Just over 10 years ago Australia shocked the cricket playing world by agreeing to a schedule which included back-to-back fixtures against neighbours New Zealand.
The formats were T20 and Test cricket with the shortest format taking place at home and the longest across the Tasman Sea.
It entailed selecting an almost entirely different squad — only David Warner was deemed essential to both teams and robust enough to cope with the playing and the travelling.
It was a seminal moment in the game and attracted widespread outrage. It was an act born of arrogance and disrespect, it was said.
Just a short decade later overlapping international fixtures are commonplace and entirely different, co-existent national squads barely raise an eyebrow.
Just this week, England are playing the West Indies in a T20 series in the Caribbean while another England land in New Zealand to prepare for their three-Test series.
New Zealand, meanwhile, celebrated their greatest Test series, a 3-0 clean sweep against India, by flying home to prepare for another three Tests against England and leaving another New Zealand team behind on the subcontinent to play a T20 series against Sri Lanka.
Many observers believed that Cricket Australia’s unprecedented decision would set a new level of financial greed that would eventually see the game choke on its own excess.
Looking back, the degree of moral outrage seems mildly amusing now. We had no concept of how vast and chaotic the scramble for fixtures and revenue would become.
Warnings about “tipping points” have abounded for years but there is, in fact, scant evidence to suggest that the game is somehow going to “break”. People can die of consumption but, apparently, a sport cannot. At least, cricket cannot.
The international product can be watered down to the point of tastelessness and there are still sufficient consumers to make it financially viable. Doomsayers warned about the dangers of saturation and “meaningless” cricket years ago but evidently had no idea of how robust the market really is.
Some international fixtures don’t even require the administrative boards to show them a basic level of respect. In Australia recently the home side rested every single one of their first choice XI in an ODI series decider against Pakistan and were consequently thrashed. It didn’t matter.
Evidently the fear that advertisers would eventually suffer from budget fatigue when it came to displaying their wares during matches with minimal viewers, live or electronic, has proven to be unfounded. Even involving contests without the Indian team and its gargantuan, guaranteed following.
The appetite for a non-stop, overlapping and confusing schedule has obviously been underestimated. Followers of American sports, like baseball, point to the fact that MLB teams play 162 regular games a year.
That is an awful lot of pitching and hitting, far more activity than is required from today’s cricketers.
Several aspects of cricket may have been missing from the pessimists’ calculations. The first is the organic grading process which allows followers to identify the big matches and still accept the small ones, the important from the unimportant.
Whereas the “less is more” strategy works well in theory, maximising revenue for iconic series and contests, it does not, it seems, preclude or even lessen interest in even the most forgettable fixtures.
Advertisers and sponsors like to drive a hard bargain and make broadcasters believe they are on the brink of walking away. But the truth is, no mainstream sport outside the US can match the exposure offered by international white ball cricket.
It isn’t just the four or eight hours it takes to show the games live, it’s the hundreds of hours of repeats for decades to come. There are dozens of channels in Asia which air almost nothing but old cricket internationals.
Of course, there are still some experts who believe the current orgy of international cricket is unmanageable and unsustainable and that, eventually, bilateral series for an obscure sponsor’s trophy will not attract enough attention or revenue to be viable, even as a bundled-in loss-leader for more meaningful cricket. And they are surely correct, aren’t they?
But until that time eventually comes there is something curiously entertaining about watching the train continue to gather speed until the brakes fail and it is derailed.
The healthiest survivors will be those closest to India and the BCCI. Thankfully, SA and Cricket SA have positioned themselves well in that regard, for now.
The ongoing T20 series, levelled by the Proteas at 1-1 after a delicious low-scoring thriller at St George’s Park on Sunday, is providing valuable experience for a number of new faces. And a game-changing $8.5m for each of the four matches.
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