Cricket has been impacted by the COVID pandemic, just like everything else.

At the recreational level in my part of the British Isles, we lost a big chunk of one season altogether.

But we lost two full years of the time-honoured niceties whereby the host club provides afternoon tea for the players of both teams - a meal often consumed while sitting together at a long table.

With the 2022 season in its early stages, I am happy to report that, after this unwelcome but unavoidable hiatus, communal teas are back - and, boy, after two years of fending for ourselves (when matches were even possible) are we players realising just how badly we missed them!

It is not just a question of everything going better with cake.

The time-honoured institution of the cricket tea has meant that, from top to bottom of the pyramid, cricket has traditionally been a sport in which, if you want to, you can get to know more about your opponents than how batswoman A copes with short-pitched bowling or how much torque bowler B puts on his off-spinner.

You might argue that this sort of fraternisation is more relevant at local level, where teams broadly comprise individuals who inhabit the same communities, suffer the same petty anxieties and problems, and where you may even discover, say, the perfect disc jockey or accountant or flower-arranger to meet your needs within the ranks of the opposition.

You might also argue that elite-level coaches may well not regard such mid-match interchanges as necessary or even desirable.

My view is more or less the exact opposite.

Elite athletes can easily find themselves leading such siloed, monomaniacal lives nowadays, with each waking second consumed, lest rivals steal a march on them, by whatever narrow sporting discipline they happen to excel at, that it must be incredibly difficult to maintain any sense of balance in their lives.

Olympic cricket teas would play a small part in encouraging civilised interchange beyond the narrow confines of the arena - beyond the boundary, if you will - and hence in helping young athletes better to comprehend sport’s place in the wider world.

An enhanced sense of this Bigger Picture on the part of its most talented exponents would, in turn, improve sport’s prospects of being a genuine force for good in the world, as opposed to a platform for tribal nationalism and division.

In this sense, the cricket tea can be used to foster the same sort of open-minded, community values as the Olympic Village itself.

If the International Olympic Committee believes in one, as presumably it does, it should have little difficulty in appreciating the value of the other.

A few subsidiary points:

The Olympic cricket format, when it arrives, is not going to consist of five-day, thirty-hour Test matches, in which the need to provide some sort of calorific intake during the game is more or less inescapable.

But, for the avoidance of doubt, no matter how short the Olympic format ends up being, tea should be taken at the mid-point.

Nor should the fact that all games cannot be played in the afternoon be used as an excuse for omitting teas: if an Olympic cricket match starts at eight in the morning to satisfy the tight-packed schedule, "tea" can consist of eggs benedict and smoked salmon bagels with cream cheese for all I care: the point is to encourage interchange, not to force athletes to consume crust-less cucumber sandwiches at outlandish hours.

This leads onto a second point: there is no law which sets down that cricket teas must be composed of scones and Victoria sponge.

In my time playing the game, I have been offered curry in Toronto, hunks of machete-hewn water melon in Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side and, on one especially memorable occasion, choucroute garnie in Strasbourg.

Finally, just as at recreational level, cricket teas provide a supplementary chance for clubs to excel at something - and be recognised and appreciated for it - even if they are not that great on the field of play, so, for an Olympic host, the cricket tea would offer a wonderful opportunity to promote local dishes and customs.

If you doubt this, take a long, lingering look at the second photograph illustrating today’s piece and then tell me it does not make you at least somewhat eager to visit Barkby, the village in Leicestershire in the English Midlands that is home to the club which served up that particular cricket tea.

And this was only the savouries table.