Last weekend’s gathering of cricket dignitaries at Lord’s, hosted by the MCC, was a good idea in theory. Almost a hundred of the game’s most influential men (and a pitifully small number of women) gathered together in the famous Long Room to discuss the future.
The ICC president, Greg Barclay, opened his address to the assembled delegates by frankly admitting that the global game’s administrative body was “not fit for purpose,” and that it needed to be either more powerful or more independent to be effective. Nothing could, or would, change for the better if it was merely the secretariat for a private members club.
The most powerful man in cricket wasn’t actually there. BCCI secretary, Jay Shah, sent his apologies. His schedule had already been filled with photo-opps posing with the T20 World Cup trophy.
But the forthright Ravi Shastri was the perfect understudy and left the room in doubt about India’s position: the ICC was just as powerful and “independent” as it needed to be, and that would not change. There were no dissenting voices. This was an occasion to enjoy the wine and canapés, not rock the boat.
There was plenty irony in the room, too, not that everyone saw it. Cricket Australia’s chair, Mike Baird, told the Melbourne Age newspaper that one of the key discussion points he was involved in concerned “the need to take meaningless content out of the schedule, content which is not attracting interest in terms of attendance at stadiums, viewership, without any sort of context for qualification (for world cups).
Hard decisions
“It starts with making some hard decisions, looking at the content we have. If we can’t get to a position where that content has context and/or jeopardy, then we probably need to scale back some of those matches. That’s a decision that all countries have to look at and decide,” Baird said.
Two points here: the first is that, in September, the Australian men’s team will tour England to play three T20Is and five, yes five, ODIs. There will be absolutely nothing at stake except the business of making money. Nothing. Several Australian players have already, publicly, referred to it as a “golf tour” given that it also includes a sojourn to Scotland to play another three T20Is.
The second point is that many of the smaller countries, such as Scotland, are crying out for “content”, whether meaningless or not. Hearing a call for fewer fixtures, from one of the big three gorging themselves on pointless cricket, did not sit well.
For three years before the last 50-over World Cup in India they were all involved in the World Cup Super League in which they were guaranteed four series at home and four away, all “live” qualifiers for the main event. But then that was canned. Why did the ICC do that? Oh yes, not fit for...
There was a putative suggestion that the number of Test-playing nations could be reduced to six within four years. The usually passionate, empathetic Kumar Sangakkara was asked how he would feel with Sri Lanka excluded: “Not great, but there isn’t much I can do about it,” he replied.
Brendon McCullum was asked the same question about New Zealand being excluded — or excluding itself. “Maybe it would be different if there was a standard £100,000 match fee,” McCullum said, apparently seriously.
Very few journalists were invited by the MCC. One of the “chosen” ones was the brilliant Australian writer, historian and author, Gideon Haigh. This is one of his key takeaways: “There was lots of talk of growth, of leverage, of leveraging the growth, of growing the leverage, and, above all, responding to commercial forces, which were viewed as vast, irresistible and immutable, and barely the stuff of human agency at all.”
The talk, he said, was almost exclusively about money and how to make more of it rather than distributing the vast mountain of cash the game already generates more equitably among its major participants.
Sundar Raman, who began his journey to vast wealth and prosperity as Lalit Modi’s right hand man at the IPL and is now a 12.5% shareholder in the SA20, was also at Lord’s. Of course he was: “Raman evangelised about the technological enrichment of the entertainment experience, and bemoaned that cricket does not give the public more opportunities to spend money on it. An intriguing inversion of this — that really all fans crave is to splash out more cash, and cricket’s job is to help by philanthropically soaking them,” Haigh wrote.
A room full of mostly very wealthy, very privileged men. If there were any humble roots among them they appear to have been long forgotten. This was not the occasion to address the dreams of a 13-year-old fast bowler in Qonce (formerly King Williams Town) hoping to emulate Makhaya Ntini. Different planet. Different universe.
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