Since its inception in 1998, Sport in Society has been at the vanguard of cricket scholarship, publishing special issues that contemplate the contemporary landscape of the game. Making sense of these processes is the central aim of this special issue. The emergent and open-ended character of these social processes suggests the potential to dominate the next phases of cricket’s development.
Frequent transformations in the game’s format, style of play, presentation to the audience, and forms of consumption have changed what cricket looks and feels like. Modern communication technologies, glamour and money have taken the consumption of cricket to unforeseen levels (Khondker and Robertson Citation2018). Phil Hughes’ shocking death has linked cricket in to sport’s concussion crisis (Malcolm Citation2020) and more general moves to take safety and injuries more seriously. ‘Fringe’ nations like Bangladesh, Ireland and Afghanistan have proved to be strong competitors (Bandyopadhyay Citation2015).
Talks of mitigating discrimination of all sorts and enforcing the spirit of the game have intensified (Burdsey Citation2011). Women’s cricket has taken giant strides (Velija Citation2015). We have seen both the resurgence of Test cricket (in some nations) and success of the Twenty20 experiment in expanding cricket’s global reach and market. India is now the epicentre of money and power in the game. If this phase saw a ground-breaking entanglement of cricket with commerce and mass media, leading to a restructuring of the game’s ethos, governance, and consumption, changes more sweeping and far-reaching have taken place in the following years. An anthology of Wisden articles from 1978 to 2006 was named ‘Cricket’s Age of Revolution’ (Moss Citation2006).
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