It began the summer after the Summer of Love. The Advisory County Cricket Committee weren’t, as far as we know, the kind of guys to wear flowers in their hair, but they offered the game its moment of profound cultural change when they agreed to Nottinghamshire’s proposal that the rules governing overseas professionals be relaxed, with each county in the Championship competition allowed to appoint one. And just as, decades later, the inauguration of the IPL would be inured to failure by an indelible moment – Brendon McCullum’s opening night 158 – so the sport’s premier property, Garry Sobers, delivered one.

On August 31, 1968 at Swansea, Sobers hit Malcolm Nash for six sixes in an over, and in so doing condemned the 23-year-old left-armer to a lifetime of quiz-questionery. It was a totemic afternoon, still remembered as one that dragged county cricket into its new, Technicolor age.

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Nottinghamshire had secured Sobers with an offer burnished by the same glamour as the IPL auction: an annual salary of £7,000, an apartment and a car, and, in return, he stepped into a Britain that smouldered with post-war austerity. Harry Pearson offered some vivid lines on+ the Championship as it had stood in 1967 in this year’s Wisden Almanack: “Even on the sunniest days, the game was played with a sense of impending chill; every batsman seemed to have a dewdrop forming on the end of his nose,” he wrote. “The cricket was dour and attritional, victories ground out with all the grace of Ray Illingworth chewing a day-old chunk of gum…”

Overseas players were not unknown in this bleak landscape. Some, like Roy Marshall at Hampshire, Warwickshire’s Khalid Ibadulla and Keith Boyce at Essex, negotiated complex rules regarding residential qualification, while league cricket was a reliable source of employment during months when there was little played anywhere else in the world.

Over the span of Tendulkar’s career, the system, like the game, changed shape, accelerating into its new culture. The notion of a county contract became something different, a short-term hop separated by a flight in and a flight back out again. Marcus North and Imran Tahir have each represented a third of the 18 first-class counties. The legend can still make an impact, but it tends now to be at the end of their career – Warne at Hampshire, for example, or Sangakkara, transcendent at Surrey.

The future, with its fractured calendar, offers only more of the same. Along with the gimmicks of new scoreboards and 10-ball overs, the ECB’s ‘The Hundred’ format must surely follow the path of creating its own heroes, because they are what we remember of the decades that 1968 began. Peter Roebuck titled his history of Somerset From Sammy To Jimmy, Sammy being Sammy Woods, the great Australian of the Victorian era who made Taunton his home, and Jimmy being Jimmy Cook, a still largely unheralded South African opener who cracked 28 hundreds in three seasons at Somerset, and set the West Country ablaze. Cook joined the list of players whose understated excellence wove them into the thread of the English game, a joy that the old-school summer offered everyone from Basher Hassan to Murray Goodwin.