. Invoking the riots at Lambing Flat, the goldfields scene of the worst anti-Chinese riots in Australian history in 1861, would only get you so far in building a Sino-Australian sporting rivalry.

This throws the stress back on to the game itself. And, let's be honest: much as we all love it, cricket is a hard sell. "No thanks," said the pretty girl that RC Robertson-Glasgow, with "misplaced kindness", once invited to a game. "Nothing ever happens at cricket; it is just all waiting." Of course, it only seems to be - but she had a point. Cricket takes a long time. It can look spectacular, but isn't designed for spectacle. It can entertain, but isn't calibrated as an entertainment. The complexity and eccentricity of its tenets and techniques are not welcoming; many of its dottier rituals seem superfluous.

Five-day cricket, regarded by those who know as the game's paramount variant, is a particularly fiendish form in which to interest the uninitiated. A weak international football team can thwart strong opposition by throwing everyone behind the ball, aiming to grit out 90 minutes for a scoreless draw, and might even get an upset goal against the run of play; a weak Test XI, with 1,800 minutes of available time, will always get thrashed. As they are at present.

Cricket, in other words, takes a bit of effort to assimilate: it's the party you realise is great after an hour in the kitchen surviving the shock of seeing three ex-girlfriends on arrival, when you find there is heaps of beer in the bath and you know the songs they are playing. Many of the game's subtlest and most confounding aspects, furthermore, are intrinsic to it. Change them for the sake of broader appeal and you endanger not merely the goodwill of the existing community but the very qualities that distinguish cricket from other games.

It might be more helpful to render meaningful what is already there. There is nothing like seeing others enjoying a game, however strange, to encourage you to join in. At the moment there does not seem a lot of enjoyment going round. "International cricket feels flat, undramatic, even dull," complained Scyld Berry in these pages a year ago. "Everyone is playing too much. Australia's pre-eminence in the Test and one-day game has become predictable ... `Cricket goes in cycles' is an adage that only a fool will cling to."

Having shrugged off its amateur past, of course, cricket must bear a certain burden of professionalised tedium. It has spent its inheritance of great players who learned their cricket the old-fashioned way, rising through the established grades and playing at state, county and provincial level before higher honours. The generation that succeeded them, streamed into youth teams and academies as well as the first-class game, have been raised with different expectations: knowing that cricket could be their living, they've never needed to live for cricket. If the game today seems more routine, perhaps that should not surprise us. Has anyone paid money to watch you work lately?

What can we say, then, about a quarter-century of professional international cricket? The trade-off was a necessary and unavoidable one: cricket could not withstand the tide of sporting commercialism. Television and sponsors had re-priced all games and the remuneration of players could not stand still. But, for players, it was only a partial emancipation. The attitude of boards of control since Packer has been an unconscious observance of Alfred Hitchcock's advice regarding actors: "Pay them heaps and treat them like cattle." And some heaps have been taller than others.

It was this climate of mistrust and cynicism that smoothed the path to malpractice. When Sir Paul Condon's anti-corruption unit reported to the ICC on match-fixing in May 2001, it noted that players were "not sufficiently involved in the administration of the game and ownership of the problems". While the ICC does not have a great record taking advice from others, one might have thought it could take its own.

Administrators have fared badly believing in cricketers' worst instincts; it might be more fruitful appealing to their better natures. One would be even more emphatic about this had professional not become so pregnant with meaning. It suggests diligence, dedication, attention to detail, as in "professional qualification", but it also implies contrivance, conspiracy and sleazy expedient, as in "professional foul". Cricket is witnessing both: we have what might be called "professional appeals", displays of calculated intimidation and petulance bearing no relation to the matter for adjudication, even "professional catches", like the one for which Sourav Ganguly remarkably escaped censure during the World Cup final. These displays are not evidence of an overabundance of high spirits, or of being supremely tough and competitive: they're just cheating. To make the most of the dividends of professionalism, players must confront some of its less appetising manifestations. It will not only be beneficial for the game; it will make the case for their influence in it unassailable.

We are at a hinge moment in cricket's history - a tipping point, to use the expression beloved of marketers and military men alike. A new age beckons; the trappings of the old are slipping away. But while cricket should not walk backwards into the future, the occasional glance over its shoulder might still be useful.