How about state funding for Tests?

So the ECB has relented. No longer, it seems, is the notion of Olympic cricket, with its potentially deleterious impact on fixture lists and revenue, quite so unthinkable. So what if T20 is the preferred vehicle: this can only be damned good news for the Associates and even the Affiliates, who crave the funding that keeps that tarnished five-ring circus in business. One can only assume Messrs Duckworth, Lewis and Stern have been working overtime on the sums.

The road ahead will be anything but smooth. For the 2016 Olympics, UK Sport distributed a cool £347 million to a slavering queue of sports that only ever matter to the general populace for three weeks every four years. With nearly 25% of those funds going to such pursuits as sailing (£25m), canoeing (£20m), equestrianism (£18m) and hockey (£16m), the ECB's bid for a meaningful chunk might involve some heavy late-night negotiations in the Long Room.

Happily, the recent appointment of Lord Patel OBE to succeed the retiring Lord Morris on the ECB management board could prove timely indeed. It may even come to be seen as a pivotal moment not only in the history of English cricket but in the annals of that still more endangered species, the Test match.

The Labour peer, an eminent voice on health, social care and community cohesion, is a laudable addition to the 14-person board, joining Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, Jane Stichbury and a Blokes XI led by Colin Graves.

Born in Nairobi to Indian parents who migrated to Bradford before his second birthday, Patel is a man of many parts and substance aplenty. A former ambulance-man, policeman and social worker, he has done a great deal to improve race equality in mental health care and combat extremism. His cricketing credentials aren't bad either: he played alongside Geoff Boycott in his youth, claimed all ten wickets in a club fixture, and coached at the Yorkshire Academy. He still turns out for Northowram Fields in the Central Yorkshire League alongside his son.

He enters the front-line at perhaps the most perilous time in the annals of the game's highest, most anachronistic and least convenient form of expression. To the ICC, England is the great protector; the challenge is to convince the other national boards that the Test match is not only worth saving but prioritising, at a time when the battle seems to be growing ever more one-sided. Witness the death of the Future Tours Programme. Witness the stillborn World Test Championship, a failure of will if ever there was.

This column thus humbly and obediently commends Patel to contemplate something radical, something that could delight even the most reactionary of Tory toffs. Namely, launch a campaign for state funding for Tests.

True, competition for the Whitehall pound is already ferocious. For 2014-15, England's Arts Council received £350 million in funding, while its aid budget rose to £327.5m: not enough to satisfy bids for aid totalling £477.8m, but still, pretty generous. Over the next two years, it will give the English National Opera £12.38m, the Royal Opera House nearly double that. That's more than £36m lavished on a tiny twig of our lushly branched cultural tree, on a form of music holding roughly as much appeal for Joe and Joanna Public as Afghan acid rock or Alaskan rap.

Yet while deficits and bailouts are part and parcel of this cultural life, the English National Opera, when asked to cut its orchestra or chorus, refused point-blank. Cut a single bassoon or baritone, reasoned artistic director John Berry, and it simply wouldn't be the ENO.

Other beneficiaries were theatre (£105m), combined arts (£77m), music (nearly £73m), visual arts (close to £46m) and dance (almost £38m). Meanwhile, National Lottery funding amounted to nearly £223m, earmarked primarily for "the arts, capital projects, philanthropy/resilience, Touring and Children and Young People and National Foundation for Youth Music". So why is Test cricket deemed unworthy of even a fraction of this support? For the not at all unreasonable reason that the professional game, home to hundreds of decently remunerated full-timers, funds itself pretty well, thank you. The ECB has reserves of around £80m in addition to benefiting handsomely from the copious contents of Uncle Rupert's pockets. The message, then, is JFK with a twist of Limey: "Ask not what your country can do for cricket, but what cricket can do for your country."

Challenge accepted. In terms of bridging national and racial divides, not to mention preserving a mostly noble tradition dating back nearly 150 years, no sporting attraction, surely, can hold a candle to the Ashes. As for the assets that underpin Test success and global respect, try this little lot: collectivism, selflessness, patience, persistence, discipline, forbearance, self-control, initiative, enterprise, ingenuity, courage and daring. Good manners don't hurt either, nor respect for the opposition and the game's intrinsic values.

Better yet, for all the gloom-and-doomery, the five-day fray has seldom offered such suspenseful and vibrant theatre. True, there has been a surfeit of pantomime and slapstick, but the past four months alone have seen an Anglo-New Zealand celebration of matey competitive artistry, an unscriptable climax to a see-saw Sri Lanka v Pakistan rubber, and equally riveting contests between England and Australia and Sri Lanka and India.

The ECB's current thinking runs something like this. Sport compares favourably with the arts when it comes to generating substantial community returns through funding; hell, the Cardiff Ashes Test generated an estimated £25m dividend for the Welsh economy. When bidding to stage internationals, clubs are always asked about the potential local gains and wider legacy.

The somewhat shocking decline in participation announced last year, however, came as a profound shock. The board's priority, therefore, is to protect the grass roots of the game through Sport England, which means focusing on working not with the central government but local authorities, who provide pitches and facilities. And they, like the central government (adamant that sport should fund itself), need to be persuaded that cricket can help tackle front-rank social issues such as racism (tick), religious intolerance (tick), obesity (tick) and inner-city deprivation (tick - think Chance to Shine). Patel is very much on-message.

"I am a huge advocate," he has declared, "of what the sport can bring to the wider community - from instilling life-skills like self-discipline and leadership to improving fitness and tackling wider issues like obesity. I am keen to explore ways in which cricket can better engage with Britain's diverse communities, particularly the South Asian community, and take full advantage of the many different ways in which we can widen the game's appeal still further."

Ah, but is it a case of bottom-up or top-down? As things stand, the view from Lord's is that while the international game is a vital component, the coffers are being sapped because the board and counties are being forced to pump in ever more dosh to offset an increasing shortfall between support and need.

So what about a trade-off? When negotiations for the next TV deal begin sometime over the next year or so (the current one expires in 2019), might a binding promise to pursue a major terrestrial partner - in the national interest - be a bargaining chip? July brought an unexpected but opportune twist: unthinkably, those bitter rivals BBC and ITV tabled a successful joint bid for rugby union's Six Nations Championship, keeping it on free-to-air and away from the clutches of those arriviste satellite channels. A mildly encouraging precedent may already have been set.

Yet such is the perpetual state of flux within broadcasting, or so runs the ECB perspective (as borne out by last month's surprise BT Sport deal with Australia's Channel Nine), there is every possibility that the stumps will have shifted so far that the next TV deal may bear scant resemblance to the present one.

The days of a single major partner are almost certainly numbered: come on down, Apple, HTC, Samsung, maybe even Amazon, Netflix and - dare one say it - ESPNcricinfo. On the other hand, since sport is one of the few forms of broadcasting that still requires a 48-inch screen for optimum appreciation, BBC and ITV might fancy boosting their sagging portfolios.

Amid this fog and fug of uncertainty, then, back to this column's original premise, namely a question for Patel: is Test cricket less important to the nation's identity, health, spiritual wealth, global reputation and planetary influence than the umpteenth-and-first performance of Don Giovanni or the 13 millionth performance of Twelfth Night? If his Lordship finds himself harrumphing deeply at the very idea, as one trusts he would, the next steps seem plain:

1) Set up an acronym-proof committee to optimise column inches (Cricket United for a New Tomorrow or Federation of Unabashed Cricket Knowalls?)

2) Invite your Westminster chums and that rocking trio of cricket tragics Sir Tim Rice, Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Elton John for a working banquet in the Long Room

3) Promise that any funding will be earmarked for two indisputably worthy causes:
a) Underwriting tours by national teams whose own boards are strapped for cash, thus restoring the nation's tattered reputation for being nice to foreigners;
b) Emulating Cressida Pollock, the ENO's interim chief executive, who has announced that half of all tickets would be available for £20 or less, thus simultaneously striking a blow for inclusiveness and reviving the prospect of a working-class national hero emerging in this most class-obsessed of team games.

Only a parent of the Pixar Generation, granted, could submit such a fantastical blueprint, but better, surely, to dream than surrender to cynicism or apathy.