The cricket season has finally come to an end in England, coinciding fittingly enough with the two biggest cricketing events of the last six months. First – but you already knew this – the Chennai Super Kings will play the Kolkata Knight Riders in the final of the Champions League on Saturday, a competition that keeps rumbling away, intruding ever closer into plain sight, like the Ebola virus or the imminent unavoidable collapse of all western civilisation.

Watching this week’s semi-finals was a gripping experience, a glimpse into a hazy but vibrant parallel sporting world in which Jacques Kallis is still lofting sixes over long-on like some noble old captive circus bear, and where the pitch-side podium dancers are still thrown into paroxysms of groin-thrusting erotic excitement at the sight of Travis Birt top-edging to the fine-leg boundary or Andre Russell bowling a wide.

And secondly the countdown to publication of Kevin Pietersen’s book of memoirs has begun in earnest, his ECB confidentiality agreement (which, incidentally, lasted longer than his time as England captain) having expired this week. The book will be trailed in a blaze of score-settling publicity on Monday, thereby completing an epic few days for cricket generally.

This is not intended as a piece of snark. In a sport that has for the last decade turned itself inside out in pursuit of a buck it seems pretty obvious where the power lies here. The winners of the Champions League will receive $2.5m (£1.56m) for 21 days of cricket, $700,000 more than you get for reaching the final of the World Cup and five times the annual prize for being the No1-ranked Test team. Pietersen will have earned more for writing a book about not playing for England than he would being in the team this summer, with his advance for KP: Sword Of Truth or Easy Being Me or I Hate You! or whatever it’s called likely to have been more than the prize money for Yorkshire’s county championship pennant. Winners! Boom!

Again, this is not meant as a standard English moan about the evils of (someone not from England) making money out of Twenty20; or indeed a criticism of Pietersen, who is a player of genius and who should – in a more grown-up world where we don’t need to know all this stuff about who is or isn’t a decent moral upstanding Waitrose citizen, or what anyone says to anyone else in private – still be playing for England and providing his own glorious, and paradoxically pure and uncluttered sporting pleasure.

The real issue is the wider weirdness of cricket. Here is a sport that is basically in the process of falling apart, its component parts atomised out into a collection of self-contained worlds, spinning off on their own orbits, but still shouting out angrily across the void. Pietersen himself is a semi-detached entity: unbeholden, uncontracted, barely playing any actual cricket, but carrying with him the fading gravity of a disappearing star. Over there on the western edge of things is the ECB, forging alliances, tangling with foes, managing its own slow-cooked decline. And in the centre the BCCI, cricket’s thermonuclear superpower, blindly irradiating everything in its path.

Beyond this, in various states of orbital decay, is a universe of flotsam: Champions League, Bangladesh Premier League, Piers Morgan, the ICC, Shahid Afridi, County Championship Division Two, Chris Gayle, the New Zealand Test team, the Sunrisers Hyderabad, Lashings, Ian Botham’s Twitter feed, Shah Rukh Khan, Waitrose, Mike Gatting demolishing the Chinese noodle plate on Ready Steady Cook. There they all are, spinning off into space and leaving behind them a sense of confusion, rancour, and above all a shared conviction that someone somewhere must be to blame for this profound and horribly irreversible transformation.

It is that sense of shared free-floating rage that is likely to define, once again, the next turn in the Pietersen saga. Where does it come from, this anger, the feeling that something somewhere has been spoilt, ruined, fatally degraded? I suspect that it is in part about loss and change. In Pietersen’s case I find myself supporting him in whatever his latest furious off-stage wrangle might be, simply because I miss him: I love, or loved his batting, the spectacle of those beautifully supple slapped cover drives, the dangling whiplash arms, the feeling of pure, brilliantly refined – if unorthodox – Test batting being stationed, at that point in time, right at the centre of the sporting universe.

It is perhaps this combination of austere and timeless talent with the attendant veneer of galloping modernity – the backstory, the attitude, the yearning for the T20 rupee – that makes Pietersen such an obvious lightning rod for English cricket’s transformation anxieties: fear of KP; fear of change; fear of the semi-visible Champions League.

And so here we are. Books or no books those component parts will keep on spinning in space, while cricket seems likely to become more like golf with the passing of time, a set of high net worth star players touring the circuits, with the Ashes cricket’s version of the Ryder Cup, the only Test series left standing, milked remorselessly for its fading sense of old school passion. The rage – oh, the rage! – over KP and his potboiler will surge back and forth in the next few days. But beneath it is something simpler, a broader sense of loss in the face of change, and growth and shifting orbits.