How to save cricket from ruin

How to save cricket from ruin


If cricket is a metaphor for life, how ghastly life must be. Look at the scorecard. Match-fixing, betting scams, ball-tampering, racism, sledging, time-wasting, contempt for authority: it hardly smells of roses.

Read more by Simon Heffer
Nick Hoult on cricket: Sobers would've been Twenty20 vision
One of the first books I ever read about cricket, as a small boy, was called The Noblest Game. Back in the mid-1960s, when players wore flannels and caps rather than shell-suits and crash helmets, cricket presented a convincing image if not of nobility, then of a vestigial gentility.

That was before money came into it, and before what we used to call the Third World took over the reins of the game.

Cricket is facing a crisis that, because of what it tells us about global economic trends, is one of which even those without an interest in the game should take note. In India, long a land of fanaticism about cricket and now a formidable economic power, these two forces are combining to challenge the leaden-footed international establishment.

The Twenty20 form of the game is not an exercise some of us have ever considered cricket. It comes under the umbrella of the term, just as television theme tunes come under the heading of "music".

The short, frenetic nature of this contest has won it a new audience around the world among those who would never previously have gone to watch a cricket match. It is especially popular in India.

Two new leagues have started up there. The Indian Premier League (IPL) is "official", the Indian Cricket League (ICL) "unofficial". Both are signing up famous players from around the world and pitting them in teams against each other. The money is big.

Andrew Symonds, the Australian all-rounder, was offered £660,000 for seven weeks' work. Similar sums are on offer to other great players. The IPL has a deal with the England and Wales Cricket Board that it will not poach ECB players this season. Next season, though, is up for grabs.

Lalit Modi, who runs the IPL, claims already to have had talks with most of the main England players, some of whom would take years to earn the money he can offer them for 40 days. The ICL, by contrast, has no such deal with the establishment, and is becoming predatory.

This means that, if money talks, English cricket could lose its main players. The Twenty20 season in India overlaps with the start of the home season.

The ECB has a choice. It shifts its own programme - which because of the English climate is next to impossible, as even with global warming and floodlights you can't play cricket into early November - or it tells players who want to go to one of the Indian leagues that that is the end of their association with English cricket.

In the latter instance, there would, as happened when the Packer circus started up 30 years ago, be much litigation, or attempted litigation, about restraint of trade. The old colonial masters might be pushed into a corner. India always used to be the jewel in the crown, but now, as the ECB and other national cricket bodies may be about to find, it is India itself who is wearing it.

This application of the free market to cricket is welcome: just as the application of the free market is to anything. Cricket in England has been shielded for too long from economic realities. If you seek an exposition of the full evils of the subsidy culture, look at our domestic first-class game.

Now played slowly and attritionally over four days, it is largely unwatchable, and largely unwatched. The old three-day game, junked in the interests of making a better Test side, was faster and relied more on tactical skills, such as the art of declaration.

Yet vast handouts from the ECB to the counties keep this boredom going, and our Test side is still dismal. First-class cricket is hardly marketed or promoted. It is immune to the commercial culture familiar in almost every other business. It is living on borrowed time.

If the cricket authorities have the vision to see it, and the guts to act on that vision, what they should do about the insurgency by Indian riches into cricket is quite obvious. From the county, state or provincial level up to the international, cricket needs to be split into two games or, to use a rugby analogy, two codes.

There would be two discrete groups of players. One would play first-class cricket. The other would play Twenty20. There could be a negotiation about which, or whether indeed both, would play the 50-over game. There would be little money in the first-class game, except from certain Test series.

The clubs that still engaged in it would have separate commercial entities that played Twenty20, would be the sole shareholders in those enterprises and would use the dividends to support the traditional game. Grounds could be shared between the two competitions: cricket grounds are among the world's most under-used resources.

This plan would enable some players to be Twenty20 cricketers and others to be first-class and perhaps Test players, with no possibility of a clash of loyalties. Within a fixed time period - maybe two or three years - no player who had appeared in one code would be allowed to appear in another. That would bring stability. There would be one more benefit, too.

The Middlesex and England cricketer Ed Smith - whose double first from Peterhouse sets him apart from most sportsmen - has just published a thoughtful and clever book called What Sport Teaches Us About Life. In it, he laments, quite correctly, the decline of the amateur: not out of nostalgia, but because of the hinterland and roundedness that amateurs bring to the sports they love.

Cricket was not worse when the Rev David Sheppard was coming from his parsonage to play for Sussex and England, or when men would come from the City to Lord's in time to turn out for Middlesex in the afternoon.

A first-class code without the money to pay many salaries would necessitate the restoration of a partly amateur game. It would allow scores of gifted cricketers who now never consider the life of a professional sportsman to compete at the highest level. The game would become less predictable, more enjoyable, more intelligent: just as it used to be.

The careering down-market of cricket over the past 30 years would not be ended: it would be put in a compartment where those who want vulgarity could have their needs catered for. Best of all, put in that compartment with it would be cricket's repellent obsession with money, and its perversion as a tool for bookies and addictive gamblers.

It would not be entirely true that a Twenty20 code would act as the sewers of the noblest game, but it wouldn't be far wrong.

The alternative is cricket's having a civil war, with the smog of unpleasantness and the many casualties that accompany such entertainments.

It is a game that has been handicapped for decades by having, with one or two notable exceptions, profoundly stupid and blinkered people running it. Indian money provides a challenge that cannot be blustered away. It deserves better, but this could be its last chance to have it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/05/do0501.xml