He gave helpful and sage advice about where it might lead. He believed cricket was in danger of losing its spirit and purity, and what he had to say about it made him a high-minded and slightly idealistic critic, but also a prescient one. His worry about the proliferation of one-day cricket and its impact on the Country Championship and Test matches might equally apply today ti the spread of Twenty 20. His point about generating good publicity for the game echoes in the debate about TV right for Tests: free to air or satellite, anyone? His concern at declining moral standards in cricket, and his thoughts on the meaning of sportsmanship, still resonate far beyond the boundary ropes of his sport. And, as anyone in the Broad Acres will tell you, Kilburn hits bullseye again when he touches on the high level of expectation among Yorkshire members and the pressure it puts on the players. Yorkshire has never played for fun. Perhaps things haven’t changed as much as we think.
The romantic steak in Kilburn is thankfully never far from the surface. It comes out in his claim that: ‘No day passes upon a cricket field without some joy is brought to someone’. The joy it brought him is in explained in his account of the start of a new season. ‘We go again where we have so often been before to find new paint upon the same pavilion railings, to see new figures tread the old steps well worn by the feet of the mighty ones of yesterday’.
