Amateur sport, like many aspects of life, finds itself in a tricky situation at the moment, but none more so than cricket.

The 2020 Cornwall Cricket League season had been due to commence on April 18, but owing to the UK’s current state of lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic, there is no telling when the season may actually begin, if indeed it does at all.

That uncertainty is understandable. While the England & Wales Cricket Board announced last week that while professional cricket has now been suspended until at least July 1, recreational cricket simply remained suspended “until further notice”.

Fears that the 2020 season could be abandoned completely intensified at the weekend after Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who was deputising for Prime Minister Boris Johnson while he recovered from the virus, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that it would be “difficult” for amateur sport to return this summer due to the “level and scale of interaction”.

The possibility of amateur cricket not returning until 2021 is therefore a real one, but what other options could there be?

The original April-September season is obviously off the table, meaning a full campaign in its purest form is impossible.

Hope of starting the season before July is non-existent, but a July start, which is still very optimistic at this stage, would still allow a three-month window – provided the campaign could stretch to the end of September – for a season to be completed.

That would allow the original fixture list to be preserved and ensure teams face each other once in a truncated campaign.

It would mean just 11 fixtures for the majority of the CCL divisions and only nine for the Premier League, but it would be better than nothing.

If that amount of fixtures is unsatisfactory, another option could be to have Saturday-Sunday matchdays, meaning two fixtures are ticked off every weekend, so teams could play the full complement of matches in half the time it would originally take.

If 11 successive full weekends of cricket would not be possible, then another option is to swap the usual 45- or 50-over game for shortened Twenty20 matches, meaning teams could play both games against the same opponent on the same day.

A change in format like this would be met with resistance, but this is an unprecedented time.

But those ideas are still based on a very optimistic July start.

The reality is, especially after Mr Raab’s comments, that an even later start, say August, is more likely.

This would almost certainly call for weekend double-headers of longer-form matches just to be able to fit in one round of games, while a one-off switch to a T20 format with weekend and midweek matches could be another more drastic alternative.

All options are likely to be met with opposition, but change is the only option for 2020.