There are innocents who believe that sport is immune from history. Sport loves to see itself as an ideal pastime, safe from the follies and foibles of a changing world, but sport changes as fast, if not faster, than anything else.

Sometimes this happens with the force of revolution, like the ending of the amateurism regulations in tennis, rugby union and track and field; sometimes it is part of a slow and apparently inevitable process, as with the commercialisation of the Olympic Games that began in Los Angeles in 1984.

And we seem to be at a critical moment in cricket. This could be an incident that future historians of sport will write up as a pivotal chapter in their books: using the date 2014 as historians of larger matters use 1914. For it seems that international cricket is beginning to break up. Cricket has never been stronger in terms of money, audience, power, and (in some places) participation: but it seems that the game's traditional structure is no longer appropriate.

In big-time cricket, the international game traditionally towered over everything else: games between one country and another, or in the case of West Indies, an alliance of small countries. It was here that you found both drama and excellence. Every match gained added resonance from the past, for all the countries involved were once colonies, except England, the former colonial master. For all ten nations involved in Test cricket, the history of their post-colonial emergence as independent nations is inextricably involved with cricket.

But last week, the West Indies players walked out of a tour of India. The players are - as they have been for years - rowing about money with their governing body. Their action has cost India an estimated US$60 million in lost revenue, and the BCCI is not happy about it. So naturally they are planning to boycott their tour of the West Indies in 2016, depriving that confederation of the vast sums of money that come from Indian television coverage. It's a move that would probably bankrupt West Indies cricket.

West Indies cricket is in a bad way. But then Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are not in any better shape. Pakistan is still worse: they can no longer play matches at home. Of the ten Test match nations, 40% are struggling even to exist. Even those that are doing better are dependent on India to keep themselves in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

International cricket is now structured in a way that makes India the monarch of all they survey. England - savour those post-colonial ironies - and Australia now operate as their chief lackeys, with the others (South Africa, Sri Lanka and New Zealand) hanging on as third-tier nations.

"The ice floes are breaking up. The apparently unchanging landscape of cricket is becoming unrecognisable. The fixed points have become fluid, the certainties have become doubts"

In Monopoly, the idea is to put all your opponents out of business. It seems that international cricket is working on the same principle. The difference is that you can always have another game of Monopoly. Once you've put all your opponents out of business in sport, you can't actually play yourself. No thought of operating by the utopian-socialist principles of sport in the United States, in which the strong subsidise the weak and every dollar is shared between every franchise.

Instead, international cricket is shifting and changing. It's a process familiar in football, in which legislation ensures that the rich get richer; naturally at the expense of the poor. The foundation of the Premier League became inevitable in 1983, when home clubs were permitted to keep all their gate receipts instead of sharing with their visitors.

The expansion of the European Cup into the Champions League - allowing participation by non-champions - in 1992 created an elite, one that now holds sway in Europe and in each of its principal footballing countries. One of the complex consequences of these changes has been the devaluing of the international game.

The same sort of thing is happening in cricket. The players still value the complexities and endless variables of Test match cricket above everything else, but who cares about the players? Not the West Indies Cricket Board, for starters. The shorter forms of the game produce the money and therefore the power: and so these tend to be pushed by administrators, who are mostly more interested in personal power than sporting excellence.

It is possible to see a profound change in cricket in the shocking collapse of the West Indies tour. The proliferation of weaker nations is producing too many one-sided matches: these things are dull in any format, but ten times more so in the course of five-day matches. International cricket matters less than it did: Test matches much less. The IPL and the other inter-city T20 leagues continue to gather strength - and the best players from the West Indies will continue to play in them.

International cricket won't be wiped out next year. Historic processes take time. But the balance has shifted, and every year international cricket will be that little bit less important, while other forms of the game will matter more. The cricket World Cup takes place in Australia and New Zealand early next year and will show everybody that international cricket still works, especially in the shorter forms of the game, and still excites the passions. Nation against nation is not suddenly invalid.

But the fact is that the ice floes are breaking up. What had looked like a solid frozen vista that would endure forever is now subject to slow but devastating change as the climate changes and the world hots up. The apparently unchanging landscape of cricket is becoming unrecognisable. The fixed points have become fluid, the certainties have become doubts.

We view history as something that's finished with. We like to think that now that things have reached their current state, history has stopped. But it never does. Sport and cricket are changing before our eyes. Cricket is gaining a great deal of money and power: what is in the process of being lost is that quaint old-fashioned notion that sport is primarily about the pursuit of excellence.