If ONE PROPHECY about cricket in the new century can be made with confidence, it is that the sport will continue to expand around the world in one form or another. Pakistan may never reveal the results of their match-fixing enquiry, India may never lose a Test series at home, or win one away; England may never win one anywhere, and no ECB official may ever be held accountable for such an outcome. But it is and always will be part of human nature, or of man's `ludic sense' as the sociologist Johann Huizinga called it, to play with a ball and hit it with some kind of stick.

It is improbable though that professional domestic cricket will survive in England in the form which it has taken for more than a century. The very fact indeed that county cricket has changed so little in the course of the 20th century means that it will have to change hugely to catch up with the 21st. The number of counties has grown in the last hundred years from 15 to 18, that is all. The number of days allotted for Championship matches has increased in the same period from three (as Derek Birley points out in his new book, A Social History of English Cricket, three-day cricket was the choice of the establishment with leisure time to fill, never mind the masses) to four, but effectively the same number of overs. The number of Championship fixtures – 17 last season, 16 next – is the same as it was for most counties at the end of the Victorian era. A prophet in 1899 did not need a crystal ball to see how county cricket would be transformed between then and now: in essence it has hardly changed at all.

First-class cricket based on the counties still has, I believe, some legs in it, but only if animation is breathed into it sooner not later. Four-day cricket in its present form on all-too-similar pitches on county grounds will die a deserved death, its cricket too samey and sterile. At one or two of our more northerly counties in particular a stereotype of county cricketer is emerging who bears no relation to the individuals of a generation ago: he is more like a squaddie – close-cropped, physically tough, mentally set, drilled to do exactly what captain or coach orders, which is to bowl ten overs of medium-pace and hit 30 off 20 balls. The lack of variety in county cricket as it stands will seal its fate.

The trend would be arrested if the tendency to play every Championship match on county grounds were reversed. If counties went back to their old out-grounds – Buxton and Harrogate, Hinckley and Pontypridd – and to new ones, the decline in county memberships and attendances would surely be halted for a while. One-day matches could and should continue to be staged at county grounds, floodlit as they will all become in the new century. But Championship matches should be taken around each county, between May and September at any rate, to reconnect cricketers with the communities they supposedly represent, instead of preaching to the same converted few as they do now. The more natural, less loamed surfaces of most out-grounds would make for more varied cricket and, by wearing and tearing instead of going up-and-down, encourage English spinners who currently fill the bottom places in the season's bowling averages. A better type of individual would be created too if, the day before a Championship match on an out-ground, each of the home players had to visit a local school to promote interest and give away some tickets as prizes to boys and girls. A cricketer who does not have everything laid out for him at his county ground – park here, sir, net here, eat there – but has to learn how to cope with cramped dressing-rooms, intrusive spectators and different conditions, is going to be a far more adaptable and useful individual on England tours.

The insuperable problem at present is the cost of bringing in scoreboards, hospitality tents, portaloos and stands conforming to stringent safety regulations; in the present climate of recession in English cricket, every county secretary will be tempted to prefer his existing asset, the county ground. So it is up to the ECB to provide the leadership, by purchasing these mobile facilities and storing them at the Test grounds for counties to use on a regional basis. There is a way to halt the sterilisation, not as yet the will.

Opposite Ad nauseam: how international cricket might look circa 2050, with logos a-go-go and umpires a no-no

 SOONER OR later in the new century, Championship and one-day cricket based on counties will dissolve. Even now we have an anachronism in that cricket is our only sport which bases itself on county rivalry, with apologies to those Cornishmen who like their day out in support of their rugby team. It was only the Normans after all who introduced our shires, and sheriffs and Lord Lieutenants to govern each one in the name of the new dynasty. Suppose Harold had won the Battle of Hastings: we would not have too many teams and first-class cricketers then. If we were still based on our pre-Norman regions, why, we would be as sleek as the Australian model: Wessex v Anglia at Winchester, Jutes v Celts at Canterbury, Mercia v South Saxons at Edgbaston. If only this was the format, with all its intensity, from where we had to start now!

The future starts now: H. D. Ackerman of Western Province in South Africa, photographed this season with a logo on his back

As we don't, cricket will become city-based, as rugby union has become, and football and rugby league always have been. We may lament the passing of county cricket and, in the extremities of England and Wales, still cling to the identity of our shire. But nearer London, how is anyone to tell the border and the difference between Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, a distinction now made in administration alone?

City-based cricket will be something of a reversion too, to the practice of the 18th century outside the southern counties, which had no big cities and therefore based their cricket on Surrey v Kent and Sussex v Hampshire. In the Midlands and North the first great matches to capture the public imagination were Nottingham v Sheffield (a Nottingham paper of 1771 published the first account, which implied that the fixture had already been going for some time); and Coventry v Leicester, an especially rowdy encounter, featuring plenty of hooliganism by both sides of supporters; and, in the 19th century, Edinburgh v Glasgow; while most of Lancashire's cricket was, and partly still is, Manchester's. We already have the nicknames, and it is only a matter of time before we have the Birmingham Bombers against the Cardiff Comets, and Derby Dynamos v Taunton Tornados. Rather too reminiscent of speedway, perhaps, but future imperatives will dictate.

We don't have to rub the crystal ball like Mystic Meg to foresee numerous changes in international cricket: floodlit Tests, games in covered stadia, the first of which will be staged this August in Melbourne between Australia and South Africa; TV cameras in batsmen's helmets; snickometers and other innovations which will turn on-field umpires ever more into cyphers. Fine for one-day cricket – bring in the whole lot as part of the razzmatazz to involve the crowd (`Everyone who thinks that's lbw, shout yes!'). But let's leave Test matches to the two men in the middle, both `neutral' if needs be.

 ADVERTISEMENTS will take up ever more of the players' clothing and equipment until their dress will have as much white as their striped-shirted predecessors of the 18th century. The encroachment of ads onto the field of play will continue too, and every Board which allows them deserves all the crowd trouble it gets, I say. Ads on the ground are a desecration: cricket should be an escape, not filled with reminders of reality and business. But at least technology will have its benefits here, with the development of `virtual advertising', the super-imposition on the TV screen of adverts over the field of play, which should spare the live spectator.

Bangladesh will clearly become the tenth Test country within a decade. After that, old Meg will have to stab in the dark. It is difficult to see how a developing country with urgent economic problems, like Kenya, can introduce and sustain a first-class structure. The experiment of staging Test matches at neutral venues will surely be expanded after the recent success of Pakistan v Sri Lanka at Dhaka. Even if India and Pakistan do not meet in their own countries, they will in Sharjah or Toronto or the USA – or Lord's, especially if MCC feels the recessionary pinch so much that it breaks away from the ECB and promotes its own programme of matches. Not unforeseeable.

The Indian Ocean rim, I guess, will continue to be the main growth area of the game, from South Africa northwards and around to Australasia. Cricket in Scotland and Ireland will always be limited by their climates; if the game was going to become widespread in Holland and Denmark, it would have done so by now. But the appetite for cricket in India and Pakistan, where it has no real rival, is already infectious. Nepal will be included in India's domestic programme as it has 200 clubs, consisting of Nepalese players as well as expatriate Indians. In Afghanistan the game is spreading rapidly whenever peace breaks out among the Pathan population, who learnt the game in the refugee camps of Pakistan and took it home, where it is one of the few sports (or pleasurable activities of any kind) officially approved by the Taliban. Of course, peace will have to be far more firmly established if touring teams are ever to visit Afghanistan. If a game were to be played now in Kabul, and a skyer were hit in the air, considerable confusion would be caused by a cry of `Mine!'

I would like to see the best associate-member countries organised into a sort of second division. Take the four European countries and Kenya, the USA and Canada, Bermuda and perhaps Namibia (now playing, if not holding their own, against provincial B teams in South Africa), Fiji and Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and Nepal, then give them four years to play each other home and away in first-class matches played to a finish on turf pitches. The prize for the winner at the end of the cycle could be Test or ODI status, with all the financial benefits that would bring. And their example might spur ICC into organising a World Test Championship.

I cannot yet see cricket spreading into non-Anglophone, older cultures which have always put their leisure time to more seminal use, like China and France, Egypt and Iran. But the game should continue to permeate the English-speaking world as the Test countries develop their official spheres of influence. We await the ICC's announcement of the abbreviated version of cricket which is being designed with the American market in mind. I'm not in favour of Cricket Max from what I have seen of it in New Zealand, as the Max Zone to reward straight hits is too artificial, but its time-scale of three to four hours is right. What I would like to see is a snappy version of the game made distinct by having only eight, perhaps nine, players on each side, designed for schoolchildren with limited time as well as Americans of short attention-spans. With only six or seven fielders to cover the whole ground, there would be more action for players and spectators.

Variety could come in this abbreviated version if each team is allotted 20 overs but can choose how to spread them over two innings. If a Tendulkar or Flintoff is blazing away in the first innings, then his captain might want to bat on until his best batsman is dismissed in the 16th over, leaving the small remainder for the second innings. Or if he loses wickets quickly on a playful pitch, the captain could declare and leave 14 overs for the second innings.

Whatever the form of cricket, though, I suspect we will have to get used to the position which applies now: in other words, that England in the new century will probably beat Australia regularly only with the aid of global warming melting the Antarctic.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd