From the top tier of the terrace at Trent Bridge you could just make out the two flags flying from the house over the road, beyond the Larwood and Voce stand. They were tied to the balcony, one English and one Pakistani. My curiosity got the better of me, and in the lunch break I went and knocked on the front door. I only wanted to know who they were supporting, but the couple who owned the place, Jane and Munil, insisted I come in and, although I tried, ever-so-politely, to stop bothering them, I ended up sharing the biryani they’d made for their friends who had come over to watch the game.

“So, umm, have you just come in off the street?” one of the other guests asked as I shovelled up their lunch.

Stepping through that door, I didn’t feel quite sure I was in England any more. They were too warm, too welcoming, so charmingly, disarmingly, hospitable. Over the road, the England team seemed to be pretty disorientated too. The crowd in the ground was split roughly 50-50 but the Pakistani fans were louder and at times it felt more like an away game, the stands rattled with the ratta-tat-tatta-ta of dhol drums and echoed with hoots and hollers every time the ball went near an English fielder. Chris Woakes ended up putting his finger to his lips to shush them after he held a fine diving catch, and Ben Stokes and Jason Roy both broke off from the celebrations to make sarcastic claps back at the barrackers.

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It felt like England were surprised to find so many people cheering for the other side. They had best get used to it. It will be similar when they play Bangladesh in Cardiff this Saturday and Afghanistan in Southampton in a fortnight’s time, the same against India at Edgbaston at the end of the month. The ICC’s statistics show more than 80% of the tournament’s tickets were bought by people who live in England, but less than 50% by people who support the England team. So the Cricket World Cup is one long, loud, rebuttal of the old Norman Tebbit test, and the idea that migrants, and their children, ought to support England.

Last summer, the Indian Express actually sent a journalist down to Bury St Edmunds to interview Tebbit, the man Michael Foot memorably described as a “semi house-trained polecat”.

It’s been 30 years now since Tebbit came up with the idea, long enough that even he seems to agree it was nonsense. “I suppose it was provocative, but it’s immaterial now,” Tebbit said. “If I were in charge of cricket, football or athletics in the country, I would be choosing British-Asians, blacks and people from Ethiopia,” he said, not stopping to consider whether any of them would actually want to be on his team. “Assimilation has already occurred,” Tebbit said. “The more non-ethnic English get into the cricket team, the more obvious it will be that the door is open to full integration.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Pakistan fan with a topical message at Trent Bridge. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Even Tebbit, 88, has caught on. Modern-day England is many things, and might even be the only country where you could stage a tournament like this one, and cricket the only sport that would draw such a wide mix of support from its post-colonial population. There are around 1.5 million Indians, 1.2 million Pakistanis, 500,000 West Indians, 450,000 Bangladeshis, 200,000 South Africans, 170,000 Sri Lankans, 125,000 Australians, 75,000 Afghans, and 60,000 British New Zealanders living in Britain, and for the next six weeks everyone who cares will be busy supporting their own team.

The World Cup has pulled together all these parts of the British cricket community, and brought out the brilliant, bright, and vital side of the sport that so often seems to be sepia-tinted with nostalgia. Cricket fans can be so preoccupied with worry about what has been lost that they are blind to see everything else that has been gained as the game has changed. The cricket they are playing in this World Cup is not the game they played in John Major’s England, that country of “long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers, and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’.”

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The question, then, is why it ever seems any other way. The ECB agrees the World Cup has pulled in a younger, more diverse audience. YouGov’s research shows the rest of the time the typical cricket ticket buyer in this country is more likely to be a white, right-wing, well-to-do male and aged over 55. Their chief executive, Tom Harrison, cited similar stats when he was trying to make the case for the board’s new tournament, the Hundred, just last month. They know there is a huge number of British cricket fans they are just not reaching; that, for instance, 33% of the recreational players in this country have South Asian backgrounds, but less than 4% of the professional ones do.

There are similar levels of under-representation among administrators, executives, umpires, coaches and spectators. The upshot is the ECB’s own research shows 50% of the British South Asian community has a negative perception of “traditional English cricket” – an overwhelming sense among these communities that the way the game has been run in this country means it is “not for them”. The ECB is trying to do something about it. It has launched an “action plan” but there are decades of structural prejudice to undo, and it will be at least five years before we can say whether anything has changed. In the meantime all those fans will only be buying tickets to watch the other teams.