Word reaches us from the subcontinent: a 15-year-old Indian schoolboy has smashed a record 50 in 11 balls, causing the usual stampede of county scouts. The BBC hyperventilates; Sky Sports salivates. I, however, feel only a cold wind of historical irony.
This is not a quaint story of sporting talent. It is a metaphor for our collective decay. Once, England taught the world how to bat.
Now we scrabble for the leavings of a former colony, desperate to import the very fire we have let dwindle. The boy, Arjun something-or-other, is doubtless a prodigy. But his emergence is less a celebration of youthful vigour than a damning indictment of our own nursery.
Our public schools churn out barristers and bankers, not batsmen. Our county system, once the envy of the world, now groans under administrative bloat. We have traded grass-roots coaching for Safeguarding forms and diversity quotas.
The result? A 15-year-old from Mumbai is more technically sound than our own 25-year-olds. The scouts circling him are not harbingers of future glory.
They are vultures at a feast that is already over. We have forgotten that empires, sporting or otherwise, are won by hunger, not by handouts. The boy's 50 in 11 balls is a triumph of raw, unmediated talent, the kind that emerges from dusty maidaans, not astroturfed academies.
It is the same raw stuff that built the British Empire, by the way. Relentless, brutal, efficient. We have since become soft, obsessed with participation trophies and mental wellbeing.
The boy does not know such luxuries. He knows only the ball and the boundary. He will come to England, take our money, and probably leave within two years, disillusioned by rain, lukewarm cider, and our grating habit of patronising the very talent we crave.
Because that is the final irony: we no longer produce the grit we require. We must import it, then corrupt it. The fall of Rome, ladies and gentlemen, is being played out on a cricket pitch.
And the barbarians are not at the gates; they are already in the team sheet.