AFTER THE French Revolution,the English aristocracy saw the warning signs and retreated from the forefront of public life, leaving overt power to the Commons and furthering its interests thereafter by the covert exercise of influence. Similarly, after the Cricket Council was established in 1968, the Marylebone Cricket Club lost its traditional control over English cricket, and this private club has had to find a new and revised role for itself.

When MCC stages a Test match at Lord's, the sums of money involved are inextricably complicated. Even the financial specialist cannot reduce them to simple figures from ticket sales, and from this sum of roughly £1.8m the cost of stewarding and of meals for players and officials has to be deducted. From next year, when the ECB will publish its accounts in an attempt at open government, we shall know exactly how much profit is left over. But for the showpiece of the season, the five-day pinnacle of the English game, that sum is not vast – especially as it has to subsidise not only county cricket but also, from now on,the grass roots as well.

Out of this sum of a million or so pounds which goes to the ECB, MCC will receive some back. Like every other Test ground authority, MCC receives £300,000 a year from the ECB towards capital investment.The remaining profit from a Lord's test goes to MCC itself. Principally that means the revenue from all the hospitality boxes, always booked up for the first four days against Australia, always packed with winers and diners. The ECB takes the revenue from their tickets, and all the rest of the hospitality income goes to MCC.

The second main item is the advertising space around the ground. Some of it is reserved for the ECB to promote its sponsors; the rest is for MCC to sell. Although the club publishes its annual accounts, again it is impossible to say exactly how much money these advertising hoardings bring in during a Test, as some of them are placed around the boundary at Lord's for a whole season.

In any event, it is a handsome sum that MCC makes out of each Lord's Test (which sometimes occur at the rate of two a year) – and it is money which, if the ECB had a stadium of its own, would otherwise go to English and Welsh cricket as a whole, albeit with the attendant costs attached. So it is legitimate for us to ask whether MCC puts back into cricket what it takes out.

We can account the rebuilding of Lord's as one of MCC's contributions to cricket. There have been one or two dissenting voices during the ground's transformation into a light, airy, quasi-tented structure, but the dissent usually hasn't lasted for very long, and I suspect the new Grand Stand and even the media centre will come to be as accepted as the new Mound Stand was. Many Testgrounds, especially those in Asia, are examples of brutalism – just bowls of concrete terracingfor the masses. In modern cricket architecture, Lord's is a brand leader.

 MCC ADMINISTERED the International Cricket Council until 1993, when the world governing body managed to establish its own secretariat. Now the club provides office accommodation for ICC and the ECB in return for a rent which the MCC secretary, Roger Knight, describes as `fairly low'. MCC still provides the administration for the European Cricket Federation, but the Federation does not as yet includes countries in Europe which are associate members of ICC, such as Holland and Denmark, Scotland and Ireland. Test centuries have recently been allotted their spheres of influence, and it is an obvious reform that all European countries should join in the one body under the umbrella of the ECB. But the ECB has enough on its plate at the moment getting English cricket sorted out, so it is expected that the Board will ask MCC to help in the pastoral care of our near-neighbours, hitherto long neglected.

 MCC provides free coaching for all kinds of cricketers, from the promising lads unearthed in far-flung associate-member countries to the less privileged of the London Community Cricket Association. On the Nursery, especially as autumn approaches, MCC entertains clubs around the county that are celebrating their centenary or some other anniversary, or else sends a team to play the club concerned. After the Cricket Council was established, there was a feeling that MCC took a back seat, and now there's a feeling that it should be more proactive, and implement a rolling programme over a four-or five-year period, says the assistant secretary (cricket), John Jameson.

The club is keen to help where it can, according to Knight: `The key to it [English cricket] is having a continuum, as the ECB says, from the playground to the Test arena.`To this end MCC may have a large part in a National Cricket Centre, or Academy. Once the post-election dust has settled, cricket will find out whether public funding is available for such a project. If not, MCC might be the body with the right funds and expertise to setup a centre of excellence, perhaps at Shenley Park. The club's interest in the Hertfordshire ground was signposted last summer when it staged a first-class match there between MCC and South Africa`A'.

In accordance with its ambassadorial role, MCC sends out touring parties every year. Normally there is one major three-week tour – last winter to Fiji and Hong Kong, next winter to East and Central Africa – and the club's profits, including those from a Lord's Test match, go partly towards subsidising the costs. In addition there are usually two shorter tours during the English summer, to Germany and Corfu this year, Austria and Italy next. In the process MCC tourists do some coaching of players, as does the accompanying umpire of umpires; and they help to keep the game alive in these outposts by taking along an eminent name or two (among the 17,100 full members and 575 or so honorary ones are 40-odd current first-class cricketers, ranging from Keith Arthurton to Bill Athey). But one has to wonder how much good MCC does by these tours, beyond having a good time and preaching to the converted. Perhaps it was not the duty of a private club to do more than that to keep the game alive, and we should be thankful it has done that; but it has been left to ICC, with its new energies, to go further and sell the game to the world.

At home MCC carries out its ambassadorial role by playing 350 matches a season against schools and clubs, in the same spirit as it has always done. We can be sure of that because we have a vivid account of the match between Rugby School and MCC in the 1820s, captured in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Mr Aislabie, then secretary of MCC, captained the club while good old Tom led the home team, which of course included the insufferably saccharine Arthur. In a few details these matches between MCC and public schools have changed: by Tom Hughes's account, the pitch was only chosen and prepared the evening before, and an impromptu dance was then held on the ground for all the players; and the tone was so hearty that when MCC's cunning spinner had Jack Raggles the slogger caught and bowled, he hurled the ball at the back of the retreating batsman. But the essential spirit has not changed much. MCC still like to bat first and show the boys the way the game should be played – or, at any rate, the English way in which the game is played. The club usually has the better of the match after a sporting declaration (it wins twice as many games as it loses). Now as then, there is a hearty lunch at the school, and perhaps an invitation to the leading cricketer of the school, the Tom of his day, to turn out for the club when he is in town.

All very well. But again, is not MCC preaching to the converted by playing against public schools, while the vast majority of state schools offer no cricket at all? This year the club will play against 44 schools from outside the Headmasters' conference, a number which is growing but still dwarfed by the 175-odd public schools MCC plays. For these public schools, the MCC match is often one out of four or five in consecutive days in cricket week. The club might do better to hire a club or school ground near each of the main English cities and there entertain teams made up from inner-city schools which have no grounds of their own. In this country we have no equivalent of the Pakistan veterans' team, made up of former Test players, who go around their country and often unearth an original talent. It might be less `social', but MCC would be the ideal club to fill this void.

 THE FUNCTION which MCC fulfils best is probably its guardianship of the Laws. It is not desirable that they should be in the hands of ICC, where they might be liable to hijacking by a new president. The situation which has evolved over the last two centuries looks like an anachronism, but is actually close to ideal.

The passing of a new law or the revision of an old one is not by any means the work of club members alone. The process begins with the Laws working party, which consists of the chairman of the Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers, Sheila Hill, and another member, WJ Robins; John Harris, chairman of the first-class umpires' association; Nigel Plews, as a sage current umpire, and Don Oslear as a former umpire with his special interest in legal niceties. As cricket secretary, John Jameson makes it a panel of half-a-dozen.

Lording it… Left The present secretary, Roger Knight (with former president Sir Oliver Popplewell) has maintained the club's record of enhancing Lord's with bold modern architecture. Top The much-admired Mound Stand, with the big video screen, during last month's one-day international. Above Luncheon is served, with lashings of egg and bacon

Twice or thrice a year this party will meet, and in between they receive letters which bring unusual cases to their attention. If the party does decide to recommend a change in the laws, this is then referred to MCC's cricket committee, chaired by Sir Colin Cowdrey, and the matter will also be discussed by ICC before being put to MCC members at their AGM.

From its lofty position MCC can see what is good for the game as a whole. As Jameson explains, ` MCC's concern is for when the Nag's Head from Ealing plays the Horse's Hoof from Horhsam.' First-class cricket can always supplement the basic laws with its own playing regulations, making a two-tier system which appears to work pretty well.

A change occurs only every few years or so. There was one this year, when, on legal advice, the word `only' was dramatically deleted from Law 3.14, note (d) –`The umpires should suspend play only when they consider… that it is unreasonable or dangerous to continue.'

One that Jameson would like to see changed relates to the lunch interval. Law 16, would you believe, decrees that if an innings ends, say, nine minutes before a 1 pm lunch, then the interval will be 49 minutes long, and play will resume at 1.40, not before. It is only a first-class playing regulation which allows play to resume at 1.31. `We should be getting people to play as much cricket as possible,' says Jameson.

Such a law must have been set in stone at a time when lunch was luncheon, and sacred; when the quail and port could not be rushed; when Mr Aislabie would not on any account risk indigestion. But what is remarkable is that the Laws have needed little more than amplification and revision in the last two centuries. Those which served the cricket of underarm bowling in the home counties of England in the 1780s still basically govern the game as played by Curtly Ambrose on a ropey track at Port-of-Spain.

But there is one legal gap which needs to be plugged soon. When a throw-in hits a batsman and ricochets towards the boundary, the Laws award the striker four runs if the ball reaches it. But if the ball stops short of the boundary, convention, even if it is wearing thin, asserts that the batsmen should not run. On two such occasions recently involving England, there has been a stink. In the Sydney Test of 1994–95, Mike Atherton and John Crawley flouted convention by running, to Australian anger; and in the Bulwayo Test, when Crawley's throw rebounded off a Zimbabwe batsman, England were just as annoyed to see Grant Flower and Alistair Campbell run. A similar incident at the height of a one-day international could be highly combustible. The Laws should be changed to say that the ball is dead if it hits a batsman who accidentally obstructs a throw. A revision is likely, Roger Knight says, to be done for the year 2000.

If MCC is on its strongest ground in the matter of the Laws, it is at its weakest on the subject of refusing membership to women. The club's attitude is so deserving of ridicule that little else needs to be said about it. We can trust that the club will not be utterly immune from evolution, that the younger or more enlightened members who are in favour of equality will one day become a decisive majority. As for those who resist change through prejudice or social inadequacy or some other reason, one would have thought that they have only to look at South Africa to see what happens when apartheid is abolished. Very little. Nominal and legal changes may come and go, but not much disturbs the predominance of the white middle-class male.

The whole system of MCC membership appears to be modelled on the lines of Christian salvation

It would be healthier for English cricket if the headquarters of the game were at Edgbaston, or Trent Bridge, or Leicester or Northampton. The physical presence of the ECB on MCC's own ground has led to too close a relationship. It is all too easy, indeed customary, for one who has risen to the top of MCC's ladder to move effortlessly across to the top of the ECB's. Those at the top of Loamshire CCC are not quite so well placed.

And while women at Lord's remain as unwelcome as they were in ancient Athens, MCC has become distinctly keen on wealthy men. The offer of life membership, in return for a payment of £10,000, has been taken up by nearly 200 people. The scheme had to be devised to pay for the new Grand Stand, as lottery funding was denied to MCC, whose policy of sexual inequality counted against it. This lurch towards fast young city types led to the club's denunciation by its former secretary. `The right person to belong to the club,' said Lt-Col John Stephenson, `is the man who comes up from Somerset once a year.' And doesn't clutter the place up.

The scheme does rather smack of Papal Indulgences and the good old days when a handsome cheque made payable to The Vatican could buy a place in Heaven. In fact the whole system of MCC membership appears to be modelled on the lines of Christian salvation. At the top, in paradise, we have those who have attained the blessed state of full membership. In Purgatory are those condemned to live and labour there for 20 years or more in the hope of salvation, the associate members and those on the waitinglist; finally, in Hell, we have the great unwashed who have to pay £30 or £40 to sit side-on with the sun in their eyes.

Such occasions as the 1999 World Cup final, the Lord's Tests, should be monitored closely. But for the moment there would seem to be no need for the ECB to do what the Indian Board did when their equivalent of MCC, the Cricket Club of India, kept too large a slice of the cake for itself when it staged Tests at the Brabourne Stadium: that is to build a new national headquarters. MCC is adapting to its new role.

Scyld Berry is cricket correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph.

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