The best way to sum up the joy of cricket? Politicians don't have to pretend to like it

Right now, moments of national unity seem worth cherishing. That being the case, Ben Stokes—who had already snatched the World Cup for England in July—served his country in more ways than one in late August. At a time of rancour and strife, England’s mighty all-rounder did more than simply win a Test match when victory seemed impossible, he also allowed England—and cricket fans everywhere else in these islands—a brief, shining moment of agreement.

None of us had seen anything quite like this, and that includes all of us old enough to recall Ian Botham’s heroics at Headingley in 1981. But just as David Gower allowed us to imagine some sense of what it must have been like watching Denis Compton, so Stokes’s breathtaking performance in Leeds gave younger followers of England’s true national game an inkling of what it was to see Botham in his pomp. Stokes was both a hero of our own moment, and one who could also build a bridge back to the heroes of yesteryear. Everything that was new at Headingley was also old things reimagined and performed for a new generation.

All across England and, indeed, wherever cricket is savoured, time paused as viewers and listeners put their own circumstances to one side to urge—or pray—Stokes and England over the winning line. This was England’s highest-ever successful run chase in Test cricket, but it was much more than that too. It felt like a moment in which fans, always so anxious about the sport’s status and future, could embrace the singular joy of cricket being cricket. Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself this was a moment for you.

Unlike football, no politician, mercifully, feels obliged to pretend to like cricket. I can think of no cricketing equivalent of Tony Blair pretending to love Newcastle United or David Cameron declaring a highly suspicious passion for Aston Villa. Or West Ham. Or whomever. When Theresa May declared Geoffrey Boycott was her favourite cricketer, it was plain that she was in no way showing off: the choice was a natural one for her. The great man has many virtues, but imagination has never been one of them.

Cricket is—and hear me out on this—England’s true classless game. That is, it appeals to dukes and dustmen equally; a game for the House of Lords and the Dog and Duck in equal measure. If it has been a forum for the rankest snobbery—not least in the grotesque contortions of the Gentlemen and Players divide—it is also an uncommonly egalitarian contest. The Duke might insist on captaining the side but his footman is more likely to be the team’s star performer.

Hence this paradox: England’s most class-ridden sport is also one of the few that is enjoyed by all classes. If the game sprung from the prelapsarian paradise of Broadhalfpenny Down, it’s long since migrated to other parts. The hard schools of the Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues have long been just as great a part of cricket’s reality, even if they form a lesser part of its mythology.

There is no cricketing counterpart to the old saw that while football is a sport for gentlemen played by thugs, rugby is a game for thugs played by gentlemen. That is for the simple and evident reason that cricket is for everyone. If the summer game is menaced by football’s transformation into an almost year-round experience, it remains the case that cricket enjoys a greater audience than its guardians sometimes seem to suppose.

The grass is always greener elsewhere if you’re charged with running English cricket. Envious of the success of Australia’s Big Bash Twenty20 league, the England and Wales Cricket Board intends to introduce a new competition, named The Hundred, next summer. Defying the county-rooted traditions of English cricket, this will be contested by eight city-based sides. The aim is to attract a new audience and, this being so, if you like the sport as it is, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. The Hundred is deliberately not for you.

But English cricket will retain its own logic and its own history, quite distinct from the development stories of the game elsewhere. In these days of resurgent big cities, it remains proudly provincial. If the game’s soul owes much to the village green, county cricket—even now—is still based on what you might term a sense of place that is much the same, albeit on a larger scale. There is a continuum from parish to county all the way up to the country as a whole. Each is founded upon the accumulation of smaller, more modest, units. The sport is run from the top down, but built from the bottom up.

Stokes may have been born in New Zealand, but he learnt the game in Cumbria and then at Durham. Most of England’s cricketers spring from similarly non-metropolitan backgrounds. For every Test cricketer born in Birmingham, Sheffield or Nottingham there’s another from Taunton, Burnley, Canterbury or Colchester. That speaks to something, too; if there’s an English equivalent of la France profonde it lies in some of these places.

Deep England is a place where there is still a place for cricket. That is sometimes a question of geography but, more importantly, this England is a place of the mind. Stokes has achieved many things this summer. Among his triumphs, he has reminded us just how many people still live in that deep and lovely England where cricket still matters.