Photo by Paula Bronstein / Getty Images The English have always seen cricket as representing their country more than any other sport. Neville Cardus, the doyen of cricket writers, famously said: “If everything else in this nation of ours were lost – her constitution and the laws of Lord Halsbury – it would be possible to reconstruct from the theory and practice of cricket all the eternal Englishness which has gone to the establishment of that constitution and the laws aforesaid.” Cardus wrote this between the wars, but even in 1993 John Major predicted: “Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds.” Major was invoking cricket to wean his party away from the “bastards”, as he called the anti-Europeans in his government.…