As is no doubt the case for many others, for me cricket has always served as the greatest of all distractions from literally everything else in the real world. Now, though, there is a distraction within that distraction and it's all England's fault. For so long now, since at least the Ashes of 2005, all I can see when I watch them play Test cricket is nipples. Actual nipples. This isn't some kind of Freudian crisis. I just cannot escape the looming presence of nipples.

There are many people who might wear the blame for this scourge, but for the sake of brevity and in the interests of going for low-hanging fruit, I'll focus on England and their kit manufacturers. Over the past decade, England's Test-playing shirts have deteriorated from merely mediocre to downright hideous.

At some point in the wake of their 2005 Ashes victory, possibly while we were all staring at the open-top bus, the ECB and its kit designers pulled a swift one on us. Throughout last summer's Ashes, for instance, Tim Bresnan's head began to resemble the hastily tied knot at the end of a sausage, so awkwardly crammed into the casing of his England shirt was the Yorkshireman. Bresnan and Chris Tremlett's nipples should have been allocated their own England cap numbers on that tour, two apiece. Kevin Pietersen's sometimes appeared a greater threat to the safety of Australian fieldsmen than his bat. I now know Alastair Cook's torso with greater intimacy than I do my own.

This aesthetic blight is heightened by the fact that the shirts are not only too tight but feature preposterously short sleeves that give the kit a bizarre kind of hand-me-down quality. Some players look like they're in body denial, others like they're being shamed into reducing their skinfolds. Steaming in during the Australia tour, Tremlett brought to mind that scene in Big, where Tom Hanks suddenly turns into an adult and bursts through his child-sized clothes. Tremlett didn't look like the Incredible Hulk, he looked like his entire kit had been stuck in the dryer for three hours too long.

West Indies have also stepped across to the dark side, consigning glorious cable-knits like Phil Simmons' comically baggy mid-1990s numbers to the memory banks of sad and pathetic individuals like me

If you're grimacing now and wondering why I'm getting so upset over something so trivial, seriously, just have a close look at the damned things. They're horrid. It's like cricket administrators stuck hundreds of years of cricket tradition into a blender and then had a focus group look on as they smeared the resultant slurry across a boardroom table, which they then snorted after it crystallised. Are players comfortable when they wear them? It doesn't look like it. It seems like the worst of both worlds, where both function and form have been obliterated in one fell swoop.

Australia, blessedly, have mostly refused to heed this mortifying trend and my only strong recollection of conspicuous kit in the last 12 months was Chris Rogers' sweat-drenched, possibly gangrenous, arm guard. In comparison with England's diabolical attire it was a welcome sight.

It's not just England's shirts that are a let-down either. I'm unsure of the performance-enhancing qualities of their sleeveless Test sweaters but I know beyond all doubt that they're an abomination far worse than any of Jimmy Anderson's contretemps with opposition batsmen. Not only have England abandoned the traditional cable-knit woollen sweater, they've taken the madness a step further by designing them with a quite useless crew neck. In one recent outing Gary Ballance came out to bat with his shirt collar poking out from the neck of his sweater, like the world's daggiest golfer. If you had spotted him on public transport, you would have moved to the other end of the carriage.

India deserve some wrath here too, to be fair. Their quite horrendous zip-up sweaters owe a debt to the gaudy clobber of IPL franchises than anything ever seen in the Test arena. During their tour of England, those garments provided the same sense of continuity with the traditional surroundings of the Lord's Test as a pair of flip-flops might at the All-England club.

Whiter than thou: spot the difference between England's and Australia's kit © Getty Images

What is wrong with the cable-knit sweater, that timeless and beautiful vestige of cricket style? Are we really hurtling into the future at such pace that cricketers need to be outfitted by the costume designers of Elysium? The Australians still wear the cable-knit, and as sullied as it might have become by the encroachment of sponsors' logos and Cricket Australia's insistence on embroidering it with their own corporate crest rather than the national coat of arms, it's an essay in decency compared to the dross on display elsewhere. They regained their No. 1 Test ranking wearing it, in fact. It can't be holding them back in any way.

Wearing that sweater and his baggy-green cap, an Australian cricketer at the very least looks the part. He wouldn't be out of place beside Bill Ponsford or Neil Harvey or Allan Border in their respective heydays.

Australia's shirts and sweaters are also cream, a small but important distinction. Surely I'm not the only person who believes that whites are for lower-grade club cricketers. England's whites are of a hue rarely seen outside the Greek islands. I don't mean that as a compliment.

There is hope. Sri Lanka, bless them, have had a decent crack. Unfortunately they've gone in half-hearted with their Diet Cable-knit. We should probably appreciate the token nod to convention, even if it does make them look like a bunch of schoolboys. South Africa held out for a while but have now followed England's lead and gone for flat, flavourless and possibly flammable material in their sweaters. So too have New Zealand, a puzzling decision in a country as inhospitably cold as theirs. If ever there was a cricket destination where the need for a double layer of cable-knit sweaters appeared paramount, it's Dunedin.

West Indies have also stepped across to the dark side, consigning glorious cable-knits like Phil Simmons' comically baggy mid-1990s numbers to the tip - or more accurately, the memory banks of sad and pathetic individuals like me. Pakistan are no better. Now their famous star logo is dwarfed by a giant Pepsi advert on a sweater that would be better suited to life as a promotional giveaway. Can you imagine Allan Border adopting the teapot pose and delivering his withering critique of Craig McDermott wearing a double layer of those carbon-fibre abominations? No, me neither. Aside from being worn by Australians and old-timers, the only place you're likely to see a traditional cricket sweater these days is in a Ralph Lauren catalogue (Google it if you think I'm exaggerating).

The evolution of cricket threads

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  Bert Sutcliffe and Jack Cowie in the right sort of woollens for the inclement New Zealand weather, 1949 © Getty Images

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  In the 1960s and '70s, buttons began to be redundant on shirts, especially of Australian cricketers. Proof: Richie Benaud © PA Photos

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  A vision in white billowing flannel: Sonny Ramadhin models the trousers of the day more than a half-century ago © Getty Images

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  Frozen: Brendon McCullum and Ross Taylor try to keep warm in their rather insubstantial looking jerseys in spring-time England © AFP

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  Do Sri Lanka's cable lite sweaters make them more sprightly? © Getty Images

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  Logorrhoea: Pakistan's players show off the walking-billboard look © Getty Images

Every era has its stylistic idiosyncrasies, of course. The way Australians from Benaud to Lillee undid their button-front shirts to near the navel would certainly not fly these days, and was probably considered a blight on the game by traditionalists of the time, but those silhouettes now have a retro charm that's hard to see the current models ever replicating. When I think of Australia in the '90s I think of the towel tucked into McDermott's trousers, bouncing and bobbing as he powered through his run-up.

Maybe for you it's Sonny Ramadhin's neatly pressed flannels or the understated majesty of an MCC touring blazer. Maybe it's those giant shirt collars that almost met the sideburns of Australia's 1972 Ashes squad, or Victor Trumper's rolled-up sleeves as he stepped out to drive. Botham never looked more, well, Botham, than while smoking that post-match cigar at Headingley with his imposing torso hugged by a long-sleeved Three Lions cable-knit.

Will I ever feel the same wave of nostalgia I get from re-watching Allan Donald crash through another top order in those billowy shirts of the mid-'90s (some of them must have been the size of queen bedsheets) when I look back at the logo-festooned mishmash of the present day? I find it hard to imagine.

Such a crucial element of the way cricket worms its way into the heart of its fans is the sheer differentness of the way it looks. If the game's aesthetic has any bearing on the way in which it is played - and to support my thesis I really hope you are nodding right now and agreeing that it is very important indeed - then beware these attempts to butcher its look. As this age of omnipresent logos and ever-protruding nipples takes hold, it might be time to concede that at the moment we're just doing it wrong.

Russell Jackson is a cricket lover who blogs about sports in the present and nostalgic tense for the Guardian and Wasted Afternoons. @rustyjacko

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

 

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