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This is an appropriate time to remind the world of a singular man who loved cricket and, by writing about it as beautifully as he did, adorned the game more than many a player. It is appropriate on three counts: the story is as long as the century, this is an Old Trafford Test and he was a Manchester man.

What, one wonders, does Neville Cardus mean to a younger generation? It is a question worth asking when Michael Jackson, the chief executive of Channel 4, uses the term ``cricket fan'' to support their newly-won coverage of domestic Tests. Fans support teams; lovers follow games. If this sounds old-fashioned, so be it. To a generation of baseball-hatted lager drinkers anything hatched the day before yesterday seems unspeakably odd, so poor old Cardus hasn't got much chance.

Yet he will have his revenge. It is a fair bet that, 100 years from now, when all the modish bubbles of a credulous age have evaporated, people will still be reading him, if only to discover why people once loved cricket as they did. No writer on sport, ever, anywhere, has enjoyed so wide a readership, or influenced so greatly those who came after. And when one considers that cricket was the second string to his bow, then one realises what a magnificent archer he was.

Brought up in genteel poverty in Rusholme, which is now an Asian encampment close by the dangerous slum of Moss Side, Cardus first went to Old Trafford in 1900 as an 11-year-old. Twenty years later, when he was a music critic on the Manchester Guardian (as it was) and fell ill, the night editor thought that watching cricket might assist his recovery.

To make his time worthwhile, Cardus filed a piece from Lancashire's match against Derbyshire and it was almost spiked on grounds of excessive length before, on a whim, C P Scott, the paper's famous editor, decided to run it. Cardus was given the byline ``Cricketer'', and from that sapling came a mighty oak. For the next 20 years he wrote 8,000 words a week, helping the paper double its sales in summer.

Cardus could never have flourished today, in the age of the soundbite and the all-seeing eye of television. As Christopher Brookes, his biographer, has written, he was a painter, not a photographer. His style was rich, consciously literary, and assumed a general knowledge in his readership that no modern journalist could ever take for granted.

He is far too mannered for some modern tastes, particularly those forged in different disciplines. Hugh McIlvanney, the accomplished boxing writer, fretted on a radio programme two years ago that there wasn't much trace of the ``street'' in Cardus. No, there's not, and what of it? There isn't much trace of the ``street'' (whatever that is) in Waugh, Fitzgerald or, to bring us bang up to date, William Trevor. There is no trace of the ``street'' in McIlvanney's rococo flourishes, either, but that shouldn't be held against him.

Cardus, in fact, came from one of those over-rated streets of sentimental folklore and, like most people from a similar background, he never went back, and never apologised for not doing so. It was partly as a reaction against his background that he became the writer he was.

Cardus had distinct advantages, apart from the absence of television, which has transformed the way spectators watch and understand all games. Other than WG, who stopped playing Test cricket when Cardus was 10, he saw all the greatest players in their pomp, from Victor Trumper to Greg Chappell. The greatest of them all, Bradman, even wrote a preface to one of his books. He was held in regard by all, another thing that marks him out as unusual.

There could never be a greater cricket writer than Cardus, said John Arlott, because he invented the whole thing. He did more than that. He invented sports writing, and so everybody who has followed, however modestly, owes him a debt of honour. Cardus opened the door that allowed the likes of Henry Longhurst, Geoffrey Green and Ian Wooldridge to skip merrily down the path he trod, and contribute their own distinguished verses.

The other thing that marked Cardus out as exceptional was the range of his interests. At his memorial service in April 1975 the great pianist, Clifford Curzon, played Mozart and Dame Flora Robson recited Shakespeare. He grew up in a different world, all right, and it is hard not to envy him.

Now, 24 years after his death, people can read some of his letters. Michael Kennedy, that most excellent of modern music writers and a former northern editor of this paper, knew Cardus well and has just released a shoal of correspondence to the library at Old Trafford. There are 230 letters, stretching from 1951 to 1974, just before Cardus's death in February 1975, and can be read from start to finish for sheer pleasure.

Cardus is at his best grumbling about other music writers and the sub-editors' desk at the MG, which he dubbed the abattoir (''quite elegant'' once came out as ``white elephant''). There are also unflattering references to English cricket that remind the reader that a poor Test team is not a modern phenomenon. Goodness knows what he would have made of the debacle this past week.

Looking round Old Trafford during this Test, and seeing how few young faces were there, other than the choreographed interval performances by the Kwik Cricket roadshow, one wonders how another Cardus will emerge. What is there in the modern game to fire the imagination of a generation that takes less innocent pleasures than he did?

But, at the end of a cricketing century that began when an 11-year-old boy went to Old Trafford for the first time, and was so taken with what he saw that he devoted much of a full and fulfilling life to writing about it, I propose a toast. To honour the memory of the only sports writer, living or dead, who achieved greatness, I say: ``Sir Neville, we remain in your debt.''