Agnew, a devotee of cricket and not just the English team, a disciple of cricket history, was as acclamatory of Waugh as O’Keefe himself. And of course, like O’Keefe, Agnew has been around there so long he is himself interwoven into that history, as a supremely colourful part of it.

I put it to you, friends, that more than any other sport it is the historical aspect of cricket, and the colour of that history – even if sometimes risque, ribald and rambunctious – that makes it so beloved.

Which brings us to the issue of the moment.

For Agnew, in the process of announcing his retirement as the BBC’s chief cricket correspondent – calling only Tests from now on – used the occasion to speak up for history, and historical terms. He talked down the new-fangled term of “batter” as the gender-neutral term to describe the men and women who wield the willow, just as he insists that just as ashes are ashes and dust to dust, so too is he jack of referring to the “men’s Ashes” when for him it is just The Ashes, full-stop. He does not decry women’s cricket, far from it.

But, well, you tell ’em, Aggers.

“I hate ‘batter’,” he told The Sunday Times. “I always call a woman batsman a ‘batter’. But why can’t a man playing a man’s game be a batsman?”

(The first reason is that the Marylebone Cricket Club – which runs the show and sets the rules – decreed in 2021 that there was no more “batsman” and the correct term for both genders, and the non-gender specific, for that matter, is “batter”. This is because cricket is “a game for all and this move recognises the changing landscape of the game in modern times”.)

Well, he never.

“I just think it’s sad,” Agnew rumbled in his Aggers way. “Inclusivity’s great, but come on!”

And what about the principal biennial cricket series between Australia and England, Aggers?

“That doesn’t mean to say that the Ashes has to be the ‘men’s Ashes’,” he said. “People will call me an old fart, I suppose … It’s an event. It happened. It’s not the ‘Men’s Battle of Hastings’, is it?”

You get the drift.

In very broad terms, Aggers is saying that while inclusivity is fine as far as it goes, modernising terms in this manner risks sacrificing cricket’s precious colourful history on the altar of anodyne terms so colourless the best they can hope for is to be grey.

I confess: at first blush, I’m with him.

It’s only on second blush that the right way is revealed.

For cricket has had this exact same conversation before on other things, and those who argued for change were right. My colleague Andrew Wu wrote a memorable piece seven years ago decrying the use of the term “Chinaman” to describe a left-arm spinner who turns the ball back into the right-handed batsman.

“The term,” Andrew explained, “joined the cricket vernacular after a Test between England and West Indies at Old Trafford in 1933, when Ellis ‘Puss’ Achong, a left-arm finger-spinner (orthodox) and the first Test cricketer of Chinese ancestry, dismissed English batsman Walter Robins with wrist-spin. According to legend, as Robins walked back to the pavilion, he said, ‘Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman’. It has stuck ever since.”

Well, it did until Andrew pointed out, “Chinaman has historically been used in a contemptuous manner to describe the Chinese, whereas its equivalents – Englishman, Frenchman, Dutchman – have not. Hands up those who would even think to call their Chinese colleague a Chinaman.”

See?

I’d never had a problem with the term before and neither did most of you – simply because we’ve never been called “a Chinaman” pejoratively. But Andrew, pointing it out like that, more or less killed the term.

I remember similarly being schooled against telling the Irish jokes which I used to delight in – as they were started by the British as a part of their overall suppression of Ireland for more than 700 years. The jokes were not remotely fair to the Irish, and it was only those of us who were not on the receiving end of the jokes who didn’t get it.

To be fair, calling someone a “batsman” is not remotely pejorative – and personally, back in the day, I could only dream of having that term applied to me – but the same principle applies.

In this third decade of the 21st Century one of the key stars every sport, business and institution must steer by is inclusivity. Could it be that you don’t like people endlessly carrying on about “inclusivity” because you, like me, have always been included?

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The decision to go with “batters” is simply because the administrators of the game – who crunch the numbers, set the policies and try to make it all work – have decided that using this term will help get more women and girls playing the game.

In sum, stand down, Aggers. We’ve lost this one.

I will, however, stay with you in the bunker for our Last Stand when it comes to the triviality of following the IPL.

Take us out, my good man!

“I can’t get excited by somebody’s move from the Delhi Daredevils to the wot-sit,” he told the Sunday Times. “If people are brought up thinking that that is what cricket is, that’s a real shame.”

Rah! Test cricket, for us, any day.

But yes, we will likely be cleaned out of that bunker, too.

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