Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Cricket Australia's chief executive, James Sutherland, will next week arrive in Beijing, looking to "sell" the game to China. You suspect the Chinese have other things on their minds but you can understand Sutherland's motivation.
Being a non-Olympic sport is like being the sickly child in a Hollywood weepie, the one who is not allowed out to play with the other kids and instead watches from an upstairs room, shortened breaths misting the window as sad strings play in the background.
The Labour London Assembly member Murad Qureshi is also travelling to Beijing, in his case to campaign for cricket's inclusion as a demonstration sport in 2012, and the former Australia wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist has written in an Indian newspaper that the Olympics are the right 'vehicle' to 'grow our game in new territories and amongst the women of the world'.
Gilchrist also reminded readers that cricket made an Olympic appearance in 1900, when Britain beat France to the gold. He did not, however, say that they were the only two teams competing.
As far as I can see, cricket already passes all the necessary requirements to be an Olympic sport, particularly when you consider its merits against, say, dressage or one of the martial arts.
It is a predominantly middle-class game which is ignored by most of the world; it has pretty incomprehensible rules and officials making bizarre hand gestures and it has players - in England's case, a captain - appearing on passports of convenience. What more does the International Olympic Committee want?
There is, however, one more element that would help cricket's campaign: an indecipherable scoring system. With apologies to Messrs Duckworth and Lewis, who have already done their best, to win Jacques Rogge's heart cricket needs to introduce something truly subjective.
OK, we Brits would have lost to the Aussies or, more likely, the Chinese. But at least we would have had live cricket back on the BBC (I suspect, with their reverence for age and aphorisms, that the Chinese would love Richie Benaud).
And just think what Twenty20's innovations could have done for the Olympic coverage. Take the onfield earpieces worn by fielders in order for them to banter with commentators between overs.
Setting aside flirting opportunities between Sue Barker and Shane Warne, the potential across other events is endless: think of BMXers nagged to do wheelies or sailors forced to sing their favourite shanties. Blake Aldridge would never have been able to make that fateful phone call to his mum if he had been stuck telling Hazel Irvine about Tom Daley's nerves.
I will not even embark on the joys of umpires having to call the players off for 'bad smog' or boundary music being provided by a lip-synching band bearing an Asiatic resemblance to Atomic Kitten, the original Kittens having been hidden behind a screen, on account of their noses not being quite straight enough.
Twenty20 for 2020? It's a shoo-in.
