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Is it me, or does the cricket season start earlier each year and finish later? Does it finish at all? The semi-finals of the FA Cup aren't out of the way, and here comes cricket again, barging its way onto the front pages, forcibly occupying centre stage, greedily consuming the spotlight, the way it does. There is no break and no escape.

This is boom-time for cricket, and no mistaking. Has so much hype and anticipation ever preceded a county season? Have the people of Essex, Glamorgan, Gloucestershire etc, ever been so close to frenzy? Everywhere you look, kids are in replica cricket strip. From the front of nearly every glossy magazine smiles a cricketer with his pop-star girlfriend. The cricketing megastores are in overdrive and a nation is obsessed.

Conversation without cricket? Impossible. Socially, you're nowhere these days if you don't follow a county and can't produce intimate knowledge of Glamorgan's bowling figures from the 1997 season. And we haven't even had the World Cup yet.

Of course, the influx of middle-class, Johnny-come-lately cricket fans with no real roots in the sport is a source of bitter resentment for the diehards who followed cricket through the fallow, unglamorous years before it was fashionable. But those people are a fact of life now.

Still, you can't help but wonder what the knock-on effects of this crazy dominance might be for other sports, such as football - starved of attention, left to wither. Consider the possible impact, at grass-roots level. Fed an unvarying diet of cricket, cricket, cricket, what incentive can a schoolchild have to pull on a pair of boots and kick a ball?

It's clear that, for the good of all sport and for the ideal of a multi-sporting culture which we all treasure, we need to get cricket under control. We could do worse than start by putting the county season back where it belongs: in the football-free months of June and July. With a fortnight's break for Wimbledon.